Fig. 3.
So it seems to have been with the Reindeer men. It has already been noticed that the stratigraphy of the paintings and engravings on the [Cairoan] walls, as investigated by the Abbé Breuil, shows that those of the earliest phase were line sketches of the simplest kind.[3] They are just such as a child might draw. They seem often to have been left incomplete from mere laziness, just so much of the figure being given as to enable its identification. No. 9, for instance, in the table given in [Fig. 3], is a mere outline of the front of a mammoth’s head, even the tusks and eye being omitted. No. 2 shows only a little more of a bison’s head. The eye at the beginning of the table seems to be human, and may be the ideograph of the individual who drew it. Besides these recognizable sketches there are other linear representations of the slightest kind, but which, there can be little doubt, conveyed a definite meaning to those who drew them. Of these a certain number, moreover, are purely alphabetiform in character. There is an X, an L, a T upside down, and they have learned to dot their i’s.
It is strange, indeed, that in the very infancy of its art mankind should have produced the elemental figures which the most perfected alphabetic systems have simply repeated. The elements of advanced writing were indeed there, but the time had not yet come when their real value could be recognized. It has only been after the lapse of whole aeons of time, through the gradual decay and conventionalization of a much more elaborate pictography, that civilized mankind reverted to these ‘beggarly elements’, and literature was born. Yet it is well to remember that the pre-existence of this old family of linear figures, and their survival or re-birth, the world over, as simple signs and marks, were always thus at hand to exercise a formative influence. There may well have been a tendency for the decayed elements of pictographic or hieroglyphic writing to assimilate themselves with such standard linear types.
It is certain that groups of singularly alphabetiform figures appear at times associated with the handiwork of the ‘Reindeer Period’. A good example of such a group is seen on the flank of a bison, painted in red and black on a wall of the Marsoulas Cave[4] ([Fig. 4]). Another curious group shows examples of the constantly recurring pectiform or comb-shaped figure. Others have been taken to represent the roof of some kind of hut. The only human sign is an open hand, which may be regarded as identical with the prototype of the Phoenician ‘kaph’, the ‘[palus]’ sign—our k. In its pictographic form it is found among the Cretan hieroglyphs, and a linearized version identical with ‘kaph’ recurs among the Minoan linear characters.
In [Fig. 5][5] are collected some specimens of signs or symbolic figures from the Cave of Castillo, on the Spanish side of the Pyrenees, showing amongst others the ‘hand’ and some figures which may represent hats. A remarkable group of three alphabetiform signs occurs on a fragment of reindeer-horn discovered by M. Piette in the Cave of Gourdan.[6] One of these shows a great resemblance to an A or Aleph. A harpoon of reindeer-horn, again, from La Madeleine,[7] shows a group of eight linear signs, among which we may detect, however, several repetitions.
In the face of these and similar examples, are we to conclude with the late M. Piette[8] that there was a regular alphabetic script during the Pleistocene period, which in turn had been preceded by a hieroglyphic system?
Fig. 4.