Fig. 16.
South of the Pyrenees similar records of primitive pictography largely associated again in this case with the builders of dolmens and chambered barrows extend through a large part of the Iberian Peninsula. Some stir was recently made by the reported discovery of characters on the slabs and content of certain Portuguese dolmens of Traz-os-Montes,[29] which were supposed to constitute a kind of alphabet or syllabary. The accounts of these discoveries, however, lack scientific precision, and though many of the characters found are certainly of alphabetiform type, there can be no doubt that these, together with the rude zoomorphic figures with which they are associated, belong to a much simpler stage of graphic expression.
Fig. 17.
In the south of Spain the chain of evidence is continued by the ‘Written Stones’ of Andalusia. The signs here are often painted in red, in a rude manner, on the slabs of megalithic structures, such as the Piedra Escrita near Fuencaliente,[30] (Figs. 17, 18). The signs include a variety of men and animals, symbols of the heavenly bodies, trees, arms, and implements, and other objects. Amongst some curious analogies that they present with the contemporary pictographs of Northern and North-Western Europe, may be noticed certain figures that resemble linear degenerations of the Ship and Crew sign ([see Fig. 17]).
Fig. 18.
The Andalusian pictographs find their continuation beyond the straits in another widely diffused group of ‘Written Stones’, the Hadjrat Mektoubat[31] of the Arabs, extending through Algeria and Morocco into the Saharan region and along the Atlantic littoral to the Canaries.[32]