The Story of the Alphabet
by Edward Clodd · English · Gutenberg #46388 · 321,098 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Story of the Alphabet
Author: Edward Clodd
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET ***
[Illustration: TOTEMIC WRITING
INDIAN PETITION TO THE UNITED STATES CONGRESS
(_see page 68_)]
THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET
BY EDWARD CLODD
AUTHOR OF
"THE STORY OF PRIMITIVE MAN",
"PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION",
"THE STORY OF CREATION",
ETC. ETC.
"_The two greatest inventions of the human mind_
_are writing and money--the common language of intelligence_,
_and the common language of self-interest._"--
MARQUIS DE MIRABEAU.
WITH NINETY ILLUSTRATIONS
LONDON
GEORGE NEWNES, LIMITED
SOUTHAMPTON STREET, STRAND
1900
THIS LITTLE HISTORY OF A B C
IS DEDICATED TO DOROTHY DAY
BY HER LOVING GRANDFATHER
PREFACE
If this little book does not supply a want, it fills, however
imperfectly, a gap; for the only work in the English language on the
subject--Canon Isaac Taylor's "History of the Alphabet"--is necessarily
charged with a mass of technical detail which is stiff reading even
for the student of graphiology. Moreover, invaluable and indispensable
as is that work, it furnishes only a meagre account of those primitive
stages of the art of writing, knowledge of which is essential for
tracing the development of that art, so that its place in the general
evolution of human inventions is made clear. Prominence is therefore
given to this branch of the subject in the following pages.
In the recent reprint of Canon Taylor's book no reference occurs to
the important materials collected by Professor Flinders Petrie and
Mr. Arthur J. Evans in Egypt and Crete, the result of which is to
revolutionise the old theory of the source of the Alphabet whence our
own and others are derived. This opens up a big question for experts
to settle; and here it must suffice to present a statement of the new
evidence, and to point out its significance, so that the reader be
not taken into the troubled atmosphere of controversy. That he may,
further, not be distracted by footnotes, references to the authorities
cited are printed in the text.
E. C.
ROSEMONT, 19 CARLETON ROAD,
TUFNELL PARK, N.
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. INTRODUCTORY 9
II. THE BEGINNINGS OF THE ALPHABET 23
III. MEMORY-AIDS AND PICTURE-WRITING 37
(_a_) Mnemonic 39
(_b_) Pictorial 51
(_c_) Ideographic 72
(_d_) Phonetic 79
IV. CHINESE, JAPANESE, AND COREAN SCRIPTS 82
V. CUNEIFORM WRITING 89
VI. EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPHICS 113
(_a_) Hieroglyphic Writing 115
(_b_) Hieratic Writing 125
(_c_) Demotic Writing 127
VII. THE ROSETTA STONE 128
VIII. EGYPTIAN WRITING IN ITS RELATION
TO OTHER SCRIPTS 134
IX. CRETAN AND ALLIED SCRIPTS 157
X. GREEK PAPYRI 198
The Diffusion of the "Phœnician" Alphabet--
(_a_) Aramean 207
(_b_) Sabean 212
(_c_) Hellenic 213
XI. RUNES AND OGAMS 223
INDEX 229
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
_Indian Petition to the United States Congress_ Frontispiece
FIG. PAGE
1. _Magical Pictograph against Stings_ 18
2. _Magical Device against Skin Disease_ 20
3. _Aboriginal Rock Carvings (Australia)_ 27
3a. _Aboriginal Rock Paintings (Australia)_ 28
4. _Bushman Paintings_ 30
4a. _Bushman Paintings_ 31
4b. _Specimen of Bushmen Rock Sculptures_ 32
4c. _Engravings found on Rocks in Algeria_ 33
5. _Bushman Rain-Charm_ 34
6. _Semang Rain-Charm_ 35
6a. _Record of Expedition_ 35
6b. _Various Types of the Human Form_ 36
7. _Quipu, for Reckoning, &c._ 40
8. _Double Calumet Wampum_ 48
9. _Double Calumet Council Hearth_ 48
10. _Jesuit Missionary Wampum_ 49
11. _Four Nations' Alliance Wampum_ 49
11a. _Penn Wampum_ 50
12,13. _Indian Grave-posts_ 53
14. _Tomb-board of Indian Chief_ 54
15. _Hunter's Grave-post_ 55
16. _A Cadger's Map of a Begging District_ 57
17. _Ojibwa Love-letter_ 58
18. _Love-song_ 58
19. _Mnemonic Song of an Ojibwa Medicine-man_ 59
20. _Wâbeno destroying an Enemy_ 61
21. _Etching on Innuit Drill-bow_ 62
22. _Ojibwa Hunting Record_ 62
23. _Hidatsa Pictograph on a Buffalo Shoulder-blade_ 63
24. _Alaskan Hunting Record_ 64
25. _Record of Starving Hunter_ 64
26. _Alaskan Hunting Life_ 66
27. _Indian Expedition_ 67
28. _Biography of Indian Chief_ 67
29. _War-song_ 68
30. _Letter offering Treaty of Peace_ 70
31. _Census Roll of an Indian Band_ 71
32. _Record of Departure (Innuit)_ 72
33. _Statue from Palenque_ 76
34. _Itzcoatl_ 80
35. _Rebus of Itzcoatl_ 80
36. _Paternoster Rebus_ 81
37. _Chinese Picture-writing and Later Uncial_ 83
38. _Chinese and Tibetan Triglot_ 88
39. _Rock Inscription at Behistun_ 95
40. _Cylinder Seal of Sargon I._ 107
41. _Tell-el-Amarna Tablet_ 109
42. _First Creation Tablet_ 110
43,44. _Deluge Tablet_ (_Chaldean Epic_) 111
45. _Hieroglyphic, Hieratic, and Demotic Signs for Man_ 115
46. _Comparative Ideographs_ 122
47. _Ptolemy_ 131
48. _Cleopatra_ 131
49. _Kaisars_ (_Cæsar_)--_A. Takrtr_ (_Autokrator_) 131
50. _Facsimile of Hieratic Papyrus Prisse_ 140
51. _Inscription on the Eshmunazar Sarcophagus_ 141
52. _Inscription on Sacred Bowls_ (_Baal Lebanon_) 146
53. _The Moabite Stone_ 147
54. _Maneh Weight_ 150
55. _Vase with Incised Characters_ (_Crete_) 161
56. _Incised Characters on Cup_ (_Crete_) 161
57. _Characters on Vase_ (_Crete_) 162
58. _Signs on Bronze Axe (Delphi)_ 162
59. _Signs on Blocks of Mycenæan Buildings_ (_Knôsos_) 163
60. _Symbols on Three-sided Cornelian_ (_Crete_) 165
61. _Symbols on Four-sided Stone_ (_Crete_) 165
62. _Symbols on Four-sided Stones, with larger faces_
(_Central Crete_) 166
63. _Symbol on Single-faced Cornelian_ (_Eastern Crete_) 166
64. _Symbol on Stone of ordinary Mycenæan type_ (_Athens_) 166
65. _Egyptian Scarabs, XIIth Dynasty_
--_Early Cretan Seal-stones_ 178
66. _Signs on Potsherds at Tell-el-Hesy_
_compared with Ægean Forms_ 179
67. _Hittite Inscription at Hamah_ 181
68. _Signs on Vase-handle_ (_Mycenæ_) 183
69. _Signs on Amphora-handle_ (_Mycenæ_) 183
Acknowledgments are gratefully tendered to Messrs. Macmillan, Messrs.
Longmans, Mr. John Murray, Messrs. Eyre & Spottiswoode, Mr. Edward
Arnold, Messrs. Witherby, the Cambridge University Press, and the
Anthropological Institute for permission to reproduce Illustrations
from their several publications.
THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY
"What is ever seen is never seen," and it may be questioned if one
in ten thousand of the readers of to-day ever pauses to ask what is
the history of the conventional signs called the ALPHABET,
which, in their varying changes of position, make up the symbols of the
hundred thousand words and more contained in a comprehensive dictionary
of the English tongue.
Professor Max Müller says that "by putting together twenty-three or
twenty-four letters in every possible variety. We might produce every
word that has ever been used in any language of the world. The number
of these words, taking twenty-three letters as the basis, would be
25,852,016,738,884,976,640,000, or, if we took twenty-four, would be
620,448,401,733,239,439,360,000; but," as the Professor warns us,
in words the force of which will be manifest later on, "even these
trillions, billions, and millions of sounds would not be words,
because they would lack the most important ingredient--that which makes
a word to be a word--namely, the different ideas by which they were
called into life, and which are expressed differently in different
languages."
(_Lectures on Language_, ii. 81.)
These words themselves, as will also be shown concerning the
ear-pictures by which they are represented, reveal in their analysis a
story of the deepest interest. In the happy simile quoted by the late
Archbishop Trench in his _Study of Words_, they are "fossil history,"
and, as he adds, "fossil poetry and fossil ethics" also. To cite a few
examples, more or less apposite to our subject, "book" is probably from
the Anglo-Saxon _bóc_, a "beech," tablets of the bark of that tree
being one of the substances on which written characters were inscribed.
Parallel to this are the words "library" and "libel," both derived from
the Latin _liber_, the inner bark or rind of a tree used for paper;
while, as everybody knows, the word "paper" preserves the history of
the manufacture of writing material in Egypt from the pith of the
papyrus reed, the use of which goes back, as will be shown hereafter,
to a high antiquity, and the classic name of which, _biblos_, has
been applied to "bible." "Code" is derived from the Latin _codex_,
"a tree-trunk"; "letters" comes through the French _lettre_ from the
Latin _lino_, _litum_, "to daub" or "besmear," an early mode of writing
being the graving of characters on tablets smeared with wax. "Tablet"
is the diminutive of "table," which comes from the Latin _tabula_,
"a board," and the ancient writing instrument, called a _stylus_,
illustrates the passage of language from the concrete to the abstract
in its application to the way in which a writer expresses his ideas.
We speak of his "style," just as we say "he wields an able pen," this
word being derived from the Latin _penna_, "a feather." The phrase
_lapsus calami_, "a slip of the pen," preserves record of the use of
the reed (Latin _calamus_), which also survives in "quill," from Old
English _quylle_, "a reed." But the metal pen has a longer history than
was suspected, since Dr. Waldstein has found one, cut and slit like
our modern specimens, in a tomb of the third century B.C.,
at Eretria in the island of Eubœa in the Ægean. "Volume," from Latin
_volumen_, "a roll," tells us what was the usual form of books in
ancient times, the old form of preservation and custody of legal
records surviving in "Rolls of Court," "Master of the Rolls," and so
forth. So in "diploma," which, literally, is a paper folded double,
from Greek _diploō_, "to fold." Both "diplomacy" and "duplicity" mean
"doubling," but the force of the parallel may not be pursued here.
Finally--for the list might be extended indefinitely--"parchment" is
borrowed from Pergamus, a town in Asia Minor, where skin came into
general use, Ptolemy V. (205-185 B.C.), so runs a doubtful
story told by Pliny, having prohibited the export of papyrus from Egypt.
As words, under the analyses now indicated, yield the history of their
origin and of the changes both in spelling and meaning which follow
their passage from older forms, and likewise reveal the reasons which
governed the choice of them, so the letters of which they are made
up bear witness to similar laws of development. The story which it
is the purpose of this little book to endeavour to extract from them
has mutilated and imperfect chapters, and, moreover, missing chapters
which may never be recovered. But sufficing material survives for
piecing together a narrative of the triumph of the human mind over
one of the most difficult tasks to which it could apply itself; a
task which, unwrought, would have made advance in the highest sense
impossible beyond a certain point. In the highest sense, because man
has gone a long way without knowledge either of reading or writing.
These "two R's" are not necessary in matters of personal contact with
his fellows, while in other ways progress is independent of them. An
illiterate man may be an accomplished landscape artist, a skilful
engineer, a successful farmer or trader, and prosperous in many ways
where the aim of life is to "live by bread alone." It is true that
much of the intellectual and spiritual record of man's past was long
preserved in the form of oral tradition. But to the volume of such
record there is a limit, while time and caprice alike work havoc in
it. Memory, great as was its capacity of old, before dependence on
books impaired it, was not infallible, nor, as the world's stock of
knowledge increased, could it "pull down its barns and build greater
wherein to bestow its goods." We have, by an effort of the imagination
well-nigh impossible to make, only to assume the absence of any means
of material record of the involved and myriad events which fill the
world's past, to conceive the intellectual poverty of the present.
We have only to assume the absence of any medium whereby we could
communicate with friends at a distance, or whereby the now complex and
countless dealings between man and man could be set down and every
transaction thus "brought to book," to realise the hopeless tangle of
our social life. All that memory failed to overlap would be an absolute
blank; the dateless and otherwise uninscribed monuments which the past
had left behind would but deepen the darkness; all knowledge of the
strivings and speculations of men of old would have been unattainable;
all observation and experience through which science has advanced from
guesses to certainties irretrievably lost; life could have been lived
only from "hand to mouth," and the spectacle presented of an arrested
world of sentient beings. Save in fragmentary echoes repeated by
fugitive bards, the great epics of East and West would have perished,
and the immortal literatures of successive ages never have existed. The
invention of writing alone made possible the passage from barbarism to
civilisation, and secured the continuous progress of the human race.
It is solely through the marvellous perfecting, through stages of slow
advance, of a scripture that "cannot be broken," that the past is as
eloquent, as real, as the present. "The pen is mightier than the sword"
in accumulating and preserving for both gentle and simple the store of
the world's intellectual wealth, unto which "all the things that can be
desired are not to be compared."
These reflections are commonplace enough, but they may not be wholly
needless, and an example or two of the impression made on the barbaric
mind by written symbols may help us the better to appreciate what our
case would be without them. In the narrative of his adventures in the
Tonga Islands, published about ninety years ago, William Mariner tells
how anxiety to escape from the place where, on the wreck of the ship
_Port au Prince_, he and some other Englishmen had been cast ashore,
led him to write, by means of a solution of gunpowder and a little
mucilage for ink, a letter which he entrusted to a friendly native to
give to the captain of any vessel that might happen to touch at Tonga.
Finow, the king, came to hear of this, and got hold of the letter. But
he could make "neither head nor tail" of it. However, by threats of
death if he refused, one of Mariner's shipmates was made to interpret
the mystic signs to Finow, who, still puzzled, sent for Mariner and
ordered him to write down something else, saying, when Mariner asked
for a subject, "Put down me." This done, Finow sent for another
sailor, who read the royal name aloud, whereupon the king appeared
more bewildered than ever, exclaiming. "This not like me; where are
my legs?" Then it slowly dawned upon him that it was possible to make
signs of things which both the writer and the interpreter had seen.
But the bewilderment returned when Mariner told him that he could
write down a description of any one whom he had never seen, or of an
event which happened long ago or far away, when these were told him.
Thereupon Finow whispered to him the name of Tongoo Aho, a former king
of Tonga, who, it had come to Mariner's knowledge, was blind in one
eye. When Mariner set these things down, and the king had them read
to him, it was explained that "in several parts of the world messages
were sent to great distances through the same medium, and, being folded
and fastened up, the bearer could know nothing of the contents; and
that the histories of whole nations were thus handed down to posterity
without spoiling by being kept. Finow acknowledged this to be a most
noble invention, but added that it would not at all do for the Tonga
Islands; that there would be nothing but disturbances and conspiracies,
and he should not be sure of his life perhaps another month. He said,
however, jocularly, that he should like to know it himself, and for
all the women to know it, that he might make love with less risk
of discovery, and not so much chance of incurring the vengeance of
their husbands." (Mariner's _Tonga Islands_, i. 116, ed. 1827.) The
_Smithsonian Reports_, 1864, tell a story of an Indian who was sent by
a missionary to a colleague with four loaves of bread, accompanied by
a letter stating their number. The Indian ate one of the loaves, and
was, of course, found out. He was sent on a similar errand and repeated
the theft, but took the precaution to hide the letter under a stone
while he was eating the bread, so that it might not see him!
Barbaric ideas fall into fundamentally-related groups, and the examples
just given are connected with the widespread belief in the efficacy
of written characters to work black or white magic, to effect cures,
and otherwise act as charms--a belief largely derived from the legends
which ascribe the origin of writing to the gods--legends themselves
the product of Ignorance, the mother of Mystery. In an Assyrian
inscription, Sardanapalus V. speaks of the cuneiform or wedge-shaped
characters as a revelation to his royal ancestors from the god Nebo;
among the Egyptians, Thoth was the scribe of the gods, and their oldest
forms of writing were named "the divine." Chinese tradition ascribes
the invention of writing to the dragon-faced, four-eyed sage Ts'ang
Chien, who saw in the stars of heaven, the footprints of birds, and the
marks on the back of the tortoise, the models on which he formed the
written characters. At this invention "heaven caused showers of grain
to descend from on high; the disembodied spirits wept in the darkness,
and the dragons withdrew themselves from sight." On the altars raised
to Ts'ang Chien throughout the Celestial Land, every scrap of fugitive
paper which has writing on it is burned in his honour. In Hindu legend,
Brahma, the supreme god of the Indian Trinity, gives knowledge of
letters to men; and Nâgari, in which alphabet the sacred books are
written, is spoken of as "belonging to the city of the gods." The
handwriting of Brahma, legend further says, is seen in the serrated
sutures of men's skulls; and as Yahweh or Jehovah wrote the "Ten Words"
with his own finger, so Brahma inscribed the holy texts of the Veda
on leaves of gold. The story of the culture-hero, Cadmus, introducing
the alphabet from Phœnicia into Greece is well known; while in Irish
legend, Ogmios, the Gaelish Hercules, is familiar as the inventor of
writing. But perhaps less familiar is that in the Northern Saga which
attributes the invention of runes to Odin:--
"Thought-runes shalt thou deal with
If thou wilt be of all men
Fairest-souled, wight and wisest.
These are ded,
These first cut,
These first took to heart high Hropt." (Odin.)
Belief in the power of the spoken word, notably as a curse, has
world-wide illustration; and not less is that in the power of the
written word or of the pictorial symbol. Cabalistic formulæ and
texts from sacred writings play a large part; the virtue in Jewish
phylacteries and frontlets was believed to depend on the texts which
they enclosed; the amulets worn by Abyssinians to avert the evil
eye and ward off demons have the secret name of God chased on them;
passages from the Koran are enclosed in bags and hung on Turkish and
Arab horses to protect them against like maleficence; prayers to the
Madonna are slipped into charm-cases to be worn by the Neapolitans;
while not so many years back (indeed, so persistent are superstitions,
that kindred practices obtain throughout Europe to this day) sick folk
in the Highlands were fanned with the leaves of the Bible.
[Illustration: Fig. 1.--Magical Pictograph against Stings]
In his instructive and entertaining book on _Evolution in Art_,
Professor Haddon refers to a series of valuable observations on the
use of picture-writing as a charm against diseases and stings of
venomous animals, among the Semang tribes of East Malacca, made by Mr.
H. Vaughan Stevens, and edited by Mr. A. Grünwedel. The women wear
bamboo combs on which are drawn patterns of flowers or parts of flowers
believed to be antidotes to fevers and other invisible diseases; for
injuries and wounds such as those caused by a falling bough in the
jungle, or the bite of a centipede, other means are employed. Among the
magic-working devices incised in bamboo staves by the Semang magicians,
Mr. Vaughan Stevens gives illustrations of one against the stings
of scorpions and centipedes (fig. 1), and of another against a skin
disease (fig. 2).
In the first-named there is depicted the figure of an Argus pheasant,
the wheel-like patterns beneath which represent the eye-marks in the
tail-feathers. On the left is an orange-coloured centipede, the head
of which points to the tail of the pheasant. The dotted lines round
the centipede are tracks which it leaves on a man's skin. On the other
side of the Argus are two blue scorpions, the figures at the end of
their tails representing a swelling in the flesh of the persons stung
by them. The female of this kind of scorpion is more poisonous than the
male, and is said to cause double stings, which are denoted by the two
rows of dots in the top figure. "The significance of this bamboo is
that as the Argus pheasant feeds on centipedes and scorpions, so its
help is invoked against them by striking the bamboo against the ground."
[Illustration: Fig. 2.--Magical Device against Skin Disease]
The other example, which exhibits a much more complicated and
conventionalised device, is designed as a charm against two kinds of
skin disease, the one represented by fish scales indicating leprous
white ulcers, the other represented by oval figures indicating hard
knots on and under the skin. The rows stand for the several parts
of the body which are affected, and the figures increase in size to
show that the disease will spread if not cured. Although the way in
which the charm is applied is not clear, there is no doubt that belief
in its virtue belongs to the large class of barbaric ideas grouped
under sympathetic magic, _i.e._ that things outwardly resembling
one another are thought by the barbaric or illiterate to possess
the same qualities. The result is that effects are brought about
in the individual himself by the production of similar effects in
things belonging to him, or, what is more to the purpose, in images
or effigies of him. Here it suffices to say that the most familiar
examples of "sympathetic magic" are the making of an image of the
person whose destruction is sought, of wax, clay, or other substance,
so that as the wax is melted, or the clay dissolved in running water,
his life may decline or wear away to its doom. Such examples are
gathered alike from civilised and barbaric folk, from Devonshire and
the Highlands to North America and Borneo.
Things are invested with mystery in the degree that their origins and
causes are unknown; and the beliefs and customs, of which a few among
the teeming illustrations have been given, invite the reflection that,
had writing remained the monopoly of any caste or class, it would
have remained an engine of enslavement, instead of becoming an engine
of liberation of the mind. "Knowledge is power," and whatever has
ensured the possession and the retention of power over his fellows has
been seized upon by man--notably by man as priest, from medicine-man
to Pope, as wielder of weapons of authority, the more dreaded when
unseen or intangible. Signs which were unadapted, and, things being
what they then were, impossible, for general use, and moreover needing
great expenditure of time and labour to master them, would come under
this head, and it was only through their ultimate simplification
that they could become serviceable to the many, and made vehicles of
the diffusion of knowledge. How monstrous and penal an instrument of
inequality learning itself long continued among ourselves is shown in
the fact that "benefit of clergy"--one among many evidences of the old
conflict between the civil and the sacerdotal powers--was not wholly
repealed until the year 1827. Under this statute, exemption from trial
for criminal offences before secular courts was extended, by law passed
in the reign of Edward I., not only to ecclesiastics, but to any man
who could read. A prisoner sentenced to death might be claimed by
the bishop of the diocese as a clerk and haled before him, when the
ordinary gave the man a Latin book from which to read a verse or two.
If the ordinary said "Legit ut clericus"--_i.e._ "he reads like a
clerk"--the offender was only burnt in the hand, and then set free.
CHAPTER II
THE BEGINNINGS OF THE ALPHABET
We may, without further preface, advance to our main purpose, which is
to supply an account of the stages through which the alphabets of the
civilised world passed before they reached their, practically, final
form. Here, as in aught else that the wit of man has devised and the
cunning of his hand applied, the law of development is seen at work. In
the quest for traces of any fundamental differences between him and the
animals to which he stands in nearest physical and psychical relation,
he has been variously described as tool-maker, fire-maker, possessor
of articulate speech, and so forth; but the further that observation
and comparison have been made, the more apparent has it become that
those differences are of degree and not of kind. Some evidence in
support of this has been already summarised in previous volumes of
this series; and here it suffices to say that it is in the inventive
arts, as _e.g._ the production of fire, of the mode of which nature
supplied the hints, and the making of pictorial signs, in which the
mimetic instinct, shared by some of the lower animals, comes into play,
that, restricting the comparison to things material, man appears upon
a higher plane. But this has been reached by processes of development
involving no break in the continuity of things.
In this "story" we start with man as sign-maker. His prehistoric
remains supply evidence of artistic capacity in a remote past, and set
before us in vigorous, rapid outline what his life and surroundings
must have been. On fragments of bone, horn, schist, and other
materials, the savage hunter of the Reindeer Period, using a pointed
flint flake, depicted alike himself and the wild animals which he
pursued. From cavern-floors of France, Belgium, and other parts of
Western Europe, whose deposits date from the old Stone Age, there have
been unearthed rude etchings of naked, hardy men brandishing spears at
wild horses, or creeping along the ground to hurl their weapons at the
urus, or wild ox, or at the woolly-haired elephant. A portrait of this
last named, showing the creature's shaggy ears, long hair, and upwardly
curved tusks, its feet being hidden in the surrounding high grass, is
one of the most famous examples of palæolithic art.
Here let us pause to say that the apparent absence of other indications
of man's presence, showing passage from lower to higher stages of
culture, led to the assumption that vast gaps have occurred in his
occupancy of north-western and other parts of Europe. The theory of
absolute disconnection between the Old Stone Age and the Newer Stone
Age long held the field, but it has disappeared before the evidence
against tenantless intervals of areas in prehistoric times. And so
with succeeding periods. There is no warrant for assuming entire
effacement of one race, with resulting clear field for the immigration
of another race; and modern archæological research is producing the
links which connect the rude art of Northern with that of Southern
Europe, and, what will be shown to be of great moment, with that of
the Eastern Mediterranean. The examples of this must remain rare,
since only pictographs on some durable material, or specimens of the
fictile art, would survive the action of time. But, happily, if they
are infrequent, they are widely distributed. For to those yielded by
the bone-caverns already referred to are to be added rock-carvings in
Denmark, and figures on limestone cliffs of the Maritime Alps; there
are curious graphic signs, suggestive to some eyes of a primitive
script, in the Marz d'Azil cave; while still more interesting are the
animal and fylfot or swastika-like figures (the swastika is a solar
symbol) "painted probably by early Slavonic hands on the face of a
rock overhanging a sacred grotto in a fiord of the Bocche di Cattaro."
To this last-named example, given by Mr. Arthur Evans in his paper on
"Primitive Pictographs" (_Journal of Hellenic Studies_, xiv. ii. 1894)
may be added some pregnant remarks by the same authority. "When we
recall the spontaneous artistic qualities of the ancient race which
has left its records in the carvings on bone and ivory in the caves of
the 'Reindeer Period,' this evidence of at least partial continuity
on the northern shores of the Mediterranean suggests speculations
of the deepest interest. Overlaid with new elements, swamped in the
dull, though materially higher, Neolithic civilisation, may not the
old æsthetic faculties which made Europe the earliest-known home of
anything that can be called human art, as opposed to mere tools and
mechanical contrivances, have finally emancipated themselves once more
in the Southern regions, where the old stock most survived? In the
extraordinary manifestations of artistic genius to which, at widely
remote periods and under the most diverse political conditions, the
later populations of Greece and Italy have given birth, may we not be
allowed to trace the re-emergence, as it were, after long underground
meanderings, of streams whose upper waters had seen the daylight of
that earlier world?" (Presidential Address to the Anthropological
Section, British Association. _Nature_, 1st Oct. 1896.)
But man at the same stage of culture being everywhere practically the
same, there is, in the paucity of examples from the Europe of the
past, compensation in the specimens of graphic art found among extant
barbaric folk. It is probable that a good proportion of these lack
significance, but _the pictograph is the parent of the alphabet_, and
therefore the careful transcripts of rock and other paintings which
explorers have made may yet prove to be of value when interpreted
in the light of examples whose gradations have been traced. Since
the extinction of the Tasmanians, whom anthropologists regard as the
nearest approach to Palæolithic man, the Australians stand, in certain
respects, at the bottom of the scale, although the ingenuity of their
social organisations warrants hesitation in making them the nadir of
human kind. But as the reproductions show (figs. 3 and 3_a_), their
attempts at art are inferior to the spirited designs of the prehistoric
cave-dwellers.
[Illustration: Fig. 3.--Aboriginal Rock Carvings (Australia)]
[Illustration: Fig. 3_a_.--Aboriginal Rock Paintings (Australia)]
Mr. R. H. Mathews, who has made an extensive survey of the
rock-paintings and carvings, says that one type serves for another,
so lacking are all in variety; "the stencilled and impressed hands,
the outlines of men and animals rudely depicted in various colours,
appearing to be universally distributed over the continent." He adds
that "although it will be better not to attempt to suggest meanings
to the groups of native drawings until a very much larger amount of
information has been brought together ... still when we know that
drawings such as these by uncivilised nations of all times, in various
parts of the world, have ultimately been found to be full of meaning,
it is not unreasonable for us to expect that the strange figures
painted and carved upon rocks all over Australia will some day be
interpreted. Perhaps some of these pictures are ideographic expressions
of events in the history of the tribe; certain groupings of figures may
portray some legend; many of the animals probably represent totems;
and it is likely that a number of them were executed for pastime and
amusement." (_Journal of the Anthropological Institute_, xxv. 2, p.
153.) In their recently published "Native Tribes of Central Australia,"
Messrs. Spencer and Gillen divide the rock-paintings into two series,
those of ordinary type, and those which, found in places strictly
taboo to women and children and uninitiated men, are associated with
totems, _i.e._ with the natural object, whether living or non-living,
from which the tribe believes itself to be descended. These totemistic
figures, called _Churinga_ (a general native term for sacred objects)
_Ilkinia_, are frequently in the form of spiral and concentric circles,
others being portraits of the totems themselves, as low in type as the
centipede or witchetty grub.
[Illustration: Fig. 4.--Bushman Paintings]
[Illustration: Fig. 4_a_.--Bushman Paintings]
The faces of sandstone caverns in South Africa are often covered with
paintings which are the handiwork of Bushmen (figs. 4, 4_a_, and
4_b_). With a skill showing some advance on the art of the Australian
aborigines there is depicted, usually in black or brownish-red colour,
the hunting and other exploits which make up life among a people
who represent the aboriginal races of the southern portion of the
continent. Some of the drawings border on caricature; others, in the
words of an observer, "suggest actual portraiture. The ornamentation
of the head-dresses, feathers, beads tassels, &c., seemed to have
claimed much care, while the higher class of drawings indicate correct
appreciation of the actual appearance of objects, and perspective and
foreshortening are well rendered." (Mark Hutchinson, _Journal of the
Anthropological Institute_, xiv. p. 464.)
[Illustration: Fig. 4_b_.--Specimen of Bushmen Rock Sculptures]
[Illustration: Fig. 4_c_.--Engravings found on Rocks in Algeria
(compare with Bushmen type)]
These probably now degraded folk, who live on lizards, locusts, and
roots when other food fails, have a good store of legend and folk-lore.
Fig. 5 seems to portray their belief in "sympathetic magic," if, as
conjectured, it represents the dragging of an hippopotamus or other
amphibious animal across the land for the purpose of producing rain.
The Semangs of the Malay Peninsula use a bamboo rain-charm (fig. 6),
on which the wind-driven showers are depicted in oblique lines, and,
among many other examples wherein the higher and lower culture meet
together, there is one supplied by old Rome, where it was the custom to
throw images of the corn-spirit into the Tiber so that the crops might
be drenched with rain. As showing the persistency of superstitions,
here is a paragraph anent the severe drought in Russia last autumn:
"In another village of the district of Bugulma some moujiks opened
the grave of a peasant who had lately been buried, and then poured
water over the corpse, in the belief that this was the best method of
bringing rain."--_Daily Chronicle_, 24th August 1899.
[Illustration: Fig. 5.--Bushman Rain-Charm.]
[Illustration: Fig. 6.--Semang Rain-Charm.]
[Illustration: Fig. 6_a_.--Record of Expedition.]
The New World is rich in ancient monuments often adorned with symbolic
devices, but older than these are the pictographs covering erratic
blocks and cliff escarpments from Guiana to Nova Scotia, and westward
to the Rockies. Some are incised in the hard stone to a depth of
half an inch; others are traced in broad lines of red ochre or other
colour, their weather-worn state witnessing to a high antiquity. Their
purpose is often not easy to explain, but we know that therein lie the
germs whence alphabets sprung. One picture (fig. 6_a_) on the face
of a rock on the shore of Lake Superior, copied and interpreted by
Schoolcraft, records an expedition across the lake, led by Myeengun,
or "Wolf," a noted Indian chief. The crew of each canoe is denoted by
a series of upright strokes, Myeengun's chief ally, Kishkemanusee,
the "Kingfisher," being in the first canoe. The arch with three
circles (three suns under heaven) shows that the voyage took three
days. The tortoise (a frequent symbol of "land" in North American
picture-writing) seems to indicate the arrival of the expedition, while
the picture of the mounted chief evidences that the event took place
after the introduction of horses into Canada. Some of the examples,
less easy to explain, represent the migration of tribes; some, like the
sculptured eagle near the borders of Quauhuahuac ("the place near the
eagle") are symbolic boundary-marks; while others are direction-marks.
Some have life-size human figures, rayed or horned; one engraved on a
rock overlooking the Big Harpeth, in Tennessee, depicts a sun visible
four miles off. Doubtless a large number of this class (fig. 6_b_) are
merely the outcome of that rude artistic fancy of man which, as has
been seen, has had continuous expression from prehistoric times.
[Illustration: Fig. 6_b_.--Various Types of the Human Form]
CHAPTER III
MEMORY-AIDS AND PICTURE-WRITING
The printed letters or sound-signs which compose our alphabet are about
two thousand five hundred years old. "Roman type" we call them, and
rightly so, since from Italy they came. They vary only in slight degree
from the founts of the famous printers of the fifteenth century, these
being imitations of the beautiful "minuscule" (so called as being of
smaller size) manuscripts of four hundred years earlier. Minuscule
letters are cursive (_i.e._ running) forms of the curved letters about
an inch long called "uncials" (from Latin _uncia_, "an inch," or from
_uncus_, "crooked"), which were themselves derived from the Roman
letters of the Augustan age. These Roman capitals, to which those in
modern use among us correspond, "are practically identical with the
letters employed at Rome in the third century B.C.; such, for
instance, as are seen in the well-known inscriptions on the tombs of
the Scipios, now among the treasures of the Vatican. These, again, do
not differ very materially from forms used in the earliest existing
specimens of Latin writing, which may probably be referred to the end
of the fifth century B.C. Thus it appears that our English
alphabet is a member of that great Latin family of alphabets, whose
geographical extension was originally conterminous, or nearly so, with
the limits of the Western Empire, and afterwards with the ancient
obedience to the Roman See." (Canon Isaac Taylor's _History of the
Alphabet_, vol. i. p. 71.)
The age of our own alphabet being thus indicated, we may postpone
further remark on its lineal descent, and pass to inquiry into the
primitive forms of which all alphabets are the abbreviated descendants,
and also to reference to some primitive methods for which they are
substitutes.
A survey of the long period which this development covers shows four
well-marked stages, although in these, as in aught else appertaining
to man's history, there are no true lines of division. The making
of these, like the apparent lines of longitude and latitude of the
cartographer, is justified by their convenience. These stages are:--
(_a_) The MNEMONIC, or memory-aiding, when some tangible
object is used as a message, or for record, between people at a
distance, and also for the purpose of accrediting the messenger. As
will be seen, it borders on the _symbolic_; indeed, it anticipates that
stage.
(_b_) The PICTORIAL, in which a picture of the thing is given,
whereby at a glance it tells its own story.
(_c_) The IDEOGRAPHIC, in which the picture becomes
representative, _i.e._ is converted into a symbol.
(_d_) The PHONETIC, in which the picture becomes a phonogram,
or sound-representing sign. The phonogram may be--(1) _verbal_, _i.e._
a sound-sign for a whole word; (2) _syllabic_, _i.e._ a sound-sign for
syllables; or (3) _alphabetic_, a sound-sign for each letter.
To recapitulate stages (_b_), (_c_), and (_d_):--
In stage (_b_) the sign as eye-picture suggests the thing;
In stage (_c_) the sign as eye-picture suggests the name;
In stage (_d_) the sign as ear-picture suggests the sound;
and it is in the passage from (_c_) to (_d_), whereby constant signs
are chosen to stand for constant sounds, that the progress of the human
race was assured, because only thereby was the preservation of all that
is of abiding value made possible.
[Illustration: Fig. 7.--Quipu, for Reckoning, &c.]
(_a_) _The Mnemonic Stage._--This is well represented by "quipus" or
knotted cords, and by wampums or shell-ornamented belts. The quipu
(fig. 7) has a long history, and is with us both in the rosary on which
the Roman Catholic counts his prayers, in the knot which we tie in
our handkerchief to help a weak memory, and in the sailor's log-line.
Herodotus tells us that when Darius bade the Ionians remain to guard
the floating bridge which spanned the Ister, he "tied sixty knots in
a thong, saying: 'Men of Ionia ... do ye keep this thong and do as I
shall say:--so soon as ye shall have seen me go forward against the
Scythians, from that time begin and untie a knot on each day; and if
within this time I am not here, and ye find that the days marked by the
knots have passed by, then sail away to your own lands'" (iv. 98). And
the same obviously handy device is of widespread use, reaching its more
elaborate form among the ancient Peruvians, from whose language the
term "quipu," meaning "knot," is borrowed. It consists of a main cord,
to which are fastened at given distances thinner cords of different
colours, each cord being knotted in divers ways for special purposes,
and each colour having its own significance. Red strands stood for
soldiers, yellow for gold, white for silver, green for corn, and so
forth, while a single knot meant ten, two single knots meant twenty,
double knots one hundred, and two double knots two hundred. Such
simple devices served manifold purposes. Besides their convenience in
reckoning, they were used for keeping the annals of the empire of the
Incas; for transmitting orders to outlying provinces; for registering
details of the army; and even for preserving records of the dead, with
whom the quipu was buried, as in old Egypt the biography or titles of
the deceased were set forth in hieroglyph and deposited in the tomb.
Quoting from Von Tschudi's _Peru_, Dr. E. B. Tylor says that each
town had its officer whose special function was to tie and interpret
the quipus. They were called Quipucamayocuna, or knot-officers; but
although they attained great facility in their work, they were seldom
able to read a quipu without the aid of an oral commentary. When one
came from a distant province, it was necessary to give notice with
it whether it referred to census, tribute, war, and so forth. But by
constant practice they so far perfected the system as to be able to
register with their knots the most important events of the kingdom,
and to set down its laws and ordinances. Although vain attempts to
read the quipus have been made in the present day, Dr. Tylor adds
that there are still Indians in Southern Peru "who are perfectly
familiar with the contents of certain historical quipus preserved
from ancient times; but they keep their knowledge a profound secret,
especially from the white men." (_Early History of Mankind_, p. 160.)
This knot-reckoning is in use among the Puna herdsmen of the Peruvian
plateaux. On the first strand of the quipu they register the bulls,
on the second the cows, these again they divide into milch-cows and
those that are dry; the next strands register the calves, the next
the sheep and so forth, while other strands record the produce; the
different colours of the cords and the twisting of the knots giving the
key to the several purposes. Akin to this is the practice among the
Paloni Indians of California, concerning whom Dr. Hoffman reports that
each year a certain number are chosen to visit the settlement at San
Gabriel to sell native blankets. "Every Indian sending goods provided
the salesman with two cords made of twisted hair or wool, on one of
which was tied a knot for every _real_ received, and on the other a
knot for each blanket sold. When the sum reached ten _reals_, or one
dollar, a double knot was made. Upon the return of the salesman, each
person selected from the lot his own goods, by which he would at once
perceive the amount due, and also the number of blankets for which the
salesman was responsible." The natives of Ardrah, in West Africa, use
small cords, each knot in which has a meaning; and among the Jebus, the
objects knotted into strings tell their separate tale, cowrie shells
placed face to face denoting friendship; an arrow, war; and so forth.
Other tribes have devised message-sticks somewhat after the well-known
native Australian type. More highly-developed knot-reckoning is found
among the Mexican Zuni, and in more primitive form among some North
American Indians; but, not tarrying to detail these, we cross the
Pacific, noting, on our passage, that a generation ago the Hawaiian
tax-gatherers kept accounts of the assessable property throughout the
island on lines of cordage from four to five hundred fathoms long.
Knots, loops, and tufts of different shape, size, and colour indicated
the several districts, and the amount of tax to be paid by each
inhabitant was defined by marks of the same character as those now
specified, with such variety as to prevent confusion. The Shû-King, a
sacred historical book of the Chinese, records the use of knotted cords
prior to the invention of writing. The number and distances of the
knots served as conventional mnemonics, and also as imperial records,
until written characters replaced them. "Legend refers the tying of
knots in strings to about 2800 B.C., when Fo-hi invented eight symbols,
and at the same time pictorial representations of these knotted strings
were taken to indicate the object thereby symbolised." These Morse-like
symbols are:--
[Illustration:
Heaven .
Balance .
Water . .
Earthquake
Wood . .
Sacrifice.
Boundary .
Earth . .
(C. Gardner, _Journal Ethnological Society_, 1870, vol. ii. p. 5)]
Another Chinese legend says that "the most ancient forms were five
hundred and forty characters, formed by a combination of knotted
strings and the eight symbols, made in the form of birds' claws in
various states of tension, and that all these five hundred and forty
characters were suggested to the inventor by the marks (left by the
claws) upon the sand." The use of looped or knotted cords is depicted
in Egyptian hieroglyph, and among other tribes of the African continent
the Jebus of to-day evidence the survival of this primitive _memoria
technica_, while from Melanesia to Formosa the knotted cord, as in
Australia and Africa the message-stick, render service as means of
communication between man and his fellows. The nine incisions, with a
longer cut across them to denote ten, is a mode of decimal reckoning
and of record found alike among Red Indians and London bargees. The
same purpose explains the custom, in force well within the present
century, of our Exchequer in keeping certain accounts by means of
notched tallies. The tally was a squared stick of well-seasoned
hazel or willow, in one side of which notches of different breadth,
indicating pounds, shillings, and pence, were cut to mark the amount
of money lent by any person to the Government, the same amount being
cut in Roman numerals, together with the lender's name and date of
the loan, on the two opposite sides. The stick was then split down
the middle, and one half handed to the lender, the other half being
kept in the Exchequer. When the money fell due, the lender surrendered
his half for comparison with its fellow, and the two being found to
"tally," the loan was repaid. It was through the overheating of stoves
in the burning of heaps of accumulated tally-sticks that the Houses of
Parliament were destroyed in 1834. Fifty years ago in Scotland (and
the like may happen in out-of-the-way hamlets to-day), the baker's boy
took a "nick-stick" with his bread, and made a notch in the stick for
every loaf he left on his rounds. So it was, Dr. Hoffman tells us,
with the Pennsylvanian dairyman, who kept account of the milk which
he sold by marking notches for pints and quarts on a stick. As these
notches correspond to entries of transactions in our daybooks and
ledgers, so the once widely-used Clog Almanack corresponded to our
modern _Whitaker_. It consisted of a square-shaped "clog" or "block" of
wood (sometimes of metal), and was designed chiefly to show when the
Sundays and holidays fell, certain symbols or hieroglyphs being drawn
against saint and other festal days--as, for example, an axe for Saint
Paul, a true-lovers' knot for Saint Valentine, and a harp for Saint
David. With this may be compared the hieroglyphic wheels named "record
of the gods," formerly in use for recording time among the Indians
of Virginia. "These wheels had sixty spokes, each for a year, as if
to mark the ordinary age of man, and they were painted on skins kept
by the priests. They marked on each spoke or division a hieroglyphic
figure to show the memorable events of the year." (Tylor, p. 93.)
Wampum-belts are of much narrower geographical distribution than
quipus. They consist of hand-made beads or perforated shells arranged
in various more or less conventionalised patterns on bark filaments,
hemp, or deerskin strips or sinews, the ends of the belts being
selvedged by sinews or hempen fibres. The patterns are pictorial
symbols recording events in the history of the tribe or treaties
between tribes; the belts being also used to note land boundaries
or personal property, sometimes even passing, in the old days, as
shell-money in all parts of New England from one end of the coast
to the other. As illustrating a common purpose for which the wampum
record was used, Peter Clarke tells us, in his _Origin and Traditional
History of the Wyandotts_ (a tribe of the Huron-Iroquois stock),
that "in the last decade of the eighteenth century, the king or head
chief, Sut-staw-ra-tse, called a meeting at the house of Chief Adam
Brown, who had charge of the archives, which consisted of wampum
belts, parchments, &c., contained in a large trunk. One by one they
were brought out and shown to the assembled chiefs and warriors. Chief
Brown wrote on a piece of paper and tacked it to each wampum belt,
designating the compact or treaty it represented, after it had been
explained from memory by the chiefs appointed for that purpose. There
sat before them the venerable king, in whose head were stored the
hidden contents of each wampum belt, listening to the rehearsal, and
occasionally correcting the speaker and putting him on the right track
whenever he deviated." Clarke goes on to say that "when the majority
of the people removed to the south-west, they demanded to have the
belts, as these might be a safeguard to them. Some of these belts
recorded treaties of alliance or of peace with other tribes which
were now residing in that region, and it might be of great importance
to the Wyandotts to be able to produce and refer to them. The justice
of this claim was admitted, and they were allowed to have the greater
part of their belts." And modern inquirers tell us that, in so far as
the wampums still possess utility, it is as evidence of a subsisting
treaty or a title-deed. Few examples, however, of the vast number of
belts once in the possession of the North American tribes (and these
almost exclusively confined to the Iroquois country) survive, since
in the displacement of the red man by the white their value from the
land-right point of view has disappeared. Four interesting specimens,
known as the "Hale Series of Huron Wampum Belts," which were presented
by Dr. Tylor to the Pitt-Rivers Museum at Oxford in 1897, form the
subject of lengthy memoirs by the donor and the late Horatio Hale in
the _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_ (xxvi. 3, pp. 221-54).
Of these only the barest summary is needful. The first and oldest
example, dating from before the middle of the seventeenth century, is
named the "Double Calumet Treaty Belt" (figs. 8, 9). It is nine beads
in width, and although imperfect, is still nearly four feet long. On
a dark ground of the costly purple wampum there is the device of a
council-hearth in what was probably the centre of the belt, flanked on
one side by four and on the other side by three double calumets, _i.e._
double-headed peace-pipes, each possessing a bowl at both ends. Of
course a pipe of this sort is of no use for smoking. It is a creation
of the heraldic imagination, like the double-headed eagle of some
modern European powers. This, first appearing on the arms of the German
Emperor in the middle of the fourteenth century, may have been derived
through contact with the East from Hittite bas-reliefs, as the cherub
of our grave-stone cutters is derived through the Hebrews from the
Assyrians, and the symbolic design of the Good Shepherd from the old
type of Hermes, the ram-bearing god.
[Illustration: Fig. 8.--Double Calumet Wampum]
[Illustration: Fig. 9.--Double Calumet Council Hearth]
Returning to the "double calumet," Mr. Hale was told by Mandorong,
an Indian chief, that it was a peace-belt, representing an important
treaty or alliance of ancient times. The second example is called
Peace-Path Belt, which name indicates its purpose; the third, of which
a good portion has probably vanished, is named the Jesuit Missionary
Belt (fig. 10), and is believed "to commemorate the acceptance by the
Hurons of the Christian religion" as taught by the Jesuits.
[Illustration: Fig. 10.--Jesuit Missionary Wampum]
[Illustration: Fig. 11.--Four Nations' Alliance Wampum]
The figures are worked on fifteen rows of white beads on a dark ground,
the oval or lozenge-shaped design near the centre representing a
council. On each side of this are religious emblems--on one side the
dove, on the other side the lamb--and beyond each are Greek crosses
representing the Trinity. "The latest date which can be ascribed to
this belt is the year 1648, the eve of the expulsion of the Hurons by
the Iroquois." The fourth example (fig. 11), called the "Four Nations'
Alliance Belt," is sixty years younger, and, as denoted by the four
squares forming the chief device, is a land-treaty made between the
Wyandotts and three Algonquin tribes.
[Illustration: Fig. 11_a_.--Penn Wampum]
This reference to records which mark a certain approach to the
ideographic stage of writing would be incomplete if no account was
given of the most celebrated wampum record in existence (fig. 11_a_),
the Penn Belt, preserved in the archives of the Historical Society of
Pennsylvania. It derives its name from a well-authenticated tradition
that it is the identical belt given, probably in 1701, to William Penn
by the Iroquois "to confirm the friendly relations then permanently
established between them." It is composed of eighteen strings of white
wampum, thus evidencing its relation to an important transaction,
and has in the centre two figures delineated in dark-coloured beads,
one an Indian grasping the hand of a man who, as wearing a hat, is
doubtless intended to represent a European. The oblique bands are the
symbol of the federation of Iroquois known as the "Five Nations,"
and represent by synecdoche (or the putting of a part for the whole)
the entire native Iroquois "long-house," as the communal dwelling is
called. "The Iroquois league is spoken of in their Book of Rites as
_Kanastat-sikowa_, the 'great framework.' It was this mighty structure,
which, when the belt in question was given, overshadowed the greater
part of North America, that was indicated by the rafters, shown as
oblique bands." (Hale, _J.A.I._ xxvi. p. 244.)
(_b_) _The Pictorial Stage._--The necessity of identifying personal
as well as tribal property, especially in land and live stock, led to
the employment of various characters more or less pictographic, which
have their representatives in signaries used in ancient commerce and in
manufacturers' trade marks. Professor Ernst of Caracas believes that he
can recognise survivals of Indian picture-writing in the marks used for
branding cattle; and among Mr. Arthur Evans's remarkable discoveries
of pre-Mycenæan relics in Crete, the significance of which will be
dealt with later on, are seal-stones engraved with signs which are
not merely fanciful or ornamental, but designed to convey information
about their owners. "For example, a boat with a crescent moon on either
side of the mast may have been the signet of an ancient mariner who
ventured on long voyages;" perchance a feat to be proud of, since even
a one-moon voyage seems to have been too much for the average Homeric
mariner (_cf._ _Iliad_, II. 292-4). "Another signet, with a gate and a
pig on one of its faces, would be proper to a well-to-do swineherd."
Other seals bearing the device of a fish may indicate a fisherman; of a
harp, a musician, and so on. (_The Mycenæan Age_, p. 270: Tsountas and
Manatt.) The painful operation of tattooing is known to have symbolic
and religious, even more than decorative, significance, as marking the
connection of the man with his clan-totem or individual totem. But it
has also a utilitarian purpose, as among certain Red Indian tribes,
who tattoo both sexes, so that in case of war the captured individuals
may be identified and ransomed. Totemic and mythic animals are
tattooed upon various parts of the body; in one case the design worn
by a landowner among the Kavuya Indians of California was used as his
property mark by being cut or painted upon boundary trees and posts, so
that his title to his possessions was proved by the portable title-deed
which he bore, reminding us of the leading incident in Rider Haggard's
_Mr. Meeson's Will_. "In New Zealand the facial decorations of a dead
man were reproduced upon the trees near his grave; while among the
Yakuts and Bushmen the facial marks, or even totems, were furthermore
employed as property marks, the Bushmen carving them upon growing
squashes and melons." (Hoffman, p. 39.) The various Indian tribes
appear to have made more frequent use of the totem name rather than of
the personal name, perhaps because of the common barbaric notion that
a man's name is an integral part of himself, through which, whether he
be living or dead, mischief may be wrought by the sorcerer who knows
the name--a notion the force of which would be lessened where the name
is generic and shared in common. On the grave-posts of both Australian
black fellows and North American Indians the totem symbol is reversed,
as in our mediæval chronicles the leopards of English kings are
reversed on the scutcheon drawn opposite the record of their death.
With this we may connect the classic symbol of the inverted torch which
the modern sculptor depicts on funereal monuments. In his great work on
the _History, Condition, and Prospects of the Indian Tribes_, published
over fifty years ago (a work, however, which needs checking from other
authorities), Schoolcraft gives some illustrations of the red man's
grave-posts, of which three are here reproduced.
[Illustration: Figs. 12, 13.--Indian Grave-posts]
Fig. 12 shows the dead warrior's totem, a tortoise, and beside it a
headless man, which is a common symbol of death among Indian tribes.
Below the trunk are three marks of honour. The next and more elaborated
figure (13) records the achievements of Shingabawassin, a celebrated
chief of the St. Mary's band. His totem, the crane, is shown reversed.
The three marks on the left of the totem represent important general
treaties of peace to which he had been a party; the six strokes on the
right probably indicate the number of big battles which he fought.
The pipe appears to be a symbol of peace, and the hatchet a symbol of
war. In like manner head-boards erected over a woman have the various
articles used by her in life, as cutting and sewing instruments and
weaving utensils, depicted upon them. The third example (14) represents
the _adjedatig_ or tomb-board of Wabojeeg, a celebrated war chief, who
died on Lake Superior about 1793. His totem, the reindeer, is reversed,
and his own name, which means the White Fisher, is not recorded. The
seven strokes note the seven war parties whom he led; the three upright
strokes as many wounds received in battle. The horned head tells of a
desperate fight with a moose.
[Illustration: Fig. 14.--Tomb-board of Indian Chief]
[Illustration: Fig. 15.--Hunter's Grave-post]
Fig. 15 is a reduced copy (Hoffman) of the grave-board of an Innuit
hunter. The vocation of the dead man is shown in the _baidarka_, or
boat, in which he is depicted as rowing with a companion. The object
beneath represents a rack for drying fish and skins. Next to this are
figures of a fox and a land otter, and the network drawing at the
bottom is a copy of the hunter's summer dwelling. These temporary
structures denote the abode of a skin-hunter, those used by fishermen
being dome-shaped. Hoffman adds that "this differentiation in the shape
of roofs of habitations applies to their pictorial representation and
not to their actual form." In close connection with these mortuary
boards there is the ornamentation of door-posts which we find among
British Columbian, Polynesian, and Maori tribes; also the carvings on
canoes and other personal effects to mark ownership or to identify the
property with the totem. But to pursue this would take us into the
domain of savage art generally, reference to which is warranted here
only in its mnemonic uses as keeping alive knowledge of events which
would otherwise perish. Obviously, the examples given above can fulfil
only a limited purpose, because only the initiated can know their
meaning. As Dr. Tylor remarks, such mode of record "may be compared
to the elliptical forms of expression current in all societies whose
attention is given specially to some narrow subject of interest, and
where, as all men's minds have the same framework set up in them, it is
not necessary to go into an elaborate description of the whole state
of things; but one or two details are enough to enable the hearer to
understand the whole. Such expressions as 'new white at 48,' 'best
selected at 92' ('futures fairly active' is a good example), though
perfectly understood in the commercial circles where they are current,
are as unintelligible to any one who is not familiar with the course
of events in those circles, as an Indian record of a war-party would
be to an ordinary Londoner." (_Early History of Mankind_, p. 86.)
This applies with even greater force to the large group of symbolic
mnemonics whose purpose is more restricted, whether it be as help to
the singer in his verses, to the medicine-man in his incantation,
to the hunter in his quest, or, as among ourselves, to the tramp on
his rounds. The subjoined copy of a cadger's map (fig. 16), given in
Hotten's _Slang Dictionary_ (1869), is an addition to the number of
survivals which are found in so-called civilised communities, and has
fit place among the examples of pictorial mnemonics in matters of 1,
love; 2, sorcery; 3, the chase; 4, war; and 5, politics which follow it.
1. _Love._--Fig. 17 is a reduced copy of a love-letter, drawn upon
birch bark (a material used elsewhere, as among the Yukaghirs of
Siberia), which an Ojibwa girl sent to her sweetheart at White Earth,
Minnesota. She was of the "Bear" totem, he of the "Mud Puppy" totem;
hence the picture of these animals as representing the addresser and
the addressee. The two lines from their respective camps meet and are
continued to a point between two lakes, another trail branching off
towards two tents. Here three girls, Catholic converts, as denoted by
the three crosses, are encamped, the left-hand tent having an opening
from which an arm protrudes with beckoning gesture. The arm is that
of the writer of the letter, who is making the Indian sign of welcome
to her lover. "This is done by holding the palm of the hand down and
forward, and drawing the extended index finger towards the place
occupied by the speaker, thus indicating the path upon the ground to be
followed by the person called."
[Illustration: Fig. 16.--A Cadger's Map of a Begging District
_Explanation of the Hieroglyphics_
[Symbol] NO GOOD; too poor, and know too much.
[Symbol] STOP. If you have what they want, they'll buy. They
are pretty _fly_ (knowing).
[Symbol] GO THIS WAY: better than the other road. Nothing that
way.
[Symbol] BONE (good). Safe for a "cold tatur." _Cheese your
patter_ (don't talk much).
[Symbol] COOPER'D (spoilt) by too many calling there.
[Symbol] GAMMY (unfavourable); likely to have you taken up.
Mind the dog.
[Symbol] FLUMMUXED (dangerous); sure of a month in _quod_
(prison).
[Symbol] RELIGIOUS, but tidy on the whole.]
[Illustration: Fig. 17.--Ojibwa Love-letter]
[Illustration: Fig. 18.--Love-song]
Fig. 18 is the record of a love-song. 1, represents the lover; 2, he
is singing and beating a magic drum; in 3, he surrounds himself with a
secret lodge, denoting the effects of his necromancy; in 4, he and his
mistress are joined by a single arm to show that they are as one; in
5, she is on an island; in 6, she sleeps, and as he sings, his magical
power reaches her heart; and in 7, the heart itself is shown. To each of
these figures a verse of the song corresponds.
1. It is my painting that makes me a god.
2. Hear the sounds of my voice, of my song; it is my voice.
3. I cover myself in sitting down by her.
4. I can make her blush, because I hear all she says of me.
5. Were she on a distant island I could make her swim over,
6. Though she were far off, even on the other hemisphere.
7. I speak to your heart.
[Illustration: Fig. 19.--Mnemonic Song of an Ojibwa Medicine-man.]
2. _Sorcery._--Fig. 19 is the song of an Ojibwa medicine-man incised
upon birch bark. These conjurers, who correspond to the Siberian
_shamans_, affect the usual mystery of the priestly craft all the
world over, and affirm, like those who know better, that their
thaumaturgic powers are the direct gift of the god. Him they name
Manabozho--probably some ancestral deity, since he is the great uncle
of the _anish'inabēg_ or "first people." In 1, Manabozho holds his bow
and arrow; 2, represents the medicine-man's drum and drumsticks used
in chanting and in initiation ceremonies; 3, a bar or rest observed
while chanting the incantation; 4, the medicine-bag, made of an otter
skin, in which is preserved the white cowrie shell as the sacred
emblem of the cult; 5, the medicine-man himself, horned to show his
superior power; 6, a funnel-like object, known as a "jugglery," used in
legerdemain and other hocus pocus; 7, a woman, signifying the admission
of her sex to "the society of the grand medicine"; 8, a bar or rest,
as at 3; 9, the sacred snake-skin medicine bag, which has magic power;
10, another woman; 11, another otter-skin "bag o' tricks," showing
that women members are allowed to use it; 12, a female figure, holding
a branch of some sacred plant used in the exorcism of the demon of
disease. In any reference to savage therapeutics it cannot be too often
insisted upon that diseases are never ascribed to natural causes. "The
Indians believed that diseases were caused by unseen evil beings and
by witchcraft, and every cough, every toothache, every headache, every
fever, every boil, and every wound, in fact all their ailments, were
attributed to such a cause. Their so-called medical practice was a
horrible system of sorcery, and to such superstition human life was
sacrificed on an enormous scale.... In fact, a natural death in a
savage tent is a comparatively rare phenomenon; but death by sorcery,
medicine, and blood-feud arising from a belief in witchcraft is
exceedingly common." (Professor Powell's _Indian Linguistic Families of
America North of Mexico_, p. 39.)
[Illustration: Fig. 20.--Wâbeno destroying an Enemy]
Fig. 20 records the destruction of an enemy by an Ojibwa wâbeno or
bad medicine-man. The box-like objects represent the four degrees
of the cult society to which the wâbeno belonged, the number of
posts indicating the series. The figure next to these is that of the
assistant to the wâbeno, who is shown with a waving line extending from
his mouth to the oval-like object intended to represent a lake upon an
island in which the victim lives. He is shown prostrate beneath the
wâbeno with a spot upon his breast, the small oblong figure between the
two being the sacred drum. (See 2 in the foregoing illustration.) The
meaning of the pictograph is that the wâbeno was employed to work black
magic on the man. He took a piece of birch bark and cut upon it the
effigy of the victim, then, after beating the drum to the chanting of
incantations, he pierced the breast of the effigy, applying red paint
to the puncture. This, under the principle of "sympathetic magic," was
believed to bring about the death of the victim, whom, through his
living on the island, the wâbeno could not reach.
[Illustration: Fig. 21.--Etching on Innuit Drill-bow]
White magic, in which the beneficent powers are at work, is illustrated
by the Innuit pictograph on an ivory drill-bow (fig. 21), on the right
of which are two huts, nearest to which stands the medicine-man who
has been called in to exorcise the disease from a couple of sufferers.
He is catching hold of the animal by whose help the disease-demon is
expelled, or to whom, mayhap, as a sort of scapegoat, the disease is
transferred. In the second exorcism, the medicine-man is grasping the
patient by the arm, while he chants the formulæ wherewith to cast out
the demon. The figure on the left is making a gesture of surprise at
his relief, while beyond him are two demons struggling to escape beyond
the power of the medicine man.
[Illustration: Fig. 22.--Ojibwa Hunting Record]
3. _The Chase._--Fig. 22 records a hunting expedition. The two lines
represent a wave-tossed river, on which floats a bark canoe, guided by
the owner. In the bow a piece of birch bark shields a fire of pine
knots to light up the course taken by the steersman. By this means the
game, as it comes to the water to drink, can be seen from the shaded
part of the canoe, in front of which two deer are shown. Next to these
is a circle representing a lake, from which peep the head and horns
of a third deer. To the right of the lake a doe appears, and beyond
her the two wigwams of the hunter. The four animals may represent the
quarry secured.
[Illustration: Fig. 23.--Hidatsa Pictograph on a Buffalo Shoulder-blade]
Fig. 23, drawn on a buffalo shoulder-blade by a Hidatsa Indian, tells
his efforts to track companions who had gone buffalo-hunting. The trail
of the animal and the pursuers is shown in the dotted lines. Of the
three heads the lowest is that of the seeker, who is depicted shouting
after his missing friends; then he is shown advancing and still
shouting, till his call is returned from the spot where the hunters
have camped.
[Illustration: Fig. 24.--Alaskan Hunting Record]
[Illustration: Fig. 25.--Record of Starving Hunter]
Fig. 24, incised on an ivory drill-bow, is a pictograph of an Alaskan
sea-lion hunt. In 1, the speaker points with his left hand in the
direction to be taken, and, 2, holds a paddle to show that a voyage is
intended. In 3, the right hand to the side of the head denotes sleep,
while the left hand with one finger elevated means one night. The
circle with two dots in the middle, 4, signifies an island with huts;
5 is the same as 1; 6 is another island; 7 is the same as 3, but with
two fingers elevated to indicate two nights. In 8 the speaker with
his harpoon makes the sign of a sea-lion with his left hand, which he
thrusts outward and downward in a slight curve to represent the animal
swimming; 9, 10, a sea-lion shot at with bow and arrow; 11, two men in
a boat, the paddles pushed downwards; and 12, the speaker's hut. The
native account, as translated, reads thus: "I there go that island,
one sleep there; then I go another that island, there two sleeps; I
catch one sea-lion, then return mine." (Colonel Mallery, quo. Hoffman,
_Transactions of the Anthropological Society_, Washington, vol. ii.
p. 134, 1883.) "Hunters who have been unfortunate, and are starving,
scratch or draw upon a piece of wood characters like those in fig. 25,
and place the lower end of the stick in the ground on the trail where
it is most likely to be discovered," the stick being inclined towards
the hunter's dwelling. The horizontal line 1, denotes a canoe, 2,
the gesture of the man with both arms extended, signifies "nothing,"
while the uplifting of the right hand to the mouth, 3, means "food"
or "to eat," and the left hand outstretched points to 4, the hut of
the famished man. Here we are actually within the ideographic stage,
and, as will be shown in due course, handling material identical in
character with that found in Egypt and other nations of antiquity. But,
as already remarked, and as will be evidenced in abundance throughout
these pages, there are no well-marked divisions between the stages of
development.
A varied interest attaches to fig. 26, which depicts some general
features of Alaskan life on a piece of walrus tusk. In 1, a native is
resting against his house, and on his right stands a pole surmounted by
a bird, apparently a totem-post. 2. A reindeer. 3. One man shooting at
another with an arrow. 4. An expedition in a dog-sledge, and, 5, in a
boat with sail and paddle. 6. A dog-sledge, with the sun above; perhaps
indicating the coming of summer. 7. A sacred lodge. The four figures
at each outer corner represent young men armed with bows and arrows to
keep off the uninitiated from the forbidden precincts. The members of
the occult society are dancing round a fire in the centre of the lodge.
8. A pine tree up which a porcupine is climbing. 9. Another pine tree,
from which a woodpecker is extracting larvæ. 10. A bear. 11, 12. Men
driving fish into, 13, the net, above them being a captured whale, with
harpoon and line attached.
[Illustration: Fig. 26.--Alaskan Hunting Life]
4. _War._--Schoolcraft, who has been already drawn upon for an example
(page 53), records the finding of the bark letter copied in fig. 27. It
was fastened to the top of a pole so as to attract the notice of other
Indians who might happen to be passing. Beginning on the right of the
middle row we have 1, the officer in command, sword in hand; 2, his
secretary, and 3, the geologist of the party, indicated by his hammer.
Then follow 4, 5, two attachés; 6, the interpreter; and 7, 8, two
Chippewa guides. In the top row is 9, 10, a group of seven soldiers,
armed with muskets. A prairie hen and tortoise, 11, 12, represent the
animals secured for food.
[Illustration: Fig. 27.--Indian Expedition]
[Illustration: Fig. 28.--Biography of Indian Chief]
Fig. 28 gives the biography of Wingemund, a noted Delaware chief.
To the left is 1, the tortoise totem of the tribe; then 2, the
chief-totem; and 3, the sun, beneath which are ten strokes representing
the ten expeditions in which Wingemund took part. On the opposite side
are indicated, 4, 5, 6, 7, the prisoners of both sexes taken, and also
the killed, these last being drawn as headless. In the centre are the
several positions attacked, 8, 9, 10, 11; and the slanting strokes at
the bottom denote the number of Wingemund's followers.
[Illustration: Fig. 29.--War-song]
Fig. 29 is a war-song. Wings are given to the warrior, 1, to show that
he is swift-footed; in 2 he stands under the morning star, and in 3
under the centre of heaven, with his war-club and rattle; in 4, the
eagles of carnage are flying round the sky; in 5, the warrior lies
slain on the battlefield; while in 6 he appears as a spirit in the sky.
The words of the song are as follows:--
1. I wish to have the body of the swiftest bird.
2. Every day I look at you; the half of the day I sing my song.
3. I throw away my body.
4. The birds take a flight in the air.
5. Full happy am I to be numbered with the slain.
6. The spirits on high repeat my name.
5. _Political and Social._--The frontispiece is a copy of a petition
sent by a group of Indian tribes to the United States Congress for
fishing rights in certain small lakes near Lake Superior. The leading
clan is represented by Oshcabawis, whose totem is 1, the crane; then
follow 2, Waimitligzhig; 3, Ogemagee; and 4, a third, all of the marten
totem; 5, Little Elk, of the bear totem; 6, belongs to the manfish
totem; 7, to the catfish totem.
From the eye and heart of each of the animals runs a line connecting
them with the eye and heart of the crane to show that they are all of
one mind, and the eye of the crane has also a line connecting it with
the lakes on which the tribes want to fish, while another line runs
towards Congress.
Fig. 30 is a copy of a letter found above St. Anthony's Falls in 1820.
"It consisted of white birch bark, and the figures had been carefully
drawn. 1, Denotes the flag of the Union; 2, the cantonment then
recently established at Cold Spring, on the western side of the cliffs;
4 is the symbol of Colonel Leavenworth, the commanding officer, under
whose authority a mission of peace had been sent into the Chippewa
country; 11 is the symbol of Chakope, the leading Sioux chief, under
whose orders the party moved; 8 is the second chief, named Wabedatunka,
or, 10, the Black Dog, who has fourteen lodges, 7 is a chief also
subordinate to Chakope, with thirteen lodges, and 9 is a bale of goods
devoted by the Government to the objects of the peace. The name of 6,
whose wigwam is 5, with thirteen subordinate lodges, was not given."
The letter was written to make known the fact that Chakope and his
followers, accompanied or supported by the American officer, had come
to the spot to make peace with the Chippewa hunters. "The Chippewa
chief, Babesacundabee, who found the letter, read off its meaning
without doubt or hesitation." (Schoolcraft, vol. i. p. 352.)
[Illustration: Fig. 30.--Letter offering Treaty of Peace]
Fig. 31 represents the census roll of an Indian band at Mille Lac, in
the territory of Minnesota, sent in to the United States agent by
Nagonabe, a Chippewa Indian, during the annuity payments in 1849.
[Illustration: Fig. 31.--Census Roll of an Indian Band]
As the Indians were all of the same totem, Nagonabe "designated each
family by a sign denoting the common name of the chief. Thus 5 denotes
a catfish, and the six strokes indicate that the Catfish's family
consisted of six individuals; 8 is a beaver skin; 9, a sun; 13, an
eagle; 14, a snake; 22, a buffalo; 34, an axe; 35, the medicine-man,
and so on." (Lubbock, _Origin of Civilisation_, p. 47.)
[Illustration: Fig. 32.--Record of Departure (Innuit)]
Fig. 32 supplies a striking example of the cumbersomeness of the
pictograph as contrasted with the sound-symbol. It is a copy of
a record which an Innuit placed over the door of his dwelling to
notify to his friends that he had gone on a journey. The persons thus
notified are indicated in 1, 3, 5, 7; 2 is the speaker, who denotes the
direction in which he is leaving by his extended left hand; 4 is the
gesture sign for "many," and 6 for sleep, the upraising of the left
hand showing that he will be some distance away; 8, his intended return
is denoted by the right hand being pointed homeward, while the left arm
is bent to denote return.
(_c_) _The Ideographic Stage._--As the characters pass from the
pictorial to the emblematic or the symbolic, their meaning, obviously,
becomes more obscure, save to the initiated. "They do not," as Colonel
Mallery remarks, "depict, but suggest objects; do not speak directly
through the eye to the intelligence, but presuppose in the mind
knowledge of an event or fact which the sign recalls. The symbols of
the ark, dove, olive-branch, and rainbow would be wholly meaningless to
people unfamiliar with the Mosaic or some similar cosmology, as would
be the cross and the crescent to those ignorant of history." And even
in pictography, as the same excellent authority observes, "it is very
difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish between historical and
traditional accounts obtained from Indians. The winter counts (_i.e._
the reckoning of time by winters, and the applying of names instead of
numbers to them, as, _e.g._, 'catching-wild-horses winter,' the device
for which was a lasso), while having their chief value as calendars,
contain some material that is absolute and verifiable tribal history."
The difficulties of interpretation, as the examples given evidence,
are in the larger number being "merely mnemonic records, and treated
in connection with material objects formerly, and perhaps still, used
mnemonically." (Mallery, "On the Pictographs of the North American
Indians," _Fourth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology_, 1886.)
The signs of advance from the pictorial to the ideographic stage which
are to be noted among the Red Indians, are more sharply marked in
the hieroglyphs and phonetic characters on the stone monuments and
manuscripts found among the relics of the vanished peoples of Mexico
and Yucatan.
A number of fatuous theories about the connection of Central American
culture with that of the Old World have been broached, from the time
when Lord Kingsborough published his lavishly-illustrated book to prove
that the ancient Mexicans were the descendants of the lost Ten Tribes
of Israel to the present day, when Dr. Augustus Le Plongeon brings us
his "proofs" that Yucatan was the primitive home of Adam, and avers
that he has discovered not only the grave of Abel, but disinterred his
heart therefrom, and found the knife wherewith Cain slew him! (_Queen
Moo and the Egyptian Sphinx_, p. 138.) Now, among the certainties
which modern research has reached is that of the independent origin
and development of civilisation in the New World. Man himself, whether
or not descended from a single pair, had his origin in one region,
probably the Indo-Malaysian, since there we find his nearest congeners,
the anthropoid apes, while the pliocene beds of Java have recently
yielded a remarkable corroboration of the theory in the fossil bones
which bring man near to the common stem whence the highest animals have
diverged. At a period when the general temperature of the globe was
milder than now, the ancestors of the existing four leading groups--the
Ethiopic, Mongolic, American, and Caucasic--spread themselves over the
several zones of the habitable world, the American group migrating from
Asia and Europe across the then existing land-connection between those
continents and the New World, where those various stages of development
which are still to be witnessed from the Arctic regions to Cape
Horn were reached. Of these the Mexican plateau affords interesting
and valuable material in the chipped flint implements evidencing a
Stone Age, and in the marvellous buildings which vie both in their
cyclopean dimensions and ornamented features with the palaces, tombs,
and temples of Egypt and Assyria, testifying to the relatively high
culture of the races that raised them. These peoples, usually grouped
together as the ancient Mexicans, are known as Mayas and Aztecs. The
duration of the empire or confederation of the Mayas is unknown, but
about two hundred years before the Spanish conquest of America they
appear to have been invaded and subdued by the Aztecs, whose rule
extended from the Atlantic to the Pacific in the countries now forming
Mexico and portions of the United States. The remains of the two
races are both imperfect and entangled, so that any coherent story is
not to be extracted from them. But the evidence points to the Mayas
as the intellectually superior race; the Aztecs, who still form the
bulk of the population of South Mexico, borrowing largely from them,
especially in the matter of the gods. "If written language be a test of
intelligence, the Mayas were ahead not only of the Mexican people, but
also of the Peruvians. The latter are believed to have made no nearer
advance towards writing than the tying of tally-knots on strings, and
the Mexicans, while they had invented paper, wrote down their ideas,
save in the cases of a few phonetic signs, as children would, by means
of pictures; but the Mayas, like the Egyptians, had proceeded beyond
pictures to hieroglyphs, where symbols, more or less arbitrary, stand
for words or syllables, and the mind prepares itself to invent an
alphabet." (Mercer's _Hill Caves of Yucatan_, p. 73.) Some of the more
remarkable hieroglyphic-bearing monuments of the Mayas have been found
in the palace of Palenque, the Spanish name of the old Yucatan capital.
They are on stucco slabs above figures some of which show curious
correspondence to Egyptian statues, wearing the pleasant but immobile
expression of the latter, and decorated with a similar headdress, while
in one case (fig. 33), a cartouche enclosing an inscription is carved
on the plinth. The concluding panels of one of the codices form what
may be called the Mexican Book of the Dead. It enforces the scheme of
duty which precedes by vividly depicting the trial and judgment of the
soul after death, and detailing the perils of the journey on the way to
Mictlan (Payne, ii. 407).
[Illustration: Fig. 33.--Statue from Palenque]
Time and fanaticism have made sad havoc with the manuscripts, and no
satisfactory key to their decipherment has been found, only a few words
here and there being interpreted. They were executed in bright and
varied colours, with a feather pencil, on prepared skins, paper, or
rolls of cotton or aloe-fibre cloth, and the pictographic system thus
created was applied to the purposes of ordinary life, and served as a
species of writing. Matters of only passing importance were recorded
on fibrous paper made from the leaves of the maguey plant; "records
intended to be permanently kept were painted on the prepared skins of
animals, those of the deer and bear being more commonly used. These
paintings or 'pinturos' are usually executed on both sides of the
skin, which was oblong in shape and often of great length, having the
ends protected by boards." (Payne's _History of the New World called
America_, vol. ii. p. 404.) These boards are called _analtees_, a word
which may be translated _annals_. The earlier hieroglyphic characters
were executed by priests, who were required to be old men, widowers,
and under vows of chastity and seclusion. Such writing was known only
to the initiated.
Tradition says that the Aztecs destroyed many of the Maya picture
records because they recalled the grandeur of the conquered people. But
the Spaniards in their turn destroyed much more. Zumárraga, Bishop of
Mexico, and Landa, Bishop of Yucatan, made such bonfires of carvings,
statues, paintings on wood, and of priceless picture and hieroglyph
writings on native paper and deerskin, that only about half-a-dozen
fragments of the Yucatan books have ever been found since. Bishop
Landa, probably from knowledge obtained from Maya priests, attempted
the framing of a key of interpretation, his aim being the translation
of certain religious and devotional writings for the use of converts.
In this he indicates a certain number of alphabetic characters, but
the key did not work, and Dr. Isaac Taylor draws the conclusion that
"the systems of picture-writing which were invented and developed
by the tribes of Central America are so obscure, and so little is
really known about their history, that they must be regarded rather as
literary curiosities than as affording suitable materials for enabling
us to arrive at any general conclusions as to the nature of the early
stages of the development of the graphic art." (_Hist. Alph._, i. 24.)
Notwithstanding this somewhat sweeping verdict, the Maya-Aztec scripts
have value, if only for purposes of comparison. There is preserved in
the museum at Mexico a whole series of pictographs exhibiting incidents
as varied as the migrations of tribes, the annals of the people,
sacrifices to the gods, and the education of children, the tasks set
them, the punishments inflicted on them, and the food given them. To
the hieroglyph there succeeds the gradually conventionalised sign, of
which examples from Red Indian scripts have been given:--the arrow,
to denote an enemy; several arrows, several enemies; the direction
of the arrow's point, the direction taken by the enemy; a piece of
maize cake protruding from the mouth, to denote eating; the symbol
for water between the lips, to signify drinking; horizontal lines,
with arrow-headed characters on them, to denote the hoed or cultivated
ground, some of these ideographs being coloured to correspond with the
thing suggested; and, as an example of the more abstruse, the extended
arms, probably to denote negation,--all marking the advance to phonetic
syllabic writing. The names of persons and places are sometimes
indicated by symbolic figures; _e.g._ Chapultepec, or "grasshopper
hill," is represented by a hill and a grasshopper; Tzompanco, "the
place of skulls," by a skull on a bar between two posts, as enemies'
skulls used to be set up; and Macuilxochitl, the "five flowers," by
five dots and a flower. Sometimes we find the species of pun known as
the _rebus_ adopted. A picture is made to stand for the sound of the
word, as _e.g._ among ourselves in guessing games, when a whisk broom
and a key stand for "whiskey," or in the series of pictures of an eye,
a saw, a boy, a swallow, a goose, and a berry, which stand for the
sentence, "I saw a boy swallow a goose-berry." In Abbot Islip's Chapel
in Westminster Abbey his name is rebused as an eye and the slip of
a tree with the hand apparently of a slipping man hanging to it. In
Bishop Oldham's chantry in Exeter Cathedral his name is represented by
an owl (Owle-dom, the old spelling of the name); and in St. Saviour's
Church the name of Prior Burton is sculptured as a cask with a thistle
on it, "burr-tun."
[Illustration: Fig. 34.--Itzcoatl]
[Illustration: Fig. 35.--Rebus of Itzcoatl]
(_d_) _The Phonetic Stage._--The ancient Mexican script supplies
examples of the change from the pictographic to the phonetic stage.
The name of one of the kings was Itzcoatl, or "Knife-Snake." In the
manuscript known as the Le Tellier Codex this king's name (fig. 34) is
represented by a serpent (_coatl_) with stone knives (_itzli_) upon its
back. This is mere picture-writing, but in the Vergara Codex we find
the rebus form (fig. 35). "The first syllable, _itz_, is represented by
a weapon armed with blades of obsidian, _itz_ (_tli_), but the rest of
the word, _coatl_, though it means snake, is written, not by a picture
of a snake, but by an earthen pot, _co_ (_mitl_), and above it the
sign of water, _a_ (_tl_). Here we have real phonetic writing, for the
name is not to be read, according to sense, 'knife-kettle-water,' but
only according to the sound of the Aztec words, Itz-co-atl." Dr. Tylor
adds that there is no sufficient reason to make us doubt that this
purely phonetic writing was of native Mexican origin, and that after
the Spanish Conquest it was turned to account in a new and curious way.
The Spanish missionaries, when embarrassed by the difficulty of getting
the converts to remember their _Ave Marias_ and _Paternosters_, seeing
that the words were, of course, mere nonsense to them, were helped out
by the Indians themselves, who substituted Aztec words as near in sound
as might be to the Latin, and wrote down the pictured equivalents for
these words, which enabled them to remember the required formulas.
Torquemada and Las Casas have recorded two instances of this device.
_Pater noster_ was written by a flag (_pantli_) and a prickly pear
(_nochtli_), while the sign of water, _a_ (_tl_) combined with that
of aloe, _me_ (_tl_), made a compound word, _ametl_, which would
mean "water-aloe," but in sound made a very tolerable substitute for
Amen. M. Aubin found the beginning of a _Paternoster_ of this kind
in the metropolitan library of Mexico (fig. 36), made with a flag,
_pan_ (_tli_), a stone, _te_ (_tl_), a prickly pear, _noch_ (_tli_),
and again a stone, _te_ (_tl_), which would read Pa-te-noch-te, or
perhaps Pa-tetl-noch-tetl. After the conquest, when the Spaniards
were hard at work introducing their own religion and civilisation
among the conquered Mexicans, they found it convenient to allow the
old picture-writing still to be used, even in legal documents. It
disappeared in time, of course, being superseded in the long run by
the alphabet, and it is to this transition period that we owe many,
perhaps most, of the picture documents still preserved. "One of the
picture-writings in the museum at Mexico is very probably the same that
was sent up to Vera Cruz, to Montezuma, with figures of newly-arrived
white men, their ships and horses, and their cannon with fire and smoke
issuing from their mouths." (Tylor, _Anahuac_, p. 232.) In the general
history of the development of writing, the Mexican script therefore
supplies us only with an example of approximation to the phonetic
system, its advance to the final alphabetic stage being probably
arrested by the subjugation of the Mayas to an intellectually inferior
conqueror, who, borrowing much, and contributing nothing of advantage,
himself yielded to the superior force of Spain.
[Illustration: Fig. 36.--Paternoster Rebus]
CHAPTER IV
THE CHINESE, JAPANESE, AND COREAN SCRIPTS
China, whose inertia is being aroused by foreign "pin-pricks," is
the land of arrested developments, and consequently its writing has
remained for probably two thousand years at a rudimentary stage,
furnishing an interesting object-lesson on the early processes of
advance, after the disuse of knotted cords (see p. 43), from the
_Ku-wăn_, or "ancient pictures," to the _Ling-shing_, or "pictures and
sounds." The language has never got beyond the monosyllabic stage; it
has no terminations to denote number, case, tense, mood, or person,
the same word without change of form being used as a noun, verb, or
other "part of speech," so that a sentence can be construed only by
the place of the several words composing it. As Dr. Marshman tersely
puts it, "the whole of Chinese grammar depends upon position." For
example, while the root-meaning of _ta_ is "being great," it may, as
a noun, mean "greatness"; as an adjective, "great"; as a verb, "to be
great," or "to make great"; and as an adverb, "greatly." And, moreover,
not only position, but also tone and gesture, contribute to the
interpretation of the spoken language.
[Illustration: Fig. 37.--Chinese Picture-writing and Later Uncial]
The characters fall into six _wen_ or classes:--1, _pictorial_, giving
a picture of the thing itself; 2, _indicative_, _i.e._ designed
by their form and the relation of their parts to suggest the idea
in the mind of their inventor; 3, _composite_, _i.e._ made up of
two characters, the meanings of which blend in the meanings of the
compounds; 4, _inverted_, or, as the term implies, topsy-turvy;
5, _borrowed_, _i.e._ having another meaning attached to them; 6,
_phonetic_, _i.e._ one part indicating the sense and another part
the sound. In Chinese phrase the ideogram is the "mother of meaning"
and the phonogram the "mother of sound." The materials used largely
determine the form which writing takes, and in the modern or cursive
characters which are shown underneath the primitive forms we see the
result of use of the rabbit's-hair pencil of the Chinese scribe.
Respecting the first class, it suffices to say little, because it
explains itself (fig. 37). The sun was drawn as a circle, the moon as
a crescent, a mountain was indicated by three peaks, rain by drops
under an arch, and so forth. But, as has been sufficiently shown,
such devices carry us a very little way; there is no literature
possible under a mere graphic system. The third, or composite class,
is the most interesting as supplying the key to the common idea of
the character represented. Sometimes the characters indicate a dry
humour. A "wife" is denoted by the signs for "female" and "broom,"
a sort of metonymy for a woman's household work; for a male child
the signs "field" and "strength" are used, because he will till the
soil. The Chinese, it will be remembered, are a purely agricultural
people, and the compound for "profit" is "grain" and "a knife." The
characters for "mountain" and "man" signify "hermit"; an "eye" and
"water" mean "tears"; and the verb "to listen" is indicated by an ear
between two doors. The signs for the noonday sun are the "sun" and
"to reign"; "light" as an abstract quality is represented by figures
of the sun and moon placed side by side; a "man" and "two" stand for
mankind; a couple of women stand for "strife," three for "intrigue,"
while a "woman under two trees" means "desire" or "covetousness." But
the inadequacy of these and the other symbols to supply characters
for the demands of a language in which the same sound has to stand
for a multitude of ideas gave rise to the phonetic group, whose
development from picture-writing more or less ideographic took place
many centuries B.C. The primary symbols or combinations of vowels and
consonants number about four hundred and fifty. The variations in tone
in pronouncing these sounds increase the total of monosyllabic words
to be understood by the ear to something over twelve hundred. But the
Chinese dictionaries contain above forty thousand words, and it is the
symbols for each of these which are provided by the phonetic symbols.
These were compound signs, the first character, as shown above, being
a phonogram or sound-word, and the second character a determinative,
_i.e._ ideogram or sense-word. They are, as Professor Whitney says,
"rather an auxiliary language than a reduction of speech to writing."
The sign for "man" has nearly six hundred combinations, all denoting
something relating to man; that for "tree" has about nine hundred,
to indicate various kinds of trees and wood, things made of wood,
and so forth; while, to borrow a concrete example, _pe_, which means
"white," has, with a "tree" prefixed, the meaning of "cypress"; with
the sign for "man" it means "elder brother"; with the sign for "manes"
it means the vital principle that survives death; and so forth. _Chow_
is the Chinese word for "ship," so a picture of a ship stands for the
sound _chow_. But the word _chow_ means several other things, and the
determinative or "key" sign indicates these. "Thus the ship joined with
the sign of water stands for _chow_, 'ripple'; with that of speech
for _chow_, 'loquacity'; with that of fire for _chow_, 'flickering of
flame,' and so on for 'waggon-pole,' 'fluff,' and several other things
which have little in common but the name of _chow_" (Tylor, p. 102).
Although, theoretically, the Chinaman has to make an enormous number of
characters before he can write his own language, so that, at the age
of twenty-five, a diligent student has barely acquired the same amount
of facility in reading and writing which is usually attained by an
English child--using the twenty-six characters of his alphabet--at the
age of ten; practically some four or five thousand characters suffice
for average needs, and the convenience of "a system enabling those who
speak mutually unintelligible idioms, to converse together, using the
pencil instead of the tongue," caused the abandonment of an attempt to
make nearer approach to an alphabetic system which was promoted by the
Chinese Government some centuries ago.
In contrast to this, the Japanese, with that pliability which has
helped to put them in the van of Oriental peoples, selected, as
a result of contact with Buddhism, which came to them by way of
China, certain signs from the wilderness of Chinese characters, and
constituted these as their alphabet or _irofa_ so called, on the
acrologic principle (p. 104), from the names of its first signs, like
our alphabet from _alpha_, _beta_. Their language being polysyllabic,
involved the result that whatever signs were used must be syllabic,
and hence the adoption of a syllabary was easy. But, of course, like
all syllabaries, this has the defect of necessitating the use of that
larger number of signs with which the alphabet dispenses. The origin
of the Japanese syllabaries, of which there are two, dates from the
end of the ninth century of our Lord. One, the Hirakana, derived from
a cursive form of Chinese called the _tsau_ or "grass" character,
contains about three hundred syllabic sound-signs; the other, known as
the Katakana, is derived from the _kyai_ or "model" type of the Chinese
character, and is the simpler of the two in having only a single
character for each of the forty-seven syllabic sounds in the Japanese
language. But neither demands detailed treatment here, since with the
intrusion of the Roman alphabet among Western imports into Japan its
substitution for the cumbrous syllabaries is probably only a matter of
brief time, and the Japanese script may then take its place with the
Maya and the Aztec as a graphic curiosity.
Chinese is the official script of Corea, but the lower classes use
a phonetic alphabet which, in the judgment of some authorities, is
derived from a cursive form of the Nâgari script of India, having, so
it is thought, been introduced by Buddhist teachers. Both past and
present times afford striking examples of the influence of religion in
the diffusion of alphabets, missionaries obviously making use of their
own alphabet in the translation of their sacred books into the language
of their converts. Whatever connection there may have been between
Corean and Indian scripts is not, however, traceable, owing to the
changes in the former. But in truth we know little about the matter,
and there is something to be said in support of an old tradition that
King Se-jo, who reigned five hundred years ago, commanded his chief
grammarian, Song Sammun, to devise an alphabet that should supersede
the cumbersome Chinese; whereupon that scholar took the Tibetan
characters as foundation, but as those were only consonantal, he turned
to the ancient Chinese and transformed six of its simplest radicals
into the Corean vowels, naming the vowels and consonants "mother" and
"child" respectively. The letters were "bunched together" so as to look
like the Chinese characters (fig. 38), the purpose being "to facilitate
the transliteration of the Chinese text in a parallel column." There is
a curious tradition, reminding us of the Chinese legend of the origin
of writing, that the Corean characters were suggested by the straight
and oblique lattice-work of the native doors.
[Illustration: Fig. 38.--Chinese and Tibetan Triglot]
CHAPTER V
CUNEIFORM WRITING
Thus far curiosity alone gives the stimulus to acquaintance with
ancient scripts--a feeling of aloofness attending all that we learn of
Chinese, Maya, and other systems having no historical connection (for
the derivation of Chinese from pre-Babylonian writing is not proved)
with those from which our alphabet is probably derived. With the story
of these the real interest begins, because within some of them lie the
sources of the alphabets of the civilised world, while all of them
have borne a share in the preservation of intellectual and spiritual
treasures, the loss of which would have arrested the progress of the
vigorous sections of mankind.
Dealing first with those of Mesopotamia, a romance, not lacking
excitement, gathers round the wedge-shaped or cuneiform characters
(Lat. _cuneus_, "a wedge") inscribed on clay tablets and cylinders, and
on the great monuments of Assyria, Babylon, and other Oriental empires
of past renown. The very existence of these relics was forgotten for
some sixteen hundred years, and when they were unearthed from the
rubbish-heaps of centuries, no one dreamed that any serious meaning
was to be attached to the fantastic angular-shaped characters which
covered bricks and tablets. In 1621, Pietro della Valle, a Spanish
traveller, visited the famous ruins of Persepolis, and he appears
to have been the first to suspect that the arrow-headed signs were
inscriptions, although he was unable to decipher them. He, however,
made the shrewd observation that as the thick end of the supposed
letters was never at the right but at the left of the oblique
characters, the signs must have been written from left to right.
"Built on a great platform, artificially constructed for the purpose,
which commands a wide plain, and has a lofty mountain shaped like
an amphitheatre at its rear, the stranger ascends the spot by a
magnificent staircase, or pair of staircases, which separate in
opposite directions to meet at the summit. Here are the gigantic
remains of several palaces, great porticos with winged bulls and
reliefs representing, gods and princes. In the live rock of the
mountains at the rear tombs have been hewn, evidently to receive the
occupants of the palaces, and all the rocks and walls are covered with
the cuneiform or arrow-headed inscriptions, consisting of very simple
elements, which are nothing but thin wedges and angles [Symbol] but
with these elements combined in wonderful variety.... But no record of
the language or its import had survived, and the ignorant inhabitants
of the neighbourhood looked upon the texts with greater awe than
they did the winged monsters that loomed over the plain. They were to
them symbols of magic import, which, if duly pronounced, would unlock
the hidden treasures guarded by the lions and the bulls." (Mahaffy's
_Prolegomena to Ancient History_, p. 168.)
The savants of the seventeenth century were not "wiser in their
generation" than the rude nomads who pitched their tents under the
shadow of the stone monsters. Many years after Della Valle's visit the
Oriental scholar, Hyde, in a book on the Ancient Persian Religion,
soberly suggested that the signs were designed by some fantastic
architect to show into how many combinations the same kind of stroke
would enter. It is a wonder that he did not, with equal sobriety,
suggest that they were related to the well-known Norman "hatchet-work."
And so the guessing went on. One antiquary contended that they were
talismanic signs; another that they were mystic formulæ of the priests,
or astrological symbols of the old Chaldean star-worshippers; another
saw in them a species of revealed digital language wherewith the
Creator talked to Adam, whence the primitive speech of mankind was
derived; while others conjectured them to be Chinese, or Samaritan,
or Runic, or Ogam characters. Most fantastic of all, one ingenious
theorist saw in them the action of numberless generations of worms!
But by the middle of the eighteenth century a sane school of
investigators had found its leader. A great traveller, Carsten
Niebuhr, father of the famous historian of early Rome, was the first
to divine the true character of the inscriptions. He agreed with Della
Valle that they were written from left to right, and he saw that they
were made up of three different sets of characters, each meaning the
same thing. But beyond showing, in his careful transcript published
in 1764, that one of the three scripts was simpler in character than
the others--all, as he assumed, being alphabetic varieties of one
language--he could not go. The meaning still remained a mystery. Thirty
years later, Münter, a Danish philologist, correctly guessed that the
diagonal bar [Symbol], which occurred frequently, was a sign for the
separation of words, and, next, he discovered the vowel signs, which,
as distinct characters, are absent from the Hebrew and other Semitic
languages. This was a great step towards final decipherment. Herodotus
(i. 125, &c.) speaks of the Achæmenid dynasty of Persian kings who were
the lords of Asia in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. The
ruins of Persepolis are identified as the remains of their palaces. Of
this royal house the famous Darius was a member, and Herodotus tells
how that monarch, "having gazed upon the Bosphorus, set up two pillars
by it of white stone with characters cut upon them, on the one Assyrian
and on the other Hellenic, being the names of all the nations which he
was leading with him" (iv. 87). The engraving of the same inscription
in two or more different languages (of course necessitated by making
their decrees known to the various peoples whom they ruled) was thus
shown to be a custom of the Persian kings.
Put upon the quest, a French scholar, M. de Sacy, born at Paris in
1758, copied some inscriptions of the Sassanid dynasty, which reigned
in Persia A.D. 226-651. These were written in a known alphabet
which is a mixture of Persian and Aramaic, called Pehlevi, and were
shown by De Sacy to run in the following form:--"I, (M or W,) king of
kings, son of (X,) king of kings, did thus and thus." Then, grouping
together the several facts, came Dr. Georg Friedrich Grotefend, to
formulate the theory that the Persepolitan inscriptions were written in
three languages, and not three alphabets of one language, as Carsten
Niebuhr had surmised. The recurrence of certain groups of characters
led him to the inference that "the inscriptions were a fixed formula,
only differing in the proper names." If these inscriptions began, like
those read by De Sacy, with the formula, _X, the king of kings, son
of D, the king of kings_, then it was clear that D was X's father;
and, further, that D's father was not a king, because his name was
not followed by that title, D being therefore the founder of a royal
race. Now, Hystaspes, father of Darius, was not king, but satrap
under Cambyses; and, joining his knowledge of history to his skill in
philology, Grotefend found the key to the royal name. He lived for
thirty years after this discovery, but added nothing to his triumph
save "a fortunate guess of the name Nebuchadnezzar in one of the
Assyrian inscriptions." Other decipherments followed; but it was
reserved for the genius and industry of our countryman, the late Sir
Henry Rawlinson, to discover the key whereby the ancient languages
of Persia, Babylon, and Assyria can be read, and thus "a chapter of
the world's history that had been well-nigh wholly lost made known to
mankind." That eminent scholar in no wise exaggerated the importance
of his work in claiming that its value in the interpretation of
cuneiform writing is almost equal to that of the discovery of the
Rosetta Stone in the interpretation of the hieroglyphic texts of Egypt
(_Archæologia_, xxxiv. p. 75).
[Illustration: Fig. 39.--Rock Inscription at Behistun]
The story of Rawlinson's achievement is warrant of the claim. About
sixty years ago, being then a lieutenant, he was sent to Persia to
drill the army of the Shah. His interest in Oriental history and
antiquities was already keen, and he was glad to find himself in
regions rich in materials the obscurity of whose meaning quickened
inquiry. Among these was a trilingual inscription, dating from the
early part of the sixth century B.C., cut on the face of a bare
precipitous rock at Behistun, about twenty miles from Kirmanshah, a
district abounding in monuments of the past (fig. 39). At the risk of
life and limb he climbed the face of the steep cliff to make copies of
such portions of the inscriptions as were accessible with the means
at his command, and after a series of efforts, continued at intervals
through several years, he finally secured a complete transcript of so
much of the writing as time had left uninjured. The inscription is in
three languages--Babylonian, Mede or Scythian, and Persian--arranged in
parallel columns containing above one thousand lines. It commemorates
"the life and acts of Darius Hystaspes, his conquests, and the nations
under his sway." Bas-reliefs portray that monarch, bow in hand, sitting
with his feet on the prostrate usurper, Gaumates, while a train of
nine rebel princes, whose names are inscribed above their effigies,
stand before the "king of kings," chained together by the neck. Two of
the monarch's soldiers are in the rear. Over Gaumates is written: "This
is Gaumates, the Magian; he lied; he said, I am Smerdis, son of Cyrus."
The same formula occurs over the heads of each of the nine captives.
"This is (M); he lied; he said he was king of (N)." The inscription
begins with a solemn invocation to Ormuzd, the old Persian god of light
and purity, and passes on to detail the claim of Darius to the throne
of the Achæmenids and the possessions of the Persian crown. It tells of
the defeat of Smerdis, and of the revolt of Susiana, a province lying
between Persia and Babylonia. "I sent thither an army, and the rebel
Atrina was brought in chains before me; I slew him." The same story
is narrated concerning other rebellious subjects. Of one Phraortes,
it is told that his nose, ears, and tongue were cut off, and that he
was "crucified at Ecbatana, together with his accomplices." Then the
inscription proceeds:
"King Darius saith: These countries rebelled against my power. By
lies they were separated from me. The men thou seest here deceived my
people. My army took them, according to my orders. King Darius saith:
Oh, thou that shalt be king hereafter, see that thou art not guilty
of deceit. Him that is wicked, judge as he should be judged, and if
thou reignest thus thy kingdom will be great. King Darius saith:
What I did, I did ever by the grace of Ormuzd. Thou that readest
upon this stone my deeds, think not that thou hast been deceived,
neither be thou slow to believe them. King Darius saith: Ormuzd be
my witness that I have not spoken these things with lying lips." (Cf.
_Transactions of Royal Asiatic Society_, 1844-46, 1851; also _Life of
Sir Henry Rawlinson_, pp. 146, 153, 326.)
As Professor Mahaffy points out, the exact correspondence of this
record, "especially in the many proper names it contains, with the
names of persons and provinces described by Herodotus, is a convincing
proof of the accuracy of the deciphering. It will give some notion
of the style of the documents that have been preserved. It will also
prove the accuracy of the accounts given by Herodotus and Xenophon
of the character of the ancient Persians, in whom an honest love of
truth and hatred of lies was the prominent feature--a feature which
we justly honour more than any other in a nation, but in which most
Oriental nations, and indeed the Greeks also, were woefully deficient."
(_Prolegomena_, p. 186.)
Sir Henry Rawlinson's decipherment of the great inscription of Behistun
did perhaps more than aught else to open the long-closed door to
the secret of Mesopotamian culture. The Persian inscription is in a
language which is the mother-tongue of modern Persian, and its meaning
being discovered, the interpretation of the Medic or Scythic, and of
the Babylonian, the oldest of the three, followed, while the several
characters supplied a valuable object-lesson in the stages of the
development of writing from the ideographic through the syllabic, and
thence of approach to the alphabetic.
Cuneiform writing appears to have been originally inscribed upon a
vegetable substance called _likhusi_, but the abundant clay of the
alluvial country afforded material whose convenience and permanence
brought it into general use. Upon this the characters were impressed
by a reed or square-shaped stylus, the clay-books being afterwards
baked or sun-dried. For inscriptions on stone or metal a chisel was
used. The writing of the Assyrian scribes is often exceedingly minute,
the tablets containing a mass of matter in a tiny space. The work was
trying enough to sometimes require the use of a magnifying-glass,
and among Sir Austin Layard's discoveries at Nineveh was that of a
lathe-turned crystal lens which was probably used for the purpose.
Obviously the substances chosen account for the angular form of the
characters; as the dyer's hand is "subdued to what it works in," so
the nature of the material in which the sculptor seeks to express his
conceptions largely determines for him the limits of that expression.
Phidias himself could not have produced his Pallas Athene from the
stubborn granite of Syene; and, as the outcome of the Egyptian
temperament, the sphinxes of the Nile valley might have worn a less
relentless look had they been fashioned of the marble of Pentelicus.
Much as the abrupt cuneiform character tends, however, to obscure
the traces of its derivation, there are sufficing proofs that it is
of pictographic origin, although no examples of picture-writing in
Mesopotamia corresponding in primitiveness to those already given from
barbaric sources have been discovered. In the linear Babylonian, as it
is called, the hieroglyph for "sun" is a diamond-shaped figure [Symbol]
which later on became [Symbol], and in the latest cuneiform, [Symbol].
Evidently the earliest sign was a circle, which could not be easily
traced on the stone or clay, and hence appears as the angular character
shown above. The annexed table, which is a copy of one supplied by Mr.
Pinches to Professor Keane, and published in his admirable monograph,
_Man Past and Present_, gives a set of typical examples of the
derivation of cuneiform characters from the earliest known pictographs.
EVOLUTION OF THE AKKADIAN CUNEIFORMS.
1000 B.C. About 2500 Oldest known line forms,
and later. to 1500 B.C. 3000 B.C. and earlier.
[Symbol] [Symbol] [Symbol] [Symbol] "bird."
[Symbol] [Symbol] [Symbol] [Symbol] "sheep"
(probably a sheep-fold).
[Symbol] [Symbol] [Symbol] [Symbol] "ox."
[Symbol] [Symbol] [Symbol] [Symbol] "to go,"
"to stand."
[Symbol] [Symbol] [Symbol] [Symbol] "hand."
[Symbol] [Symbol] [Symbol] [Symbol] "man."
[Symbol] [Symbol] [Symbol] [Symbol] "dagger."
[Symbol] [Symbol] [Symbol] [Symbol] "fish."
[Symbol] [Symbol] [Symbol] [Symbol] "reed."
[Symbol] [Symbol] [Symbol] [Symbol] "reed."
[Symbol] [Symbol] [Symbol] [Symbol] "corn"
("ear of corn").
[Symbol] [Symbol] [Symbol] [Symbol] "god,"
"heaven."
[Symbol] [Symbol] [Symbol] [Symbol] "constellation,"
"star."
As an illustration bearing upon the specimens set forth in the table
we have the ideogram of Nineveh [Symbol].The archaic form of this
character [Symbol] proves that it was compounded of the ideographic
picture of a house, enclosing the ideogram of the fish [Symbol],
thus preserving record of the instructive fact that imperial Nineveh
was at first, as its name implies (_nun_, "fish," is the name of the
fourteenth letter of the Semitic alphabet), a collection of fishermen's
huts (_cf._ Taylor, i. 41). The frequent mixture of old and new forms
in cuneiform writings and the different values sometimes given to
the same sign, have increased the difficult task of interpretation.
As in the earlier stages of other languages, determinatives were
used; _e.g._ all names of men were preceded by a single upright
wedge, of countries by three horizontal wedges, and so on. But in the
examples given in the table, the gradual conventionalising of the
signs is seen, as in that for "ox," wherein the modification of the
head and horns of the animal into the phonogram is obvious, while
the Behistun inscription exhibits well-defined stages of approach to
simplification. The cumbrous cuneiform which fills the third column
has five hundred symbols, ideograms, phonograms, and homophones; the
Medic, which occupies the second column, is written in ninety-six pure
syllabic signs; while the Persian tells the same story in thirty-six
alphabetic signs, four only of the primitive ideograms being retained.
This survival of use of ideograms, it may be noticed in passing,
has illustration among ourselves in many ways. As certain parts of
the body, _e.g._ hand, foot, bosom (in Anglo-Saxon _fæthem_, _i.e._
"fathom," or the space of both arms extended), and forearm (Latin
_ulna_, Anglo-Saxon _eln_, whence "ell"), became and remain standards
of measurement, so it is with certain modes of reckoning. The digits,
I, II, III, IIII (Latin _digitus_, "a finger") are unquestionably
pictures of fingers, and Grotefend contends with good reason that
V is a picture of the four fingers closed and the thumb extended,
while X would represent the two hands, IV the subtraction and VI
the addition of a finger. The use of a primitive decimal notation
is widespread among barbaric peoples. In chess problems the several
pieces are pictorially represented; in the planetary signs, [Symbol] is
the caduceus or wand of Mercury; ♀ is the mirror of Venus, while the
entomologist, in cataloguing his specimens, uses these symbols for
the male and female respectively. In ♂ we have the shield and spear of
Mars; in [Symbol], the sign for Jupiter, the arm wields a thunderbolt;
and the mower's scythe [Symbol] is the symbol of Saturn (connected with
Latin _sero_, _satum_, "to sow"), the god of agriculture. The signs
of the Zodiac, which were mapped out by the old Chaldeans, supply a
still more cogent example. In the form in which they are depicted on
the ancient temple of Denderah, in Egypt, there may be traced evidence
of their primitive pictorial character, a character still recognised
in the headings of the months in our almanacks (cf. _Whitaker's_), and
to be detected in current symbols. For example, the curved horns of
the ram survive in [Symbol], the sign for Aries; the head and horns of
the bull in [Symbol], the sign for Taurus; the arrow and a portion of
the bow in [Symbol], the sign for Sagittarius; while, as Dr. Taylor
points out, "the curious symbol [Symbol] is found to preserve the whole
outline of Capricornus, the small circle being the head of the goat,
with the forelegs below, and the body and tail extending to the left."
Then in such entries in the almanack as "[Symbol] rises 4h. 25m.,"
"[Symbol] 11h. 54m.," "[Symbol] 10th 9.32 morn.," "[Symbol] 3420" in
tables of the configuration of Jupiter's satellites, as also in the
symbols for money, weights, measures, and so forth, the not wholly
dispensed with picture-writing may be detected. The well-nigh vanished
trade signs doubtless served a useful purpose as pictographs in guiding
the illiterate to the shops of which they were in quest; and here and
there the barber's pole with its spiral bandages reminds us of the
phlebotomy of the past; the golden balls of the great financiers of
Florence hang out from pawnbrokers' shops their delusive signal to the
thriftless; while the "grasshopper" of Messrs. Martin, the "leather
bottell" of Messrs. Hoare, and other remnants of goldsmiths' trade
signs, remind us how many of these swung before the shops of Cheape and
Lombard Street in olden time.
To return to the cuneiform. It will be remembered that in the case
of the _monosyllabic_ Chinese, with its dictionary of forty thousand
words, the symbols of these are compounds of phonograms or sound-words
with determinatives as keys to the precise meaning to be attached
to the phonograms. Now the languages of the ancient peoples of the
Euphrates valley are _polysyllabic_, and hence arose the necessity
for signs denoting full syllables, both complex, "in which several
consonants may be distinguished, or simple syllables composed of
only one consonant and one vowel or _vice versâ_." (Maspero's _Dawn
of Civilization_, p. 728.) And among the libraries of Babylon there
were discovered a number of little grammatical documents on bricks,
called _syllabaria_, where a list of characters is given, with the
phonetic sign explained in simple syllables at one side, and, when used
ideographically, at the other. When a syllabary had thus been adopted,
the grouping into words was effected by combining the syllables. "But
a polysyllabic language did not lend itself so readily as the Chinese
monosyllabic to syllabism," and Halévy explains how the difficulty
was met. It was met, at least in some degree, by the adoption of the
principle of Acrology (Greek _akron_, "extreme" = at the top or start),
_i.e._ by the choice of a name from the likeness which it suggested
between the form of the letter and some familiar thing whose name
began with the letter in question. This re-naming of letters by a word
beginning with them occurred in the Egyptian, Russian, Runic, and
other alphabets. For example, in Russian, the letter _b_ is not called
_beta_ but _buki_, "a beech," while _d_ has lost the old name of delta
and acquired that of _dobro_, "an oak." In the Runic letters of our
forefathers _b_ is named _beorc_ or "birch," and _th_ "thorn," while
the acrologic system comes nearer home to us in the old nursery rhymes:
"A was an Archer, who shot at a frog; B was a Butcher, who had a big
dog," &c.
Now this advance to syllabism had been effected, long before the
Babylonians appear on the scene, by the older inhabitants of
Mesopotamia, the Akkadians, or, more correctly, the Akkado-Sumerians,
the Akkadians being settled on the highlands, and the Sumerians on
the plains, of that region. The racial affinities of either are not
determined, some ethnologists holding that they are of Finno-Turkic
origin, others that they belong to the Tatar-Mongolic branch. Neither
is it known at what period they immigrated into Chaldea, since at the
dawn of history they are already merged in the Semitic conquering race.
Some thousands of years B.C. Chaldea had been invaded by
the people afterwards known as Babylonians, whose primitive home, in
common with that of other Semites, as the Hebrews, Phœnicians, &c., is
conjectured to have been in South Arabia. The Babylonians, mixing their
blood with that of the subject peoples, settled as agriculturists on
the rich alluvial lowlands, while an offshoot from them, the Assyrians,
occupied the mountainous and wooded country to the north of the great
rivers, keeping their Semitic purity of descent. These "Romans of the
East," as they have been called, were soldiers and merchants, strong in
the conviction that "trade follows the flag," and hence embarking in
many an aggressive enterprise to beat the Phœnician and other rivals in
commerce. But, resting on the sword alone, the Assyrian empire perished
by the sword.
As for the Akkadians (using this term to include the pre-Semite
inhabitants), they had passed the barbaric stage when they invaded
Chaldea. They knew the use of metals: they were skilful architects,
and; what was of importance in the marshy districts where dams and
canals were indispensable, good engineers; their laws mark an advanced
social organisation; their writing, as has been seen, had become
syllabic; and their literature, besides recording the details of their
daily life, supplies the key to a religion which profoundly influenced
the Babylonians, and, through them, the Hebrews, ultimately affecting
the whole of Christendom. That religion was a blend of higher and
lower ideas. At base it was Shamanistic. Natural phenomena--sun,
moon, stars, the earth, and so forth--were worshipped, but, as in all
religions, that which touches man more closely in his affairs and
relations has the firmer hold, and hence there was an active belief in
magic, with its allied apparatus of charms, spells, and incantations.
Side by side with formulæ embodying superstitions common to barbaric
folk all the world over, we find penitential psalms, appeals to the
great gods, and spiritual utterances, some of which are on a plane with
Hebrew sacred poetry. All this body of literature, secular and sacred,
made up the vast store of books in the libraries whose interpretation
is one of the brilliant successes of modern scholarship, and whose
contents bring home to us the priceless value of the art of writing to
mankind.
Up to a recent date, the oldest known example of cuneiform writing was
supplied by a porphyry cylinder seal of the Semite king, Sargon I., who
flourished 3800 B.C. (fig. 40). It bears this inscription:--"Sargon,
King of the city of Akkad, to the Sun-god (Sarnas) in the city of
Sippara I approached." It is this same king concerning whom a myth,
which may have been the origin of the myth about the infant Moses in
the bulrushes, is recorded on a tablet preserved, together with the
seal, in the British Museum.
[Illustration: Fig. 40.--Cylinder Seal of Sargon I.]
Another famous cuneiform relic is the Stele of the Vultures, a
large portion of which is in the Louvre. It dates from about 4500
B.C., and besides its sculptured panels, one of which depicts
vultures carrying away the heads of the slain in battle (whence
its name), it records the victory of E-anna-du, priest-king of
Sirpurra, over the "people of the land of the Bow," on the Elamite
frontier, a tribute of corn being imposed on the conquered state.
Other inscriptions testify that "in the fourth millennium before the
Christian era art was fully developed, statues set up, the chariot used
in war, silver and copper worked, weaving and the making of pottery
known, and an elaborate system of calculation into thousands evolved."
But the antiquity of these witnesses pales before that evidenced by the
rubbish-mounds of the city of Nuffar or Nippur, in Northern Babylonia.
Several records of Sargon I. were found among the thousands of tablets
dug from the later deposits, but discoveries were made beneath these
on which Dr. Peters, in reporting on the epigraphic material secured
by Mr. Haynes, writes as follows:--"We found that Nippur was a great
and flourishing city, and its temple, the temple of Bel, the religious
centre of the dominant people of the world at a period as much prior
to the time of Abraham as the time of Abraham is prior to our own
day. We discovered written records no less than six thousand years
old, and proved that writing and civilisation were then by no means
in their infancy. Further than that, our explorations have shown that
Nippur possessed a history extending backward of the earliest written
documents found by us, at least two thousand years." (_Nippur; the
Narrative of the University of Pennsylvania's Expedition_, vol. ii. p.
241.) Upon which Dr. Hilprecht comments: "I do not hesitate to date
the founding of the temple of Bel and the first settlements in Nippur
somewhere between 6000 and 7000 B.C., and possibly earlier."
(_Academy_, 30th April 1898, p. 465.)
[Illustration: Fig. 41.--Tell-el-Amarna Tablet (_circa_ 1450
B.C.)]
[Illustration: Fig. 42.--First Creation Tablet]
Although they are nearly five thousand years later, deeper interest
attaches to the three hundred and twenty clay tablets, inscribed with
the cuneiform character (fig. 41), which were discovered in 1887 among
the ruins of Tell-el-Amarna, the Arabic name of a village on the east
bank of the Nile, about one hundred and eighty miles south of the once
renowned city of Memphis. The village stands on the site of a city
founded by Amenophis III., so that the date of the documents, among
which are letters received by that king, is known to range from 1500 to
1450 B.C. Two of the tablets contain legends, and one gives
a hymn to the war-god, but the larger number comprise communications
passing between the kings of Egypt and the kings of Western Asia, many
of them being docketed with the date and name of the sender written
in Egyptian hieroglyph. One tablet from a Hittite prince is written
in the old Akkadian tongue. They furnish valuable information upon
the political and commercial relations between Egypt and Babylonia,
and upon negotiations between the kings both for wives and subsidies.
"Being all in the cuneiform character, they were unlikely to be
readily deciphered at the Egyptian court. Hence it was the custom of
the Babylonian kings to send interpreters with them, and reference is
made to such messengers in several of the letters. But a scribe able
to read and write the cuneiform was undoubtedly kept by the Pharaohs
for purposes of translation and for inditing replies. Some of the
tablets are copies of such replies, written in cuneiform, but retained
for reference, just as we in the present day keep copies of important
letters."
[Illustration: Fig. 43.--Deluge Tablet (Chaldean Epic) OBVERSE.]
[Illustration: Fig. 44.--Deluge Tablet (Chaldean Epic) REVERSE.]
The actual contents of the Tell-el-Amarna tablets are of secondary
importance to the fact that cuneiform writing was in use in Palestine
fifteen hundred years before Christ, and, therefore, that Babylonian
myths and legends had, in all probability, circulated freely there
centuries before the Book of Genesis took shape. Thus the legends of
the Creation, the Fall, and the Deluge, the Chaldean origin of which
is established (figs. 42, 43, 44), "can very well have existed in
Palestine at the time it was invaded by the Israelites, who would have
learned them from the people they subdued, and would have found plenty
of time to modify them into the forms in which they appear in Hebrew
literature." (_The Witness of Assyria_, p. 11, by Chilperic Edwards.)
CHAPTER VI
EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPHICS
With the foregoing references to some of the most venerable documents
that have yet come to light, we may leave Assyria for Egypt, no longer
a land of marvel and of mystery, with its past hidden as the sources
of the great river of which that land is "the gift" were long hidden.
For the discovery of the key to that past, and of the vast waters
that feed the Nile, alike lie within the present century. Till then
the veil of Isis hung over the significance of the inscriptions on
coffin, sepulchral box, stele, tomb, obelisk, and temple, and over the
interpretation of characters written on papyri rolls centuries before
the foundations of Athens were laid. Of these records, be it noted,
Death, which sweeps away man and the memory of him from his fellows,
has been more than aught else--in Egypt, and indeed, all the world
over, but notably in Egypt--the preserver. And this because there all
that appertained to the departed was guarded with the most jealous
care. The tomb, as often elsewhere, was modelled on the plan of the
house, and supplied with utensils, food, and drink, or adorned with
the painted representations of these things on the walls, for the
needs of the _ka_, or double, _sahn_, or spirit, or some other of the
eight Egyptian ontological divisions of the individual.
Like the other pictographic systems already surveyed, the Egyptian
interests us because it has preserved the traces of its origin, adding
its "cloud of witnesses" to the identity of the several stages of
development marking the scripts of all literate peoples. Until very
recently, its chief interest lay in the belief that it is the parent
of the family of alphabets of the civilised world; but, as will be
shown later on, the theory is no longer tenable. Although the earliest
known examples of Egyptian hieroglyphs (Greek _hieros_, "sacred," and
_glypho_, "to carve," so called in the belief that they were used
solely by the priests) contain alphabetic characters, they have come
down as highly elaborated types of picture-writing, the changes in
which during the long period covered by the records being so slight
that, to cite Professor Whitney, "it is like a language which has never
forgotten the derivations of its words, or corrupted their etymological
form, however much it may have altered its meaning." Therefore,
although the Egyptians had developed alphabet-signs five thousand
years B.C. they never advanced to the stage of their sole and
independent use, partly because of the conservative instincts of the
race, which, fostering veneration for the old, was reluctant to alter
anything, and partly because, as Professor Flinders Petrie has pointed
out, their "treatment of everything was essentially decorative,
the love of form and drawing being in Egypt a greater force than
amongst any other ancient people. Babylon and China, from want of
sufficient artistic taste, allowed their pictorial writing to sink
into a mere string of debased and conventional forms; the Egyptians,
on the contrary, preserved the purely pictorial and artistic character
of their hieroglyphs to the end. The hieroglyphs were a decoration
in themselves; their very position in the sentence was subordinate
to the decorative effect. The Egyptian could not be guilty of the
barbarism seen on some of the Assyrian sculpture, where inscriptions
were scrawled right across the work without regard to design. So far
was this idea carried that many words or ideas were represented by
two distinct characters, one wide and the other narrow and deep, so
that the harmony of the design should not be broken by an unsuitable
element. The result was that the Egyptians were rewarded by having the
most beautiful writing in the world." (_Egyptian Decorative Art_, p. 4.)
This writing exists in three groups of characters (fig. 45): (_a_)
_Hieroglyphic_, (_b_) _Hieratic_, (_c_) _Demotic_. The demotic is
derived from the hieratic, and the hieratic from the hieroglyphic.
[Illustration: Fig. 45.--Hieroglyphic, Hieratic, and Demotic Signs for
Man]
(_a_) Pictogram, ideogram, and phonogram--in other words, signs
representative of word, idea, and sound--make up the seventeen hundred
_hieroglyphs_ which, in the older signs, preserve the traces of
their origin in rude picture-writing. They were chiselled on stone
of various kinds, cut or painted on wood or plaster, and written on
papyrus or skin; the characters being arranged in vertical columns.
With the quickened zeal of modern excavators discoveries come apace, so
that before these words are printed, some additional find, throwing all
others into the shade, may come to light. Such, for example, would be
the production of epigraphic evidence as to the sojourn and oppression
of the Israelites in Egypt, and their escape from that "house of
bondage." For a long time the earliest known example of hieroglyphic
writing which the Gizeh and Ashmodean Museums could show (each
institution possessing fragments of the relic) was a mutilated stele
or monumental tablet to the memory of Shera, a priest or grandson of
Sent, the fifth king of the Second Dynasty, which, adopting Professor
Flinders Petrie's chronology, flourished about four thousand five
hundred years B.C. In this record three alphabetic characters
are employed to spell that monarch's name. But in November 1897, Dr.
Borchardt reported the important discovery that the royal tomb found by
M. de Morgan in the spring of that year at Nagada, situated opposite
Coptos, a little north of Thebes, is that of Menes, the founder of
the First Dynasty, whose date Professor Flinders Petrie fixes at 4777
B.C., "with a possible error of a century." Calcined remains of
the body are now in the Gizeh Museum, and, among other objects, the
broken fragments of an ivory plaque which, when joined, showed the
_ka_ name of Aha (the _ka_ being the "double" or "other self" of the
deceased which abode with the mummy), and, attached thereto, the name
MN = Menes, borne by the Pharaoh during his lifetime. Assuming that Dr.
Borchardt's interpretation is accepted by Egyptologists, it proves that
the hieroglyphic system of writing was then already fully developed.
It may be remarked, incidentally, that among the remains of the
pre-dynastic race discovered by Professor Flinders Petrie in 1895, in
the district north of Thebes, no hieroglyphs or traces of other writing
were found. There was evidence of knowledge of metals, but not of the
potter's wheel. It therefore seems probable that writing came in with
the First Dynasty, which, according to M. de Morgan, was descended from
Chaldean Semites.
But more interesting, for the light thrown on early Egyptian thought,
than inscriptions on stele or plaque are the copies of portions of the
sacred literature entitled "Chapters of the Coming Forth by Day," and
also the "Chapters of Making Strong the Beatified Spirit," but commonly
known as the _Book of the Dead_. This venerable embodiment of human
conceptions about an after life, and of human hope and consolation this
side the grave, contains the hymns, prayers, and magic formulæ against
all opposing foes and evil spirits, to be recited by the dead Osiris
(the soul was conceived to have such affinity with the god Osiris as
to be called by his name) in his journey to Amenti, the underworld
that led to the Fields of the Blessed. It lies outside both our scope
and space to give an account of the contents of the several chapters,
and, fortunately, the entire text, translated by Dr. Wallis Budge,
with admirable facsimiles of illustrations, is within the reach of
a moderate purse. But one curious and prominent feature should have
reference, because it shows the persistence of barbaric ideas about
names as integral parts of things. (On this subject, see the author's
_Tom Tit Tot; an Essay on Savage Philosophy in Folk-Tale_, 1898.) The
Osiris has not only to be able to recite the names and titles of the
gods, but of every part of the boat, "from truck to keel," as the
nautical phrase goes, in which he desires to cross the great river
flowing to Amenti. And then, before he can enter the Hall of the Two
Truths--that is, of Truth and Justice, where the god Osiris and the
forty-two judges of the dead are seated--the jackal-headed Anubis
requires him to tell the names of every part of the doors, posts,
and woodwork generally. These correctly given, the soul declares its
innocence in language whose moral tone has never been surpassed, while
it throws a light on the virtues and vices of old Egyptian society
which makes clear how poor a guide to the past are its monuments
compared with its literature.
The age of the composition of this remarkable book is unknown. But so
old is it that the earliest copies we possess show that when they were
made, some six thousand years ago, the exact meaning of parts of the
text had become obscure to the transcribers. Fragments of it have been
found in those ancient tombs, the Pyramids; chapters or long extracts
were written on stone and wooden coffins; but after the expulsion of
the Hyksos, or Shepherd Dynasty, by the kings of Thebes, about 1580
B.C., papyrus came more into use for the purpose.
One of the most superbly-illustrated examples is that known as the
_Papyrus of Ani_, belonging to what is called the Theban recension of
the text, which was much used from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth
Dynasty (1587-1060 B.C.). It will suffice, as evidence of
the magical qualities attributed to the written word, to quote the
following from the seventy-second chapter, as translated into sonorous
English by Dr. Wallis Budge:--
"If this writing be known (by the deceased) upon earth, and this
chapter be done into writing upon (his) coffin, he shall come forth
by day in all the forms of existence which he desireth, and he shall
enter into (his) place, and be not rejected. Bread and ale and meat
shall be given unto Osiris, the scribe Ani upon the altar of Osiris
... there shall wheat and barley be given unto him; there shall he
flourish as he did upon earth, and he shall do whatsoever pleaseth
him, even as do the gods who are in the underworld, for everlasting
millions of ages, world without end."
Under Dr. Wallis Budge's editorship, the Ani papyrus has recently been
supplemented by the issue of facsimiles and translations of papyri
and other texts connected with the _Book of the Dead_. Among these is
a _Book of Breathings_, written in a late hieratic, and dating from
late pre-Christian times. It contains a ritual to be said by the priest
for or over the dead, and teaches belief in a resurrection of the body
and a state of material bliss on earth. "Thy soul shall live," and, so
runs the text, "thy corruptible body shall burst into life, and thou
shalt never decay." ... "Grant that his soul may go into every place
wheresoever it would be, and let him live upon earth for ever and ever."
Up to a point the story of Egyptian writing illustrates the stages of
development of writing generally so clearly that its recital, even at
the cost of some repetition, will be helpful, and the more so as it
falls into line with the story of other scripts.
"It goes without saying" that the representation of an object was
a simple matter enough, the rudest draughtsmanship sufficing for a
picture that should tell its own meaning at a glance. But as soon as
the need arose to graphically express ideas, for example, such as vice
and virtue, time and space, health and sickness, symbolism came in. To
the illustrations of this supplied by the scripts already dealt with
may be added a few examples from Egyptian ideography, into which, at
the stage that we first meet it, the whole system of hieroglyphics
may be said to have become modified. The bee was a symbol of kingship
and also of industry; a roll of papyrus denoted knowledge; an ostrich
feather, justice, because these feathers were supposed to be of equal
length; a palm branch, one year, because that tree was popularly
believed to put forth a fresh branch every new moon--although, as Mr.
Gliddon suggests, a more plausible reason is in the annual cutting of
the lower leaves close to the trunk. The ideograph for a priest was
a jackal--not, as may be cynically hinted, because of his "devouring
widows' houses," but because of his watchfulness; for a mother, a
vulture, because that bird was believed to nourish its young with its
own blood. Thirst was represented by a calf running towards water;
power by a brandished whip; and battle by two arms, the one holding
a shield and the other a javelin. Among the Dakotah Indians combat
is indicated by two arms pointed at each other. The ideograph for
night, a star pendant from a curve, is like the Ojibwa; while among
the ancient Mexicans night was represented by a semicircle with eyes,
as stars, attached to it. Signs for hunger, thirst, supplication, and
so forth, among both Innuit Indian and ancient Egyptian--as indeed
many other signs among peoples, both in the old world and the new,
whose writing has not reached a purely phonetic stage--have that
correspondence to be expected when things common to all men are
graphically represented (fig. 46). Running water, for example, remains
necessarily a pictograph, but water depicted in connection with rites
represents, by one symbol or another, the varying nature of the latter.
Both in Egypt and Mexico it is represented flowing from a vessel, the
Egyptian ideograph having a kneeling figure with arms uplifted, as
if in adoration or gratitude. There appears, also, some resemblance
between the symbol for negation between these two, but this has the
doubt attaching to all metaphysical interpretation of signs.
[Illustration:
Night (Egyptian).
Night (Maya).
Supplication (Egyptian).
Supplication (Ojibwa).
Negation (Egyptian).
Negation (Californian Indian).
Negation (Maya).
Medicine Man (Ojibwa).
God of Medicine (Easter Island).
Fig. 46.--Comparative Ideographs]
Obviously, this presentment of ideas through graphic designs into
which metaphor often bordering on enigma had to be read, implied good
memories and clear grasp of association on the part of the interpreter.
Any doubt or ambiguity, with resulting confusion, as to the meaning
of the symbol, rendered it worse than useless. Hence the addition of
"determinants," concerning which something was said when treating of
the Chinese script (see p. 85). These are of two classes--the special
and more numerous, whose use was confined to one word or idea; and the
general, numbering about two hundred, which, like the Chinese "keys,"
refer to whole groups of words.
But ideas have to be arranged in sentences, and these are made up
of nouns, adjectives, verbs, and other parts of speech for which
symbolism, however ingenious, can make no provision. Moreover, while
the characters are limited in their application, the ideas to be
expressed graphically are ever growing, and hence, in course of time,
there are not enough symbols "to go round." A way of escape opened
itself, and thereby led to an invention undreamed of, when recourse was
had to the use of pictures of things which were different in sense,
but the names of which had the same _sound_; in other words, to the
pictorial pun known as the rebus (see p. 79). As an amusing instance
of the formation of a compound phonogram out of syllabic signs, Canon
Taylor quotes from an inscription of Ptolemy XV. at Edfu, in which, as
he says, "it seems not impossible to detect a faint flavour of ancient
Egyptian humour. The name of _lapis lazuli_ was _khesteb_. Now the
word _khesf_ meant 'to stop,' and the syllable _teb_, 'a pig.' Hence
the rebus 'stop-pig' was invented to express graphically the name of
_lapis lazuli_, which is figured by the picture of a man stopping a pig
by pulling at its tail." Probably the Canon is right, but in western
lands that action is often intended to make the pig move on. Another
example of the rebus occurs in the name of Osiris, which in Egyptian
is _Hesiri_ (Wallis Budge gives it as _Ausir_). The god, on this
showing, is represented, presumably, by a figure on a seat, _hes_, and
by an eye, _iri_. But with the constant revision of interpretations by
Egyptologists, it behoves us to quote with caution. There is a stock
illustration as to the adoption of the supposed picture of a lute
(used by the Egyptian scribes to denote "excellence"), as a phonogram
to express the word _nefer_, "good." But it seems that what was thought
to be a lute is the picture of a heart and windpipe!
At last, we know not when, and we cannot, speaking of Egypt alone,
guess where, there dawned upon some mind the fact that all the words
which men uttered are expressed by a few sounds. Hence, what better
plan than to select from the big and confused mass of ideograms,
phonograms, and all their kin, a certain number of signs to denote,
unvaryingly, certain sounds?
That was the birth of the ALPHABET, one of the greatest and
most momentous triumphs of the human mind. The earliest phonograms
represented syllables, not individual letters, the distinguishing signs
for vowels and consonants being of yet later introduction; in fact,
some alphabets, notably the Hebrew and other Semitic, have no true
vowels, but only distinguishing marks, diacritical points as they are
called, to denote them. To recapitulate, we have 1, picture-writing; 2,
ideograms; 3, phonograms representing words; 4, phonograms representing
syllables; 5, alphabetic characters. From their four hundred verbal
phonograms and syllabic signs the Egyptians of a remote age--for it is
literally true "that the letters of the alphabet are older than the
Pyramids"--appear to have selected at the outset forty-five symbols
for alphabetic use, but the rare occurrence or special use of some of
these caused a further reduction to twenty-five letters. "All that
remained to be done was to take one simple step--boldly to discard all
the non-alphabetic elements, at once to sweep away the superfluous
lumber, rejecting all the ideograms, the homophones, the polyphones,
the syllables, and the symbolic signs to which the Egyptian scribes
so fondly clung, and so to leave revealed in its grand simplicity
the nearly perfect alphabet, of which, without knowing it, the
Egyptians had been virtually in possession for almost countless ages."
(Taylor, i. 68.) That step they never took, but continued the use of
eye-pictures side by side with that of ear-pictures, instead of passing
to the use of fixed signs for certain sounds.
(_b_) The cursive writing known as _Hieratic_ was an abridged and
conventionalised form of the hieroglyphic. The use of the latter
became mainly restricted to monumental and kindred purposes, while the
hieratic was employed by the priests in copying literary compositions,
notable among which was the _Book of the Dead_, papyrus being the
material most commonly used. This was made from the _byblus hieraticus_
or _Cyperus papyrus_, a plant which flourished in the marshy districts
of the Nile. There it has long been extinct, and is now found only
in Sicily. It would seem to have served as many useful purposes to
the ancient Egyptians as the bamboo serves to-day to the Chinese and
other Orientals. "The roots were used for firewood, parts of the plant
were eaten, and other and coarser parts were made into paper, boats,
ropes, mats, &c." In preparing it for writing material, the outer rind
was removed and the pith then cut into strips; which were laid side
by side, with another set of strips across them fastened by a thin
solution of gum, thus forming a sheet, which was pressed, dried in the
sun, and polished to a smooth surface. The sheets were often joined to
make a roll, which was sometimes above one hundred feet long and varied
in width from six to seventeen inches. The finest papyri of the _Book
of the Dead_ are about fifteen inches wide, and, when they contain a
tolerably large number of chapters, are from eighty to ninety feet
long. Dipping his reed, which was either bruised at the end to make
it brush-like, or cut, pen-like, to a point, in the ink-wells of his
stone, wooden, or sometimes ivory palette, which was often dedicated to
the god Thoth, "lord of divine words," the professional scribe wrote
the text in varying colours, chiefly black or red, but also in other
tints imitative of the subject dealt with, as blue for sky, yellow for
woman, and so forth.
The earliest known specimen of hieratic writing is a papyrus containing
chronicles of the reign of King Asa, whose date, according to a
moderate estimate of Egyptian chronology, is about 3580 B.C.
To the same period the most perfect literary work which has come
down to us is usually assigned, although the copy preserved in the
Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, whither it was brought by M. Prisse
d'Avennes from Thebes, seems to have been written between 2700 and
2500 B.C. This valuable relic, commonly known after its donor
as the _Papyrus Prisse_, is entitled the "Precepts of Ptah-Hetep," and
its contents justify the judgment of Dr. Wallis Budge, that "if all
other monuments of the great civilisation of Egypt were wanting, it
alone would show the moral worth of the Egyptians, and the high ideals
of man's duties which they had formed nearly five thousand five hundred
years ago."
(_c_) The _Demotic_ or _Enchorial_ characters preserve but slight
traces of their derivation from picture-writing. As the term _hieratic_
(Greek _hieratikos_, sacerdotal) denotes the class by whom that writing
was used, so the terms _demotic_ (Greek _demotikos_, of the people)
and _enchorial_ (Greek _enchōrios_, of the country) denote that this
writing was in popular use, being adapted to the purposes of daily
life. It appears to have come into use about 900 B.C., and
so continued till the fourth century of our era. It has been shown
that in the time of Darius and other rulers of the Achæmean dynasty,
proclamations and documents of general importance were set forth in
three languages--Babylonian, Medic, and Persian. So, in the time of
the Ptolemies, who inherited the Egyptian possessions of Alexander
the Great and ruled in the Nile Valley till it fell under the sway of
Rome, all matters of public importance were made known in hieroglyphic,
demotic, and Greek characters. The hieroglyphic was called the "writing
of divine words"; the demotic, "writing of letters"; and the Greek,
"writing of the Greeks."
CHAPTER VII
THE ROSETTA STONE
The expressions given above occur on the famous Rosetta Stone, an
inscribed slab of black basalt, which has proved to be of priceless
value in supplying the key to the interpretation of Egyptian
hieroglyphs, thus fulfilling a purpose corresponding to that of the
Behistun rock inscriptions in the interpretation of cuneiform writing.
The slab--which is preserved in the British Museum--takes its name
from its discovery among the ruins of a fort near the Rosetta mouth
of the Nile, where it was found by a French officer in 1799. On the
capitulation of Alexandria to the British, the stone, whose importance
had been detected by the savants attached, by the foresight of
Napoleon, to his expedition, came by good fortune under the charge of
Sir William Hamilton, whose interest in Egyptian antiquities was keen.
It is not perfect, but enough has survived to suffice for decipherment
of the general tenor of the inscriptions. Speculation as to the meaning
of the hieroglyphs had been rife for centuries, for although they
remained in use one hundred and fifty years after the Ptolemies began
to reign (305 B.C.), and although the names of Roman emperors
were written in them as late as the third century A.D., only
a few among the classical writers whose works we possess have anything
of value to say on the matter. It was not until the early decades of
the present century that the ingenuity of two Egyptologists, Young
and Champollion, working independently (as, years later, Adams and
Leverrier worked at the problem of the discovery of Neptune), wrested
their secret from the hieroglyphs. Honour lies only in lesser degree
with some immediate predecessors, among them Zoëga, who rightly
conjectured that the oblong rings enclosed royal names, because these
"cartouches," as they are called, appeared above the series of sitting
figures in temple sculptures; and Akerblad, who published an alphabet
of the demotic characters on the Rosetta Stone.
Dr. Thomas Young was a very remarkable man. Born of Quaker parents
in 1773, he gave his youth to literature, languages, and mechanics,
and at thirty won the Fellowship of the Royal Society, having two
years before then accepted the Professorship of Natural Philosophy at
the Royal Institution. Made easy in circumstances by a legacy from
a relative, he applied himself yet more strenuously to physics and
philology. The result of his labours in the one was the discovery of
the undulatory nature of light (which has its analogy in sound-waves),
in opposition to Newton's corpuscular or emission theory; and, in the
other, a partial decipherment of the demotic characters, and correct
identification of the names of a few of the Egyptian gods--Rā, Nut,
Thoth, Osiris, Isis, and Nephthys--and of the names Ptolemy and
Berenice. He died in 1829.
Jean François Champollion, of whom Dr. Wallis Budge speaks as "the
immortal discoverer of a correct system of decipherment of Egyptian
hieroglyphics," was born in 1790. Like Young, he betook himself early
to the study of languages, and at the age of thirteen was "master of a
fair knowledge of Hebrew, Syriac, and Chaldee." In his twenty-second
year he became Professor of Ancient History to the Faculty of Letters
at Grenoble, and, with a certain impulse to the quest given by
acquaintance with the labours of Young and others, he revised their
system and developed his own, making tours to the museums of Turin,
Rome, and Naples for the study of papyri, and passing thence to Egypt,
where he secured a large body of materials. Death overtook him in
1832, but not before he had accomplished the chief aim of his life in
demonstrating that the hieroglyphic characters are partly pictures of
objects and partly signs of sounds.
Although the Rosetta Stone was the base of decipherment of Egyptian
hieroglyphics, the success following Champollion's labours is largely
due to the discovery of a small obelisk in the island of Philæ. This
obelisk was said to have been fixed in a socket bearing a Greek
inscription containing a petition of the priests of Isis at Philæ,
addressed to Ptolemy, to Cleopatra his sister, and to Cleopatra his
wife. The hieroglyphic inscription upon the obelisk itself included
certain characters within a cartouche which were identical with those
within the only cartouche occurring on the Rosetta Stone. Here, then,
was a clue, which was the more easily followed up because the names of
Ptolemy and Cleopatra have, in the Greek, certain letters in common
which could be used for comparison with the hieroglyphics. "If the
characters which are similar in these two names express the same sound
in each cartouche, their purely phonetic character is at once made
clear," and the recovery of the Egyptian alphabet was only a question
of time (figs. 47, 48, 49).
[Illustration: Fig. 47.--PTOLEMY]
[Illustration: Fig. 48.--CLEOPATRA]
[Illustration:
KAISARS (CÆSAR)
A. TAKRTR (AUTOKRATOR)
Fig. 49.]
The Rosetta Stone is inscribed with fragments of fourteen lines of
hieroglyphics, thirty-two lines of demotic, and fifty-four lines of
Greek. These have for their subject-matter a decree of the priesthood
assembled at Memphis in honour of Ptolemy V. Epiphanes, King of Egypt,
B.C. 195. They set forth the beneficent deeds of that monarch,
in his consecration of revenues of silver and corn to the temples,
his abolition of certain taxes and reduction of others, his grant of
privileges to the priests and soldiers, and his undertaking at his
own cost, in the eighth year of his reign, when the Nile rose to so
great a height as to flood all the plains, the task of damming it and
directing the overflow of its waters into proper channels, to the great
gain and benefit of the agricultural classes. Besides his remissions
of taxes, he gave handsome gifts to the temples, and subscribed to
the various ceremonies connected with public worship. In return for
these gracious acts, the priests assembled at Memphis decreed that a
statue of the king should be set up in a conspicuous place in every
temple of Egypt, and inscribed with the names and titles of "Ptolemy,
the saviour of Egypt." Royal apparel was to be placed on the statues,
and ceremonies were to be performed before them three times a day.
It was also decreed that a gilded wooden shrine, containing a gilded
wooden statue of the king, should be placed in each temple, and that
these were to be carried out with the shrines of the other kings in
the great panegyrics. It was also decreed that ten golden crowns of a
peculiar design should be made and laid upon the royal shrine; that
the birthday and coronation day of the king should be celebrated each
year with great pomp and show; that the first five days of the month of
Thoth should each year be set apart for the performance of a festival
in honour of the king; and, finally, that a copy of this decree,
engraved upon a tablet of hard stone in hieroglyphic, demotic, and
Greek Characters, should be set up in each of the temples of the first,
second, and third orders, near the statue of the ever-living Ptolemy.
Dr. Wallis Budge adds that "the Greek portion of the inscriptions
appears to be the original document, and the hieroglyphic and demotic
versions merely translations of it." (_The Mummy_, pp. 110, 111.)
As the principle of interpretation is the same for all the
inscriptions, and as the key to that interpretation is knowledge of
one of the languages in which the inscription occurs, brief reference
to another historical tablet often bracketed with the Rosetta Stone
will suffice. This is known as the Stele of Canopus, which also bears
inscriptions in hieroglyphic, demotic, and Greek. It is about half a
century earlier than the Rosetta Stone, and was set up at Canopus in
the ninth year of the reign of Ptolemy III. to record a decree made by
the priesthood there assembled in honour of the king. It recites acts
similar in their beneficent character to those recounted of Ptolemy V.,
and decrees what honours shall be paid him and his consort Berenice,
whose famous hair, dedicated in the temple of Arsinoë at Zephyrium in
gratitude for Ptolemy's safe return from his Syrian expedition, was
said to have been metamorphosed into the constellation known as _Coma
Berenices_.
CHAPTER VIII
EGYPTIAN WRITING IN ITS RELATION TO OTHER SCRIPTS
The interpretation of the Egyptian hieroglyphics being thus settled
once and for all, the next problem to be attacked was their relation,
if any, to the sound-signs whence are derived the alphabets of the
civilised world. We travel backwards along clearly-marked lines from
our alphabet to the Roman, and thence to the Greek, which tradition
attributed to the Phœnicians. Herodotus says upon this matter: "Now
these Phœnicians who came with Cadmos, of whom were the Gephyraians,
brought in among the Hellenes many arts when they settled in this
land of Bœotia, and especially letters, which did not exist, as it
appears to me, among the Hellenes before this time; and at first they
brought in those which are used by the Phœnician race generally, but
afterwards, as time went on, they changed with their speech the form
of the letters also. During this time the Ionians were the race of
Hellenes who dwelt near them in most of the places where they were;
and these, having received letters by instruction of the Phœnicians,
changed their form slightly and so made use of them, and in doing so
they declared them to be called 'phœnicians,' as was just, seeing that
the Phœnicians had introduced them into Hellas. Also, the Ionians from
ancient time call paper 'skins,' because formerly, paper being scarce,
they used skins of goats and sheep; nay, even in my own time many of
the Barbarians wrote on such skins" (v. 58).
Pliny, in his _Natural History_ (v. 12, 13), gives the credit of
the invention of the alphabet to the Phœnicians, and other ancient
authors repeat what must have been an old tradition. The honesty of
these writers is unimpeachable, however much their competency may be
questioned; and no slight confirmation of their testimony appears,
in the judgment of many modern scholars, to be furnished by the
correspondence in number, name (the sibilants _s_ and _z_ excepted),
and order, although not in form, between the letters of the Greek and
the Semitic alphabets. "In default of further evidence, the very word
ALPHABET," Canon Taylor remarks, "might suffice to disclose
the secret of its origin. It is obviously derived from the names of the
two letters _alpha_ and _beta_, which stand at the head of the Greek
alphabet, and which are plainly identical with the names _aleph_ and
_beth_ borne by the corresponding Semitic characters. These names,
which are meaningless in Greek, are significant Semitic words, _aleph_
denoting an 'ox,' and _beth_ a 'house.'" The following table shows the
names and order of the Greek and Semitic letters, the Hebrew being
selected as the type of a Semitic alphabet, because it is more familiar
than any other (_cf._ Taylor's _History of the Alphabet_, vol. i. p.
75).
+-----------------------+-----------------------------------+
| HEBREW. | GREEK. |
+------------+----------+-----------------------------------+
| Name. | Meaning. | Name. |
+------------+----------+-----------------------------------+
| א Aleph | ox | A α Alpha |
| ב Beth | house | B β ϐ Beta |
| ג Gimel | camel | Γ γ Gamma |
| ד Daleth | door | Δ δ Delta |
| ה He | window | E ε Epsilon |
| ו Vau | hook | (Vau--obsolete) |
| ז Zayin | weapons | Z ζ Zeta |
| ח Cheth | fence | H η Eta |
| ט Teth | serpent? | Θ ϑ θ Theta |
| י Yod | hand | I ι Iota |
| ך Kaph | palm of | K κ Kappa |
| | hand | |
| ל Lamed | ox-goad | Λ λ Lambda |
| ם Mem | waters | M μ Mu |
| נ Nun | fish | N ν Nu |
| ס Samekh | post | Ξ ξ Xi |
| ע 'Ayin | eye | O ο Omicron |
| פ Pe | mouth | Π π Pi |
| צ Tsade | javelin? | (San--lost) |
| ק Qoph | knot? | (Koppa--obsolete) |
| ר Resh | head | Ρ ρ Rho |
| ש Shin | teeth | Σ σ ς Sigma |
| ת Tau | mark | T τ Tau |
| | | Υ υ Upsilon} |
| | | Φ φ Phi } of |
| | | Χ χ Chi } later |
| | | Ψ ψ Psi } origin.|
| | | Ω ω Omega } |
+------------+----------+-----------------------------------+
Assuming the theory of the Phœnician origin of the alphabet to be
established, the next question is, was that alphabet an independent
invention, or was it adapted from another set of characters? As has
been seen, all evidence goes to show that sound-signs have been derived
from pictographs, and, if the Phœnician script be no exception to this,
search must be made for its earlier forms. Tradition asserted that "the
Phœnicians did not claim to be themselves the inventors of the art of
writing, but admitted that it was obtained by them from Egypt." So says
Eusebius, and the same tradition has currency among classic authorities
from Plato to Tacitus, while the fact of the active intercourse which
long prevailed between Phœnicia and Egypt goes far in its support. The
Phœnicians were of Semitic race, "dwelling in ancient time, as they
themselves report, upon the Erythrean Sea" (_i.e._ in the neighbourhood
of the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf), "and thence they passed over and
dwelt in the country along the sea coast of Syria; and this part of
Syria and all as far as Egypt is called Palestine" (Herodotus, vii.
89). But of their origin and primitive migrations, in truth, little is
known. Tyre, whose king, Hiram, gave Solomon aid in the building of his
famous temple, and Sidon, are familiar names in the Bible, but that of
the "Phœnicians" does not once occur, reference to them being probably
included in the term "Canaanite." Professor Huxley, always felicitous
in his phrases as he was supreme in exposition, aptly called them the
"colossal pedlars" of the ancient world. The narrow strip of Syrian
seaboard which they occupied when we first meet them in history was
a meeting-place between East and West, and the nursery of a maritime
enterprise which looms large in history. Their ships traded westward
beyond the Pillars of Hercules, and eastward to the Indian Ocean; their
colonists settled on both shores of the Mediterranean, on the Euxine,
and were scattered over Asia Minor. Like the Romans, the Phœnicians
had little creative instinct. Designing or discovering little, but
skilfully manufacturing and circulating much, they were distributors of
the wares of their own and neighbouring countries, and founded emporia
in many a city of the ancient world, as _e.g._ at Memphis, "round about
whose sacred enclosure, on that side of the temple of Hephaistos which
faces the north wind, dwell Phœnicians of Tyre, this whole region being
called the camp of the Tyrians," or, as we should say, the Tyrian
quarter (Herodotus, ii. 112).
Obviously, one of the pressing needs of a people thus brimful of
commercial activity, to whom "time was money," would be some swift
and concise mode of record of transactions. Hence the supersession
or abbreviation of cumbrous and elaborated characters, with their
apparatus of determinatives, ideograms, and the like, by a simple
"shorthand" sort of script. But of _what_ characters? Influenced partly
by the traditions already referred to, partly by the fact of the
intimate relations between Phœnicia and Egypt, and doubtless by that
principle of development the application of which was extending in
all directions, a French Egyptologist, Emanuel de Rougé, read a paper
on the history of the alphabet before the Académie des Inscriptions
in 1859 (the year of publication of Darwin's _Origin of Species_),
which, in the judgment of many scholars, appeared conclusive as to
the derivation of the Phœnician (and, through that, of all other
alphabets now in use) from the Egyptian characters. The success which
appeared to attend M. de Rougé's researches "must be attributed to his
clear perception of the fact, itself antecedently probable, that the
immediate prototypes of the Semitic letters must be sought, not, as
had hitherto been vainly attempted, among the hieroglyphic pictures
of the Egyptian monuments, but among the cursive characters which
the Egyptians had developed out of their hieroglyphs, and which were
employed for literary and secular purposes, the hieroglyphic writing
being reserved for monumental and sacred uses" (Taylor, i. p. 90).
The method which he adopted was admirable. He took the oldest known
forms of the Semitic letters that he could discover, and compared
these with the oldest known forms of hieratic writing, confining that
comparison to the twenty-five letters of the so-called "Egyptian
Alphabet." The materials at his command were of the scantiest. On the
_Egyptian_ side hieratic papyri of the new Empire (which began about
1587 B.C.) existed in plenty, but the characters in which
they are written are comparatively late. Fortunately, however, among
the very few examples of the oldest form of hieratic was the _Papyrus
Prisse_ (fig. 50), and this precious relic supplied M. de Rougé with
the cursive characters which made formulation of his theory possible.
On the _Semitic_ side there are the Egyptian words which are given in
Semitic form in the Old Testament, and the Semitic names of Syrian
towns which are found in the Egyptian annals of conquests under the new
Empire, through which the sounds severally represented by the Semitic
and hieratic characters are arrived at. The chief source of epigraphic
evidence was an inscription (fig. 51) on the sarcophagus of Eshmunazar,
king of Sidon, dating from the fifth century B.C., or about
two thousand years later than the _Papyrus Prisse_, and therefore
representing a late form of the Phœnician alphabet.
[Illustration: Fig. 50.--Facsimile of Hieratic Papyrus Prisse]
The sarcophagus, which is preserved in the Louvre, was found in a
rock-tomb near the site of ancient Sidon. The interpretation of the
inscription upon it has exercised the skill of a host of scholars,
and given rise to an enormous body of literature. Eshmunazar, whose
mask and mummy are sculptured on the sarcophagus, speaks in the first
person. He calls himself "king of the Sidonians, son of Tabnit," and
tells how he and his mother, the priestess of Ashtaroth, had built
temples to Baal Sidon, Ashtaroth, and Emun. He beseeches the favour
of the gods, and prays that Dora, Joppa, and the fertile corn-lands
of Sharon may ever remain part of his kingdom. Well-nigh in the words
of Shakespeare's epitaph, he lays a curse upon him who would molest
his grave; such an one "shall have no funeral couch with the Rephaim,"
that haunt the vasty halls of death. "I am cut off before my time; few
have been my days, and I am lying in this coffin and in this tomb in
the place which I have built. Oh, then, remember this! may no royal
race, may no man open my funeral couch, and may they not seek after
treasure, for no one has hidden treasures here, nor move the coffin out
of my funeral couch, nor molest me in this funeral bed by putting in it
another tomb." (_Records of the Past_, vol. ix.)
[Illustration: Fig. 51.--Inscription on the Eshmunazar Sarcophagus]
Such, broadly speaking, were M. de Rougé's materials for observation
and comparison, and there have been few more striking examples of
ingenuity of classification and inference than those which, his
work supplies. In his excellent summary of that work which Canon
Taylor gives in the first volume of his indispensable _History of
the Alphabet_ (pp. 98-116), he refers the student who desires full
details to M. de Rougé's posthumous _Mémoire sur l'origine Égyptienne
de l'alphabet Phénicien_, and suggests that those readers who care
only for results may even skip his summary. That summary necessarily
includes much technical matter which will interest only the trained
philologist; and in the superficial survey of the subject which is only
possible, and perhaps desirable, in these pages, any details would be
out of place. Nevertheless, the accompanying tabulated form of M. de
Rougé's results may be followed by an example or two of the method
which secured them, and also by reference to some earlier Semitic
inscriptions which have come to light since 1859.
M. DE ROUGÉ'S THEORY OF THE ORIGIN OF THE ALPHABET.
I. Egyptian Hieroglyphics, facing to the left.
II. Egyptian Hieratic characters, facing to the right.
III. The oldest Phœnician letters, mostly from the Baal
Lebanon inscription.
IV. The oldest Greek letters, from inscriptions at Thera
and Athens, reading from right to left.
V. The lapidary Greek alphabet at the time of the Persian
war, reading from left to right.
VI. Greek uncials, from the Codex Alexandrinus, about 400 A.D.
VII. Greek minuscules.
VIII. The old alphabet of Italy.
IX. Lapidary Latin alphabet at the time of Cicero.
X. Latin uncials and minuscules.
XI. Modern square Hebrew, derived from the Phœnician
letters in Col. III.
[Illustration: Egyptian, Pœnician, Greek Latin and Hebrew Alphabet
symbols.]
Our examples of M. de Rougé's method may be taken from the letters _b_
and _h_.
_b._ The Egyptians had two signs for this, the "leg," [Symbol] which
is the normal sign, and the "crane" (see fig. 2 in foregoing table),
which letter should be taken as the prototype of the Phœnician (see
fig. 2, col. iii.). The reason may be that the sound of the first
symbol seems to have been nearer to _v_ than to _b_, the "crane" being
used as the equivalent of _beth_ in the translation of several Semitic
names, such as Berytus (Beyrout) and Khirba. The hieratic trace of
the "leg" would, moreover, be easily confused with that of some other
letters, such as the "chick" and the "arm," and would therefore be
inconvenient for adoption. The Semitic character [Symbol] differs from
its hieratic prototype [Symbol] in having acquired a closed loop. The
closed form is so much easier to write that the change presents no
difficulty. But there is a curious bit of indirect evidence which seems
to show that the Semitic in its earlier form was open, something in the
shape of an [Symbol]. The Greek alphabet used at Corinth, one of the
earliest Phœnician colonies in Hellas, must have been derived from a
type of the Semitic alphabet more archaic than that which appears on
the Moabite Stone (see p. 147). Now, in the old Corinthian alphabet the
letter _beta_ is not closed, but open, [Symbol], its form being almost
identical with the hieratic prototype.
_h._ The letter _he_ corresponds to the "mæander" and the "knotted
cord." The hieratic forms show that the former must be taken as the
prototype. In the _Papyrus Prisse_ there are two of this character;
one, which is comparatively rare, is open at the bottom, [Symbol], and
corresponds to the Moabite [Symbol]. It is much more usual, however, to
find the character completely closed. The name of the Semitic letter,
which is generally supposed to mean a "window," would indicate that the
previous form of the letter agreed with the more usual hieratic trace.
This conjecture is curiously confirmed by the evidence afforded by the
early inscriptions of Corinth, which, as we have seen in the case of
_beta_, occasionally preserve alphabetic forms of a more archaic type
than those found on the Moabite Stone itself. Now, in the primitive
alphabet of Corinth we find, instead of the usual form of _epsilon_, a
closed character [Symbol] which is nearly identical with the form of
the "mæander," most usual in the _Papyrus Prisse_. (Taylor, i. pp. 102,
114.)
Among the more important Semitic inscriptions, other than that on the
Eshmunazar sarcophagus, are: (1) the inscription on fragments of sacred
vessels of bronze from the temple of Baal Lebanon, which is assigned
to the eleventh century B.C.; (2) the inscription of Mesha,
king of Moab, on a slab of black basalt, known as the Moabite Stone,
which is assigned to the ninth century B.C.; (3) the lion
weights from Nineveh, bearing the names of Assyrian kings who reigned
during the second half of the eighth century B.C.; and (4)
the inscription on a tablet in a tunnel which conveys water from
the Virgin's Pool in the Kedron Valley to the Pool of Siloam in the
Tyropæon. The date of this inscription lies between the eighth and the
sixth centuries B.C.
[Illustration: Fig. 52.--Inscription on Sacred Bowls (Baal Lebanon)]
1. _The Baal Lebanon Vessels._ In 1876 M. Clermont-Ganneau bought from
a Cypriote dealer some fragments of bronze plates bearing Phœnician
characters (fig. 52). They were traced to a peasant who had found them
when digging, and who had broken up the metal in the hope that it was
of gold. The industry and skill of MM. Renan and Clermont-Ganneau
pieced the fragments together in such wise as to warrant the inference
that they were portions of sacred bowls, an inference confirmed by the
longest of the inscriptions, which declared that "this vessel of good
bronze was offered by a citizen of Carthage, servant of Hiram, king of
the Sidonians, to Baal Lebanon, his Lord," whose temple was one of the
"high places" dedicated to the god.
[Illustration: Fig. 53.--The Moabite Stone]
2. _The Moabite Stone_ (fig. 53). This, perhaps the most famous, and,
certainly, one of the most important, of Semitic relics, was discovered
in 1868 by Dr. Klein, a German missionary, during his travels in Moab.
The Arabs who escorted him took him to see an inscribed stone, the
Phœnician characters on which were beautifully cut in thirty-four
lines. The doctor copied a few words, and resumed his journey. On
reaching Jerusalem he made known his discovery, whereupon competition
was started between the French and German Consulates for purchase of
the coveted treasure. This aroused the suspicion of the Arabs, to whom
the stone had become a sort of talisman on which the fertility of
their crops depended--that is, when they had industry enough to plant
them. Messengers sent by M. Clermont-Ganneau succeeded in taking a
squeeze of the inscription, which made the Arabs still more hostile,
and in the end, after the Turkish governor of Nablus had vainly tried
to secure the stone for himself--of course to sell at a profit to the
"infidel"--the Arabs put a fire under it, then poured cold water over
it, and smashed it into fragments, which were distributed as charms
among the tribe. But the tact of M. Clermont-Ganneau recovered nearly
all the pieces, so that, a few lines excepted, the inscription is
complete. The original is preserved in the Louvre, and a very good cast
of it may be seen in the Phœnician department of the British Museum.
The inscription, which is written in a language resembling closely the
Hebrew of the Old Testament, gives Mesha's account of his rebellion
against the King of Israel, to whom he had hitherto paid yearly tribute
of the wool of a hundred thousand lambs and a hundred thousand rams.
Historically the monument is of high value. Mesha speaks of himself
as the son of Chemoshmelek, whose position as the national god of
the petty kingdom of Moab corresponds to that of Yahweh or Jehovah
among the Israelites. The reference to Chemosh throws light on the
correspondences in belief between the several Semitic peoples. The
"high place" or altar of the god, his anthropomorphic character as
angry, as urging his votaries to battle and to slaughter of their
foes, giving them no quarter--all this is identical with the Hebrew
conception of deity, so that the inscription, _mutatis mutandis_,
reads like a transcript from the warlike annals of the Old Testament.
From the epigraphic standpoint, which alone concerns us here, the
inscription is regarded by Canon Taylor and other scholars as
supporting the theory of M. de Rougé.
3. _The Lion Weights_ (fig. 54). Several examples of these were found
by the late Sir Austin Layard in his first excavations at Nineveh.
They are bilingual, the names of the Assyrian kings being usually
in cuneiform writing, while the weights are indicated in Phœnician
characters. Of course this evidences intimate trading relations
between Assyria and Phœnicia, and the commercial dominance of the
latter in the adoption of its weights and measures as the metrical
standard of the former, and in the general use of the Phœnician
alphabet for business purposes. The action of time has largely
obliterated the inscriptions, but among the names of Assyrian kings
which have been identified are Tiglath-Peser, Shalmaneser IV.,
Sargon II., and Sennacherib. The similarity between the Phœnician
and Assyrian characters is shown in the inscription here reproduced,
which is to scale of the original. It is on the eleventh lion,
which weighs a little over twenty ounces, and therefore represents
a maneh, a Hebrew weight used in estimating gold and silver, and
believed to contain one hundred shekels of the former and sixty of
the latter. The reading is M_a_N_e_H M_e_L_e_K, "a maneh of the king."
The name is not very legible, but is read by Professor Sayce as
Shalmaneser, who reigned in the seventh century B.C.
[Illustration: Fig. 54.--Maneh Weight]
4. _The Siloam Inscription._--The tunnel in which this was found was
doubtless constructed to secure the water supply of Jerusalem in the
event of a siege, the Virgin's Pool being outside the city walls,
while the Pool of Siloam is inside the boundaries of the old rampart.
Encrustations of carbonate of lime made the decipherment of the letters
very difficult on their first discovery in 1880, but enough was seen
to prove their high importance for the study of the development of
the Hebrew alphabet in its passage from the Phœnician to the Aramean
type, whence the modern characters are derived. "It was recognised at
once that a Hebrew inscription of a date prior to the Captivity had
at last been discovered, and that the uncertainties as to the nature
of the alphabet of Israel would now be set at rest." The letters were
carefully cleared of their accretion; squeezes, tracings, and casts
were obtained, and the Hebrew record, engraved in Phœnician characters
nearly resembling those on the Moabite Stone, thus Englished, of course
more or less conjecturally in detail, by Professor Sayce:--
(1) (Behold the) excavation! Now this is the history of the tunnel.
While the excavators (were lifting up)
(2) the pick each to his neighbour, and while there were yet three
cubits (to be broken through) ... the voice of one call-
(3)-ed to his neighbour, for there was (an excess?) in the rock on
the right. They rose up ... they struck on the west of the
(4) excavation, the excavators struck each to meet his neighbour pick
to pick, and there flowed
(5) the waters from their outlet to the Pool for the distance of 1000
cubits and (three-fourths?)
(6) of a cubit was the height of the rock at the head of the
excavation here.
The inscription is interesting if only as showing how modern methods
of tunnelling were anticipated by these ancient engineers. One gang
of men began boring at one end and another gang at the other end,
thus advancing till both met, and the failure to make the connection
which is spoken of in "the (excess) in the rock on the right" has
confirmation in the existence of two "blind alleys" in the tunnel,
showing how the borings overlapped. The accuracy with which, aided
by the most recent appliances worked by compressed air, the passages
through miles of rock have been bored until the men at either end meet
face to face in the middle, is among the romantic achievements of
modern science. The Samaritan alphabet is the sole surviving lineal
descendant of the Phœnician, which in whatever degree the parent of all
extant alphabets, became extinct with the decline of Phœnicia herself,
and the characters are now recoverable only through the inscriptions of
which examples have been given.
M. de Rougé's theory of the source of that alphabet, and of the
variants to which it has given rise, has not passed unchallenged.
It belongs to the class of hypotheses which lend themselves to the
straining of facts in their support, and therefore demand evidence
amounting to demonstration. The superficial resemblances between the
written characters are cited as proof of relation, no play being given
to that independence of origin of which numerous examples occur in
other branches of human development. In his article on Hieroglyphics
in the _Encyclopædia Britannica_, Mr. Reginald Poole remarks that "the
hieratic forms vary, like all cursive forms of writing, with the hand
of each scribe. Consequently, the writers who desire to establish their
identity with Phœnician can scarcely avoid straining the evidence."
Moreover, the long lapse of time between the materials for comparison
invites caution. The _Papyrus Prisse_ is, at least, two thousand years
older than the Eshmunazar inscription, and on these two hang the
validity of M. de Rougé's theory. Another contention is that certain
Semitic letters represent sounds which are peculiar to that language,
and for which no equivalent signs could be adopted from the Egyptian,
to which, however, the reply is that in the borrowing of characters it
suffices to select those representing similar, although not the same,
sounds. The objection that the names of the Semitic letters are not
those of the hieroglyphs is met by the principle of acrology (see pp.
86, 104). The question is also asked, Why did not the Phœnicians borrow
the hieroglyphic instead of the hieratic characters? Mr. Arthur Evans
thinks that in some cases this was done, a few of the letters of the
Phœnician alphabet coming direct from the pictorial symbols, as _Alpha_
(_Alef_ = an ox), from the hieroglyph of an ox's head; _Zeta_ (_zayin_
= weapons), from the two-edged axe; _Sigma_ (_samech_ = a post), from
the sign of a tree; _Omikron_ (_Ain_ = an eye), from the circle used
to represent the eye; _Eta_ and _E-psilon_ (_cheth_ = a fence and _He_
= a window), from signs for a wall or door or window. Canon Taylor,
however, argues that the derivation must have been on the lines laid
down by M. de Rougé, the Semitic alphabet originating among a colony of
aliens of that race settled in Lower Egypt, either as slaves, traders,
frontier guards, or conquerors. In any case these intruders would be
strangers to the religion and the language of the Egyptians. It would,
therefore, be more likely that they should make use of the cursive and
easy hieratic, which was ordinarily employed in Egypt for secular and
commercial purposes, than that they should adopt the difficult sacred
script which was reserved by the Egyptian priesthood for monumental
and religious uses. This supposition is confirmed by the singular
absence of any hieroglyphic monument which can be assigned to the three
dynasties of Semitic rulers known as the Hyksos or Shepherd Kings, who
were expelled from Lower Egypt by the Theban Ramesides.
Canon Taylor admits that if, among the objections raised by Professor
Lagarde, that based on the want of adequate resemblance between
the Semitic letters and the hieratic forms can be sustained, M. de
Rougé's theory falls to the ground. The Canon, a staunch, although
perfectly candid, supporter of that theory, very properly lays stress
on the tendency of things borrowed to partake of the character of the
borrower. That they are borrowed at all implies a certain adaptableness
in them which permits modification of type, especially when the writing
has to be inscribed on another kind of material. The early hieratic
writing was traced on papyrus with a soft reed-stump, while the Semitic
was cut upon a stone with a chisel, to the loss of flowing lines and
curves. "Looking broadly at the two scripts, Hieratic and Moabite,
we see in the first place that the Semitic writing is distinguished
by greater symmetry and greater simplicity. The letters have become
more regular and uniform: more angular, more firm, and more erect;
the differences in relative size have diminished; the complicated and
difficult characters especially being straightened or curtailed."
(_History of the Alphabet_, i. 125.) Summing up the several objections,
of which only the more important have been noted here, Canon Taylor,
amending nothing in the recent reprint of his book, remains satisfied
as to the soundness of M. de Rougé's theory. "Not only is it on _a
priori_ grounds the probable solution, not only does it agree with the
ancient tradition, not only does it supply a possible and reasonable
explanation of the facts, not only is it confirmed by all sorts of
curious coincidences, but no objection has been urged against it to
which a sufficient answer cannot be found. If we reject M. de Rougé's
explanation of the origin of the alphabet, there is practically no
rival theory on which to fall back. There are only three other possible
sources, none of which can, at present, be regarded in any higher light
than as a mere guess. If the Semitic letters were not derived from
Egypt they must have been invented by the Phœnicians, or they must have
been developed either out of the Hittite hieroglyphics, or out of one
of the cuneiform syllabaries." (_Ib._, p. 130.) The possible relation
of the still undeciphered Hittite hieroglyphs to other scripts will
have reference presently, and perhaps Deecke's theory of the derivation
of the Phœnician from the Assyrian cuneiform has some measure of truth
in it. For cuneiform appears to be essentially a Semitic script, and
the Phœnicians in their contact with other Semitic peoples would, it
may be assumed, have retained and adapted some, if not all, of the
cuneiform characters long before they became familiar with Egyptian
hieroglyphic or hieratic. Granting, however, all that the upholders
of M. de Rougé's theory may demand, their inference as to the direct
connection between the Greek and other alphabets and the Phœnician
alphabet is not necessarily to be accepted. On this question of
relation new and important light is thrown by recent discoveries, whose
significance will be dealt with in the following section.
CHAPTER IX
THE CRETAN AND ALLIED SCRIPTS
When treating of the sources whence civilisation flowed westward
centuries before Greece and Rome appear, the historian turns to the
valleys of the Nile and the Euphrates. For Egypt and Chaldea have
meant so much to us all in our search after the chief influences on
man's intellectual and spiritual history, and this with increasing
warrant, because the more widely investigation is pushed, the more
venerable is the past of both countries found to have been. In the
case of Babylon we have seen that the art of writing--that index of
culture--had passed the pictographic stage long before eight thousand
years ago, while the Egyptian hieroglyphs, which probably came in with
the dynasties, and therefore date from the reign of Menes, the first
historical king, are some thirteen hundred years later, so far as
their use in the Ni
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