The whole cycle of designs by the cave-dwellers of the late Palaeolithic periods may, to a very large extent, be described as ‘picture-writing’ in the more general sense of the word. The drawings and carvings of reindeer and bisons, or more dangerous animals, such as the mammoth, the cave bear, and lion, doubtless commemorated personal experiences. In one case, at any rate, the naked man stalking an aurochs, engraved on a reindeer horn, we have an actual record of the chase.
But over and above this more elaborate kind of picture story, the mass of new materials—due in a principal degree to the patient researches of Messieurs Cartailhac, Capitan, the Abbé Breuil, and the late M. Piette—have thrown quite a new light on the development of pictography among the late Palaeolithic peoples. Such a series of polychrome wall-paintings as have been discovered in the great Cave of Altamira near Santander, in Spain—paralleled by those found in the Grotte de Marsoulas and elsewhere on the French side of the Pyrenees, with their brilliant colouring and chiaroscuro, present this primaeval art under quite new aspects. Moreover the superposition of one painting or engraving over another on the walls of the caverns has supplied fresh and valuable evidence as to the succession of the various phases of this ‘parietal’ art. We have to deal with almost inexhaustible palimpsests.
What is of special interest, however, in the present connexion, is that, side by side with the larger or more complete representations, there appear, in the lowest layer of these rock palimpsests, abbreviated figures and linear signs which already at times present a truly alphabetiform character.
Here we have the evidence of a gradual advance from simpler to more elaborate forms. On the other hand, the converse process, the gradual degeneration of more pictorial forms into their shorthand, linearized equivalents, can often be traced in the series of these representations. The Abbé Breuil, for instance, has recently published a series of tables showing the progressive degeneration and stylization of the heads of horses, goats, deer and oxen.[2] Without subscribing to his views in all their details, it is evident that this derivative series, as a whole, can be clearly made out. The abbreviation of the oxheads in [Fig. 2] is fairly clear up to No. 12, though whether the further procession is to be traced in the spiraliform signs that follow may be more open to doubt. It is worth noting that a curious parallel to these very ancient examples of the degeneration of the ox’s head is to be found among the Cretan and Cypriote signs of the Minoan and Mycenaean Age.
Fig. 2.
But the course followed by evolution of figured representations during the ‘Reindeer Period’ leads to another result, which also has parallels in the history of later art, but which does not seem to be so generally recognized. The degeneration, illustrated by [Fig. 2], of more or less complete figures into mere linear reminiscences, is very familiar to us. It is well illustrated, for instance, in the relation of the demotic and hieratic Egyptian signs to the hieroglyphic. But what is sometimes forgotten is that the simple linear forms are sometimes the older, and that, even as, I think, can be shown in the case of some of the Egyptian hieroglyphs, the linearization of the pictorial form was merely a going back to what had really been the original form of the figure. I have also been struck with the same phenomenon in tracing the genesis of some of the hieroglyphic characters of Minoan Crete. We have only to look at the rude attempts of children to depict objects to see that simple linear forms of what may perhaps be called the ‘slate pencil’ style precedes the more elaborate stage of drawing. Art begins with skeletons, and it is only a gradual proficiency that clothes them with flesh and blood.
