Fig. 579.—African property mark.
The following translation from Kunst and Witz der Neger in Das Ausland (a), describing Fig. 579, is inserted for comparison:
Whenever a pumpkin of surprisingly fine appearance is growing, which promises to furnish a desirable water vase, the proprietor hurries to distinguish it by cutting into it some special mark with his knife, and probably superstitious feelings may coöperate in this act. I have reproduced herewith the best types of such property marks which I have been able to discover.
Fig. 580.—Owner’s marks, Slesvick.
Sir John Lubbock (a) tells that many of the arrows found at Nydam, Slesvick, had owner’s marks on them, now reproduced in Fig. 580 as a and c, resembling those on the modern Esquimaux arrows shown in the same figure as b.
Prof. Anton Schiefner (b) gives a remarkable parallel between the Runic alphabet and the property marks of the Finns, Lapps, and Samoyeds.
PERSONAL NAMES.
The names of Indians as formerly adopted by or bestowed among themselves were generally connotive. They very often refer to some animal and predicate an attribute or position of that animal. On account of their sometimes objective and sometimes ideographic nature, they almost invariably admit of being expressed in sign language; and for the same reason they can readily be portrayed in pictographs. The device generally adopted by the Dakotan tribes to signify that an object drawn in connection with a human figure was a totemic or a personal name of the individual, is to connect that object with the figure by a line drawn to the head or, more frequently, to the mouth of the latter. The same tribes make a distinction to manifest that the gesture sign for an object gestured is intended to be the name of a person and not introduced for any other purpose by passing the index forward from the mouth in a direct line after the conclusion of the sign for the object. This signifies “that is his name,” the name of the person referred to.
As a general rule, Indians were named in early infancy according to a tribal system, but in later life each generally acquired a new name, or perhaps several names in succession, from some special exploits or adventures. Frequently a sobriquet is given which is not complimentary. All of the names subsequently acquired as well as the original names are so connected with material objects or with substantive actions as to be expressible in a graphic picture and also in a pictorial sign. In the want of alphabet or syllabary they used the same expedient to distinguish the European invaders. A Virginian was styled Assarigoa, “Big Knife.” The authorities of Massachusetts were called by the Iroquois, Kinshon, “a fish,” doubtless in allusion to the cod industry and the fact that a wooden codfish then hung, as it did long afterwards, in the state house at Boston, as an emblem of the colony and state.