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Title: The Beginnings of Libraries
Author: Richardson, Ernest Cushing
Language: English
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THE BEGINNINGS OF LIBRARIES
[Illustration:
A COLLECTION OF QUIPUS
AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY, N. Y.
NOS. B 3453, 8704
]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE
BEGINNINGS OF LIBRARIES
BY
ERNEST CUSHING RICHARDSON
LIBRARIAN OF PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON
LONDON: HUMPHREY MILFORD
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
1914
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_Copyright, 1914, by
Ernest Cushing Richardson_
PUBLISHED FEBRUARY, 1914
[Illustration]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PREFACE
A considerable mass of memoranda on the early history of libraries has
been gathered by the author of this essay during the last twenty-five
years, and out of this material various essays have been published from
time to time on Antediluvian Libraries, Medieval Libraries, Some Old
Egyptian Librarians, etc. The fact that the unworked mass of modern
information through excavations is so great as to put off for a long
time still a systematic treatise, has led to the plan of publishing
these essays and addresses from time to time as completed and in uniform
style. Although written for very different audiences and in various
methods, each is an attempt to gather information not generally
accessible and to be, so far as it goes, either a contribution to
knowledge or to the method of knowledge, a sort of preliminary report or
investigation in the field, pending full and systematic report. The
nucleus of this essay on the _Beginnings of Libraries_ was an address to
the Library School of the New York Public Library at the beginning of
the academic year 1912-13, and takes its color from this fact, but it
has been freely enlarged. The writer owes special thanks to the American
Museum of Natural History in New York.
ERNEST CUSHING RICHARDSON.
Princeton University Library,
October 12, 1913.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTENTS
Preface v
Contents vii
List of illustrations ix
1. Introduction 1
2. The study of beginnings 5
3. Definition of the Library 14
4. Method 22
5. Antediluvian libraries. General 25
6. Libraries of the gods 27
7. Animal and plant libraries? 34
8. Preadamite libraries 39
9. Adamite and patriarchal libraries before the flood 42
10. Prehistoric and historic libraries 50
11. The evolution of record keeping 54
12. Memory libraries 65
13. Pictorial object libraries 76
14. Mnemonic object libraries 91
15. Picture book libraries 100
16. Ideographic records 114
17. Types of primitive libraries 116
18. Contents of primitive libraries 132
19. The administration of primitive libraries 142
20. The beginnings of library schools 151
21. The beginnings of library research 156
22. Bibliography 159
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
1. A collection of quipus Frontispiece.
2. A collection of message sticks 94
3. A collection of wampum 98
4. A record ornament of leopard teeth 102
5. Tupai Cupa’s Tattoo Marks 106
6. Picture writing, Lone Dog’s Winter Count 108
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE BEGINNINGS OF LIBRARIES
§ 1. _Introduction_
This talk is addressed to those beginning library work as a life work.
This connects “library work” with two significant phrases, “those
beginning” and “as a life work”.
This phrase “as a life work” suggests what is perhaps the chief value of
a library school training. The distinction of and main justification for
all kinds of higher education is that such education aims to put the
student in position to view his work to be done as a whole, and life as
a thing to be wrought out as a whole, not to be lived from hand to
mouth. Presence at a library school means that the student has had
foresight enough to be willing to spend energy, money, and a good bit of
that most precious capital time, in sitting down to draw plans for his
life building as a whole instead of starting in to build by rule of
thumb.
There are however in this matter two factors—one’s self and the library.
In order to sketch out one’s life work as librarian and live it, one
must needs first know what libraries are, what they are capable of
becoming and how one can best apply such knowledge and energy as one may
have to making these libraries accomplish what they were intended to do
for human society. This involves looking at libraries as a whole as well
as at one’s life work as a whole, and the task of the library school is
to give this view of the situation. In the last analysis this is the
most important thing which any technical school does for one, this
giving the vision of the whole of experience in one’s chosen field in
order that one may draw his life plan in view of it. And for that
matter, the task of technical education does not differ in this regard
from the task of general education, which is simply the vision of the
whole of human experience, as a whole, with reference to one’s own life
among all kinds and conditions of men.
As therefore the field of science and general activities is the
Universe, so the field of library science and education is
libraries—libraries top and bottom, inside and out, beginning, middle
and end and looked on as a whole.
On the other hand the phrase “those beginning” suggests the facts that
you are yourselves at the beginning of a course of study, that the
school year is at its beginning, that this New York Public Library
school itself is still in its beginnings and that library schools in
general are only in their beginnings. This in turn suggests as the topic
of this talk three aspects of the matter of library beginnings: the
beginnings of libraries themselves, the beginnings of library science
and the beginnings of schools for library science. This talk will touch
briefly, towards the end, on the two latter topics, but will have
chiefly to do with the beginnings of libraries.
§ 2. _The study of beginnings_
At the outset it should be said that the importance of this study of
beginnings is in every science quite out of proportion to the importance
of the objects studied. Beginnings are by nature small. The highest and
best things are by nature the most complex and latest, but the study of
the earliest and simplest libraries, like the study of the simplest cell
life, is not only useful from several points of view but vital to a
right understanding of the more complex. The great vice of technical
education of all sorts is its tendency to fix attention on the latest
and best only. It is true of course that man’s ideas and methods are an
evolution—just as his body is. The fact of the accumulation of human
experience is the central significant fact of human civilization. It is
the glory of libraries that by reason of this fact they are an
indispensable tool of progress in civilization. On the whole, by and
large, the latest ideas are in fact best, for they tend to sum up in
themselves the total of the useful variations of all preceding ideas,
and the main time and attention of a course of education must of
necessity therefore be given to the latest and best experience, because
it does sum up all that has gone before. This does not, however, lessen
the value of the study of earlier ideas on any subject back to the very
beginnings, for at any given time and place, the latest idea or method
in any field is not necessarily the best. It might be the best: it is in
position to build on all previous experience and so become best. We all
know, however, that the latest book on a subject is not always the best
book. So it is, too, of individual ideas or methods.
This frequent failure of the latest to be best comes chiefly from lack
of knowledge of previous experience. Every year sees library methods put
in operation which were tried and found wholly wanting in the last
century or it may be, two, three or even five thousand years ago. On the
other hand again, every now and then we find that some method or idea,
discovered long ago but neglected meantime, is far better than those in
common use. This has often been true of great scientific ideas and we
have in Mendelism a striking recent example. One must needs therefore
study earlier ideas in any field, both in order to be sure that
so-called new ideas are not exploded old ones and in order to find
whether common practice in any field at a given time is not really the
development of an inferior line of evolution.
And, again, from the point of view of science, this study of earlier
stages is useful because the simple things are often the best
interpreters of more complex, the early of the late, and it is the
vision of the whole in perspective to the very beginning which gives the
clue to the real meaning of the latest. “Students have come to realize,”
says Professor Stewart Paton (in the Popular Science Magazine
8,1912,166), “that in the ... amoeba, jelly-fish, crab or fish, is to be
found the key that will eventually open the book ... (of) the most
complex psychic manifestations.” This is true also of libraries—the
oldest, smallest and rudest give a clue to the more complex, and it may
be added, parenthetically, the library is itself in fact the most
complex psychic manifestation in the objective Universe.
Beginnings thus, though small, are the roots of the matter. This is so
well recognized in the field of science as to have become an axiom, and
in the study of any class of things nowadays the aim is to trace each
kind of thing—plant, animal, idea or social institution back to its
beginning. Evolution has taught us to expect a genealogical series back
and back to very simple forms and the method of all science has become
what is called historical or genetic. Natural science is not satisfied
until the most complex animals and plants have been traced back through
all their complexities to single cell origins, and, if Browning may be
believed, the aim of humane and ethical science too does not rest short
of the same effort “to trace love’s faint beginnings in mankind”.
This study of the beginnings is, moreover, not only at the bottom of the
method of modern science but of the method of modern teaching. Every
man, it is said, in his life history retraces the history of his race,
and the race history of man is above all things a history of developing
ideas. This has two aspects significant for the method of teaching. As
investigating science must trace every complex idea back to its simplest
beginnings, so teaching traces the idea forward from those beginnings to
its latest form. The law by which man in his individual development of
ideas must retrace the history of the race applies to every idea or
group of ideas and it is doubtful therefore if any one ever learns
anything rightly in life unless he patiently follows the idea of it from
its simplest beginnings to its latest form—the path being sometimes a
steady growth in value, sometimes a rise and fall again towards
extinction. The historical method of teaching, therefore, is the only
method which can be called natural.
The other teaching aspect of this matter is the very significant fact in
child psychology that the general development of the child’s mind, like
the development of its body, does in fact repeat the history of its
ancestors as they passed from gestures and cries to articulate speech
and writing and through these from the simplest knowledge to the most
complex. The child must therefore, in short, be taken along “the paths
upon which in a very real sense every human being has come in person”
and the natural method of child teaching must consequently be deduced
particularly from a study of the beginnings of speech and writing, books
and book collections. In a sense, and in a very real sense, the key to
the scientific pedagogy of the future lies in the group of studies
summed up as library science, for the library is the late and complex
object which sums up in itself the sciences of the book, the word, and
all simpler elements of human expression and record, if there be any
such. A fourth reason for the study of beginnings is, therefore, that it
is the natural method of study and teaching.
Finally and closely connected with the preceding reasons is the fact
that the purpose of all science is prophecy. We learn not so much that
we may teach, as the motto says, but we learn that we may foretell. The
object of all science is to understand from what has been the relation
of cause and effect in the past, what is likely to be the result of any
given set of circumstances in the future. Physics, e.g. has proved a
very sure prophetic guide. An engineer can tell with precision that a
bridge constructed in a certain way will break if loaded beyond a
certain point. Load it to that point and his prophecy becomes true. In
the same way, with somewhat less precision perhaps, the biologist can
prophesy results in the breeding of plants and animals, the physician
can prophesy that quinine will help malaria, the farmer that planted
seed under certain conditions will or will not on the average produce
certain results, and so on through every branch of human activity. We
study in order that we may know the conditions which will be brought
about in the future by one or another set of circumstances and so that
we may be able to produce the circumstances if we wish the result. The
preparation for foretelling may, therefore, be labeled the fifth reason
for historical study.
§ 3. _Definition of the Library_
In approaching the actual study of primitive libraries it is necessary
to touch a little on definition and method. Both these matters,
essential to the approach of any topic scientifically, doubly need some
attention at this point, because library history has heretofore not
troubled itself much about primitive libraries at all or indeed about
libraries for the first two thousand years after they had left their
more primitive stages. The very method, therefore, lies chiefly outside
the experience of library history, being gathered mainly from primitive
art and anthropology, and definition must needs consider what the
essential nature of these primitive libraries is that links them with
the great libraries of modern times. Discussion of definition is the
more necessary in that the already contradictory usage has been still
farther confused in the matter of the earlier historical libraries by
those who, wishing to distinguish the collection of purely business
records, public or private, from the collection of purely literary works
by calling the former an archive, have yet applied the term archive,
incorrectly, under their own definition, to mixed collections of
business and other records.
Many answers have been given to this question: What is a library? All of
these imply a book or books, a place of keeping and somebody to do the
keeping—books, building and librarian—but some definitions emphasize the
books, some the place and some the keeping. Far the commonest words used
have been the Greek _bibliotheke_ and the Latin _libraria_ and their
derivatives. The one rather emphasizes the place and the other the books
but both were used sometimes for both library and bookshop. When modern
languages succeeded to the Latin the Romance languages kept
_bibliotheca_ for library and _libraria_ for bookshop. Germanic
languages on the other hand kept both words for library, although in the
course of time German has nearly dropped librerei for bibliothek, and
English has quite deserted bibliotheke for library. Both English and
German call “book shop”, or “book business”, what French, Italian and
Spanish call “library”.
Library is thus the common modern word in English for a certain
something which the German calls Bibliothek, the Frenchman bibliothèque
and the Italian, Spaniard, Scandinavian and Slav call by some similar
name. This something in its last analysis is a book or books kept for
use rather than kept for sale or for the paper mill. A library is thus a
book or books kept for use.
Among the many definitions of the library which do not recognize use as
the library’s chief distinction, the commonest are perhaps those which
adopt plurality or collection as the distinguishing factor. Many however
adopt the building as chief factor. Typically, of course, the modern
library does include many books, a whole separate building and a
librarian, but even if the books are few, the place only a room, a
chest, a bookcase, or a single shelf, and even if it is only the owner
who is at the same time the keeper, it is still recognized to be a
library if the books are kept for use and not for sale. Quantity does
not matter: the point which divides is the matter of use or sale. Even a
one book library is, in fact, a library just as much as a one cell plant
is plant or a one cell animal is animal. A one book library is a very
insignificant affair compared with the New York Public Library with its
many books and many branches, but it is just as truly a library—or else
you must find some other word. In point of fact “library” in English, or
some derivative of _bibliotheca_ in most other languages, is the word
which in practice stands to the book-for-use as the word animal or plant
does in biology for the living thing whether it is a single cell or a
cell complex.
Some definitions again try to limit the library to printed books or
bound books or literary works as distinguished from official or business
documents, and these definitions have, as before said, sometimes led to
a good deal of misunderstanding. Even if “archive” is assumed to be the
right name for a collection of business documents, still such a
collection is simply one kind of a library. Every one recognizes this
when the collection of business documents is one of printed and bound
public documents (U. S. public documents e.g.), and if the documents are
tablets, rolls or folded documents, the case does not differ. If books
are kept for use it makes no difference whether they are of wood, stone,
metal, clay, vellum, or paper, whether they are folded documents, rolls
or codexes, whether they are literary works, government or business
documents: if intended for use they form a something for which some word
must be found which will apply equally to all kinds of records for use
and to a one-book-for-use library as well as to the New York Public
Library. The right word in the English language seems to be this word
“library”. The “business documents” in active current use in the
registry or the counting house are perhaps the farthest away from the
“library” of common speech but they are equally far from “archives” in
the scientific sense, and curiously these have retained one of the very
simplest and oldest names of the true library, “the books”, and of
librarianship “book keeping”.
But the definition of a library as a book or books kept for use only
brings us up against the farther question, What is a book? To this it
may be answered that a book is any record of thought in words. Here
again neither size, form, nor material matters; even a one word record
may be a book and that book a library. This leads again however to still
another question: What is a word? Without stopping to elaborate or to
discuss definitions in detail, we may take the next step and define a
word as “any sign for any thing”, and again explain the sign as anything
which points to something other than itself. This is not an arbitrary
definition but one founded in modern psychology and philology and to be
found in sundry stout volumes by Marty, Leroy, Wundt, Dittrich, van
Ginneken, Gabelentz, and others. The sign may be a sound, a color, a
gesture, a mark or an object. In some stenographic systems a single dot
stands for a whole word.
The most insignificant object, therefore, kept to suggest something not
itself may be a library. A single word book is of course a very
insignificant book indeed, and the single letter, single word, single
book library a still more insignificant library, but, unless you invent
other words for them, they are truly book and library, and there is no
more reason to invent another word for book or library in this case,
than another word for animal when it is intended to include both the
amoeba and man. The very simplest library consists therefore of a single
recorded sign kept for use. It is the feeble faint beginning of a
library but just as much a library as the New York Public Library, the
Library of Congress, the British Museum, or the Bibliothèque
Nationale—and the beginning of library wisdom is to seek out diligently
the nature of these rudimentary libraries.
§ 4. _Method_
So far for definition. Now a word or two as to method. In this search
for the earliest history of the making and keeping of records, library
science, like all the human sciences, has at least three ways of
approach or sources. The first source is history. This includes the
evidence from written documents (which is direct and is history proper)
and the evidence from monuments (which is circumstantial and is
archaeology proper).
The second source is the custom of primitive or uncivilized nations of
recent times: this is comparative library science. The modern idea of
evolution implies that these primitive peoples are simply cases of
arrested or retarded development—they, having branched off from a common
stock at an early stage of development or else having only slowly
developed in parallel natural lines. Their customs therefore, it is
alleged, truly represent early mankind when it was at a like stage of
development. With this evidence belongs also the rich source of
survivals in popular customs among civilized peoples and folklore
generally; these are things which have kept on side by side with the
things which have outgrown them.
The third source is the acts of children while they are developing from
the speechless to the speaking stage and from the speaking to the
writing stage;—the modern theory being, as has been said, that the child
in developing repeats the experience of its ancestors, or, as it is
said, “recapitulates the history of the race” in this regard. This is in
the same sense perhaps that children’s games are supposed by some to
reflect the hunting, the wars and the domestic life of their savage
ancestors.
These three sources are supposed to cross-check one another and supply
gaps in one another, and each might be followed out separately in
detail, but for purposes of this talk it will be convenient rather to
treat as one historical progress, illustrated from the customs and
habits of modern savages, folk customs, and the psychology of children.
That part of methodology which has to do with the bibliography of the
subject in its various aspects will be reserved for the end of the talk.
§ 5. _Antediluvian libraries. General_
There are several classes of alleged libraries, which if they have real
existence must necessarily precede all others. These include the
libraries of the gods, animal or plant libraries, Preadamite and
Coadamite libraries and the alleged libraries of the antediluvian
patriarchs. All of these may be included under the term antediluvian and
the period subdivided chronologically into Adamite or Patriarchal,
Preadamite, Prehuman (plant and animal libraries) and Precosmic
(libraries of the gods)!
There is a considerable literature on the subject of antediluvian
libraries (cf. Schmidt, Bibliothekswissenschaft, 1840, p. 67; Richardson
in Library Journal, 15, 1890, pp. 40-44), but this term has been, until
recently, used to include mainly libraries which were alleged to have
existed from Adam to Noah. Modern explorations in comparative psychology
on the one hand and comparative mythology on the other have however now
brought to light many potential or alleged libraries from before
Adam—not forgetting that this first ancestor of ours has quite recently
been dated some sixty million years before the Christian era!
§ 6. _Libraries of the gods_
The oldest of all alleged libraries are the libraries of the gods.
Almost all the great god families, Indian, Egyptian, Babylonian,
Persian, Greek, and Scandinavian, had their own book-collections, so it
is said. According to several religions there were book-collections
before the creation of man; the Talmud has it that there was one before
the creation of the world, the Vedas say that collections existed before
even the Creator created himself, and the Koran maintains that such a
collection co-existed from eternity with the uncreated God. It is
obviously idle to try to trace libraries back farther than this.
Brahma, Odin, Thoth, and substantially all the creator gods who are
described in terms of knowledge or words, are each sometimes in effect
looked on by the mythologists as himself an incarnate library and
sometimes even the books of which he is composed are specified.
On the other hand, by many all creation was looked on as a library. To
the ancient Babylonians the stars of heaven were themselves books in
which could be read the secrets of heaven and earth and the destiny of
mankind. The whole firmament was thus a library of celestial
tablets—tablets of destiny or tablets of wisdom from the “house of
wisdom”, which was before creation, or carried upon the breast of the
world ruler. “The Zodiac forms the Book of Revelation proper ... the
fixed stars ... the commentary on the margin” (cf. Jeremias. Art. _Book
of Life_, in: Hastings ERE.)
This belief, developed into the so-called science of astrology, had a
prodigious influence even on the political history of mankind through
its effect on the decisions and acts of kings. The conviction that the
will of the gods as to future events was here written down, stored up
and might be read, was at times the controlling factor in the shaping of
human events.
Two of the most famous libraries of the gods are those of Brahma and of
Odin. The books of Thoth, equally or more famous, belong to a somewhat
different class. Brahma’s library contained or was the Vedas—themselves
in fact a large collection of various works. These were, it is alleged,
preserved in the memory of the omniscient Brahma and at the beginning of
this present age they were, in the modern language of an ancient
Sanskrit writer, Kalkuka Bhatta “drawn out”. Attention has been called
to the fact that this library was represented as a classified library
with notation founded on the points of the compass!
“From the eastern mouth of Brahma ... issued ... the rich verses....
From his southern mouth ... the yajash verses.... From the western mouth
... the saman verses and the metics.... From the northern mouth of Vedas
(Brahma) was manifested the entire Atharvana” (Muir. 3:12). This library
was, it should be noticed, quite up to date in having the special
collections kept in separate rooms with separate exits. It was also, it
appears, not a mere reference library but books were issued for outside
use.
Brahma’s library was represented in various other forms e.g., as the
milk of the cow goddess or the juice of the Soma plant, and in the same
way Odin’s collection of words or knowledge is represented in various
forms e.g., as the milk of the goat Heidrun, the water of the fountain
of memory, the apples of Iduna, which were the fruit of the tree of
knowledge and the blood of the wise Kvaser.
That which best identifies the mead, which is the source of the
immortality of the gods themselves and without which they languish and
die, with books, is the story of Kvaser. Kvaser was the wisest of all
the gods (Fooling of Gylfe 54). The dwarfs put him to death and gave out
that he had drowned himself in his own wisdom, but in fact they slew him
for this wisdom, which was his blood. This was drawn off into a kettle
called Odrörer (“that which moves the mind”) and mixed with honey was
most carefully kept in jars. Drinking out of these jars makes an
ordinary man “a poet and man of knowledge” but the mead is most
jealously kept to renew the life of gods and poets (Brage’s talk 3 sq.)
and grudged to mortals. Once Odin, hard pressed in flight, let fall a
few drops of this essence of knowledge, and this scanty supply eagerly
caught up by mortals produced the rabble of bad poets.
This collection of jar-fulls of knowledge was an obvious library and
recalls the fact that almost all the mythologers represent books or
knowledge as food or drink, kept in jars. It is not wholly excluded that
this great series of myths came from the earliest practice of keeping
clay tablets or papyrus rolls in clay jars, precisely similar to the
jars in which wine, oil and grain were kept in some treasure houses. But
however that may be the soma of India, the haoma of Persia, as well as
the Scandinavian mead and the ambrosia and nectar of classical times,
were all looked on as concrete knowledge and as such the food and drink
of the spiritual or immortal life—a very reasonable philosophy.
These libraries of the gods should not be confused with real collections
of books of alleged superhuman authorship like the books of the Old
Testament, which are not claimed by any to have been written before 1200
or 1500 B.C., or the collections of actual oracles delivered at Delphis,
Dodona or other shrines, or even with the forged oracles of Greece, or
the apocryphal Jewish and Christian books. All these were actual
historical book collections and the question whether authorship was
really superhuman or not is indifferent at this point which has to do
with the libraries which the gods are alleged to have had for themselves
before man was.
§ 7. _Animal and plant libraries?_
The modern psychologists, by the science which they call comparative
psychology, have gradually been robbing humanity of much that it used to
plume itself upon as its own unique possession. Among the last
strongholds to yield were reason and language, and the defenders of
these, although retreating, are hardly yet put to rout. Even if the
articulate speech of the parrot and the jackdaw is only “imitation”, and
the alleged language of the apes a delusion, still it is something of an
open question whether the sounds and gestures which animals use with one
another are not really of the nature of language. The fox who doubles on
his track in order to lead the dogs on a false scent is getting very
close to language in a rudimentary sense, and the dog who sits up or
barks for food or wags his tail to express good will, perhaps nearer
still.
It is a long step, however, from even developed oral and gesture
language to record, and it is still generally denied that among the
traits of our kinship with the beasts any evidence has been discovered
of what can be called record keeping. If this were true, then it would
seem to follow that the animal ceased to be animal and became man
precisely when he invented and began to practice record keeping—in short
that libraries mark the very beginning of the human race!
On the other hand, however, it cannot be ignored that the psychologists
are publishing monographs on the arithmetic of animals and the memory
for facts among animals, and scores of other monographs on the minds of
animals. There are those too who claim that the dog even marks the place
where he caches his surplus of bones, and certainly the bringing home of
a dead woodchuck, in order to show his master what he has done, comes
very close to that keeping and exhibiting of human trophies which is
recognized as among the beginnings of “handwriting”. If it is true that
the animals do make conscious marks to guide them back to hidden
objects, or even that they do have memory for facts, which is true
memory, then possibly the beginnings at least of memory libraries and
perhaps of external records must in the future be sought in the animal
world. The ancient Egyptians, of course, found it there when they made
the writing ape author, owner, and keeper of books. Perhaps after six
thousand years modern psychology is about to catch up with this idea!
Whether or not future psychology discovers anything like actual record
collections and memory libraries among the animals, it remains true that
the study of comparative psychology does lead into the beginnings of
memory and helps therefore to the study of the real nature of human
memory-books and memory libraries, while again it leads into the
question of the nature of gesture language, and gesture is the own
father of hand-written books. When true libraries have been discovered
among animals it will be time enough to take up the question of plant
libraries. Nevertheless it may be said that the question of “memory”
among plants is seriously discussed and plants may perhaps receive
impression as sensitively as animals. It is a little figurative to say
that a tree which carries in itself a hundred annual records of its
growth is a library in the sense of a public record office which keeps
the annals of a nation’s growth for a like period. There is however a
certain analogy which the discussions of natural records and object
writing suggests may even have some slight germ of scientific interest.
Of course where there is memory there may be groups of memorized records
which would be collections of very rudimentary “Books”, but so far the
weight of evidence seems to be against the existence even in animals,
let alone plants, of that kind of memory which retains permanently fixed
forms of expression. Sub-human libraries may therefore be for the
present left to the fabulists and put with apocryphal, legendary and
mythological libraries outside the pale of the real or historical
libraries.
§ 8. _Preadamite libraries_
Whatever psychologists and mythologists may have to say about libraries
before the existence of the human race, there seems to be a surprising
consensus of opinion that book collections must have started at latest
very soon after man himself. A great number of such libraries are
claimed by the ancients for the period between Adam and Noah, and if
there were human beings before Adam, as many say, it is likely that
there were at least memory libraries, for, as will be seen later in
discussing memory libraries, these are almost inseparable from human
nature. And further than this it appears from those very same sources,
which so fluently allege and describe the library of Adam, that the
books of Adam’s library represent such an advanced stage in the
evolution of handwritten records as to necessitate a long library
history previous to his time. These books included e.g., it is said,
inscriptions cut in stone, and such inscriptions imply centuries if not
tens of centuries of knot and other mnemonic forms of writing,
preceding. Therefore if Adam’s library was as described in its
literature, there must have been, for a long time before, Preadamite
libraries!
Moreover if those writers on the Preadamites are correct who hold that
Adam was the father of the Caucasian race only, (M’Causland. Adam p.
282), and that Mongols and negroes at least (M’Causland. Babel p. 277)
were already existing when Adam was created, then of course all negro or
Mongol libraries are Preadamite survivals! It is true that such writers
represent culture, and by implication libraries, to have been introduced
to the Mongols from the Adamite line and by Cain, but if premises are
granted, the inference is complete, that primitive libraries of all
kinds at least up to the time of phonetic records were Preadamite in
origin and were shared by Mongol and negro races as well as by the
Caucasian Adamites! For that matter some of these ancient, if not
veracious sources assert that Adam was the inventor of the alphabet,
which makes the matter even clearer, throwing even syllabic written
libraries, not to mention ideographic libraries, back into the
Preadamite period!
For those who care to follow up this fruitful but not profitable
subject, some guide to the extensive literature on the Preadamites will
be given farther along.
§ 9. _Adamite and Patriarchal libraries before the Flood_
The very considerable literature on Antediluvian libraries which has
been already mentioned is, in general, confined chiefly to the line of
the patriarchs, whom the various writers on the Preadamites often
describe as Adamites to distinguish thus the patriarchal or Caucasian
line from its Mongolian and negro contemporaries—Adam, Cain, Abel, Seth,
Noah, Ham, etc.
According to some of these veracious historians, on the seventh day of
the first month of the first year Jehovah wrote a work on the creation
in several volumes, primarily to teach Adam the alphabet, and
secondarily, to preserve the record of the creation. This seems to have
formed Adam’s entire library, until the fall. After this, however,
Jehovah published a new edition of this work in one volume on stone, and
added another work on another stone. These were placed by him in a
“Beth” or “House” on a mount east of the Garden of Eden, where were also
the Cherubim. This was according to them the first library building, and
by inference the Cherubim were the first librarians. This library was
bequeathed by Adam to Seth and by Seth to Enoch. It formed a part of the
library of Noah, and was consulted by Moses, who incorporated, it is
alleged, from it the Elohistic and Jehovistic documents into Genesis.
The libraries of Cain, Seth, Enoch and Ham were also famous among these
old chroniclers—Seth’s for its astrological and astronomical works, and
Ham’s for the heretical works, which he was not allowed to take into the
ark with him.
Far the most famous however of all these libraries is the library of
Noah. It contained that of Adam, with very many additions. At the time
of the flood Noah was commanded to bury his books—“the earliest, middle,
and recent”—in a pit dug at Sippara—and from this it appears that the
library must have been very large since there was room in the ark for
all kinds of animals, but not enough for the books.
After the flood this library was dug up by Noah, and preserved in his
Beth at Nisibis, or, according to Berosus, was dug up by the sons of
Noah, after their father had been translated, and formed the nucleus of
the Babylonian libraries. A legend of the digging up of the library
still exists, it is said, on the spot, where re-excavations are now
going on.
The Hindu account of this library (Sir William Jones’ works. I, 288) has
an interesting variation. It states that the flood came because, the
sacred books having been stolen away, men had become wicked. After the
deluge Vishnu slew the thief, and restored the books to Noah.
If Cassianus may be believed, however, these buried books were not all
of Noah’s library since he took with him into the Ark at least a select
collection, presumably for use on the voyage.
Nor were these the only libraries supposed to have been in existence
when the flood came, for the Egyptian priests told Solon of many
libraries which were destroyed by it. One rather wonders at this too,
for in those days of course they were apt to make their books fire and
water proof (rather than the buildings as now) and the flood should not
have hurt them, but if they were in fact destroyed it simply shows that
they were made of papyrus, leather or unbaked clay!
These writers not only tell us in detail about many of the books which
Noah must have had in his library, but even in some cases give us a list
of the books themselves. We find thus e.g. that the library must have
contained the following works at least by Adam (a) “De nominibus
animantium”, (b) a census report of the Garden of Eden, which included
all living things, (c) The 92d psalm, (d) A poem on the creation of Eve,
and various other works, all, it is to be presumed, written after the
fall; for the very same authentic chroniclers who ascribe these works to
Adam declare that he was born at three o’clock, sinned at eleven, was
“damnatus” at twelve of one day and driven out of Eden early next
morning—which left little time for literary work on his part, one may
suppose, while in Eden.
The library must have contained also, if our sources are correct, works
by Eve (“conversation with the serpent”), Cain, Seth, Enos, Enoch,
Methuselah and others, and various works by Noah himself, including his
history of the world to his own time, written before the flood and
published in two editions, one on wood and one on stone.
The surviving samples of these alleged works are not calculated to make
one regret anything about the deluge so much as its failure to be more
thorough. Take e.g. Adam’s poems on the creation of Eve. Imagine Noah’s
sons, “In the Springtime, when a young man’s fancy lightly turns to
thought of love”, drawing out a tablet or two of this poem for
inspiration and reading how calmly the new bride is invited by Adam to
“shake hands and kiss him”!
The efforts to date the library of Adam have been various. A _terminus
ad quem_ is offered by Berosus, who asserts that the capital of the
world before the Flood was named “The Library” or the “Book All”. He
puts this at 250,000 years B.C., but this of course implies considerable
development between Adam and the time when the world was populous enough
to need a capital at all. There is, therefore, no necessary conflict
between the veracious Berosus and the veracious modern historians of
science, who place the _terminus a quo_ at sixty million years ago.
There is, however, considerable discrepancy between even the later of
these two on the one hand and the very earliest of the one hundred and
forty different dates between 3483 and 6984 B.C. actually assigned by
more timid historians of the beginnings of Adamic civilization. As sober
historians are bound to confess that at best the historical evidence for
some 243,016 years on the one hand and 59,748,087 or so years on the
other of Berosus’ date is not wholly continuous and 6984 B.C. may be
regarded as about the earliest exact date known to have been ventured
for Adamite libraries.
It hardly needs to be added that all these alleged patriarchal books and
libraries are apocryphal although many of them have a respectable
antiquity of more than two thousand years and most of them belong either
to pre-Christian, early Christian or Mohammedan times. They have been by
no means without their influence on human thought and on the actions of
those who believed their statements to be historical truth. They are
therefore not to be ignored in reckoning the influences which have
shaped library development.
§ 10. _Prehistoric and historic libraries_
Leaving aside, however, all kinds of imaginary libraries, mythological,
fabulous, legendary or apocryphal, we still have for real human
libraries a very respectable historical and prehistorical antiquity.
This long period may be divided into prehistoric and historic or
beginnings and later history—the prehistoric period or period of
beginnings being understood to be the time before chronological record
by years, or before the time of abundant and decipherable hand-written
records.
On the whole, the term “beginnings”, is better for the early periods
than the term “prehistoric period”. “Beginnings” in this point of view
differs from “prehistoric period” simply in overlapping a very little
the shifting and uncertain borderland between the old prehistoric and
historic, carrying over just far enough onto the firm land of annual
chronological history to insure a safe footing in the field where
written records begin to abound.
In the case of books and libraries this line of division is most clearly
made at the invention of phonetic writing, and this seems to correspond
pretty well in time with the point of abundant written sources and of
definite chronological data in the general history of mankind.
In terms of relative chronology this line corresponds fairly with the
first dynasty of Egypt. No doubt in its real beginnings it shades back
far beyond its distinguishable first appearance at this time, but in
broad terms it begins for Egyptians and Sumerians about this time, and
even if this was not the earliest point of its appearance, it is the
point at which the earliest abundant well dated and understood phonetic
records are found. What time we shall count this to be in terms of
annual chronology depends altogether by about 1000 years on whether we
accept the views of the school of chronology illustrated by Breasted’s
History or that for which Flinders Petrie is champion and in the same
way with the Sumerian where King stands for the reduced chronology. When
doctors disagree, prudent conservatism suggests the acceptance of that
minimum amount on which both agree, in this case about 3400 years of the
pre-Christian era. Without prejudice, therefore, to the possibility that
Flinders Petrie may be right in putting the first dynasty a thousand
years or so earlier, and remembering that even Breasted accepts a
predynastic historic period extending to 4500 B.C. with a strictly
historic period from “the earliest fixed date in the history of the
world” in 4241 B.C., the division between phonetic records and earlier
forms of written documents may be taken as falling at about 3400 B.C. At
this time the invention of alphabetic writing was still perhaps two
thousand years in the future but writing of some kind, mnemonic and
picture writing, had already been practised for perhaps two thousand
years or even much more. The beginnings, or the prehistoric, prephonetic
and predynastic period of libraries, lie therefore back of the phonetic
writing of 3400 B.C.—in picture book libraries, mnemonic libraries,
object and memory libraries.
§ 11. _The evolution of record keeping_
These four classes of libraries, memory libraries, pictorial object
libraries, “mnemonic” libraries, and picture book libraries, form thus
the field. All of them existed before what may be called historical
libraries; all are found among uncivilized peoples of all times; all
have their faint remainders in popular custom among modern civilized
nations, and suggestions of all may be found in child-study. Three of
these classes, memory libraries, mnemonic libraries and picture book
libraries, correspond to well recognized book forms. The term
“mnemonic”, which is commonly used to include quipus, message sticks,
wampum, and similar records, is itself not a very exact term, since all
outward symbols, whether representative or conventional, are mnemonic.
Moreover, what is generally meant by the term is the use as symbols of
objects which do not represent or directly suggest their meaning—in
short, of object signs with conventional rather than pictured meaning
but as a matter of fact image signs with conventional meaning i.e. all
ideograms or phonograms are equally “mnemonic” with conventional
objects. A better distinction is therefore into the memory libraries,
object libraries (including both representative, or pictorial, object
sign collections and conventional object sign collections) and image
libraries (including also both representative or pictorial images and
arbitrary or conventional signs). For practical purposes, however, we
may perhaps use the terms, memory, object, mnemonic, and picture,
understanding by object, pictorial object, by mnemonic, mnemonic object
and by picture, pictorial image, as distinguished from the mnemonic or
conventionalized images known as ideograms and phonograms. To avoid
confusion in this matter it must be kept clearly in mind that writing is
not picture writing because its symbols are pictures, but because they
picture something. If an ox’s head or its image (aleph or alpha) stands
for an ox it is pictorial writing but if it stands for “divinity” it is
ideographic and if, as it usually does, it stands for the sound “a” it
is phonetic-alphabetic writing: It is pictorial writing only when it
suggests its own meaning.
Again it must be said that pictorial writing is not confined to image
writing as is usually implied by the phrase “picture writing” but
applies just as well to objects. A real ox’s head and horns may mean
“ox” or “divinity” or “a” just as well as a painting, drawing or
sculpture of it.
Yet again it should be noted that the picture of an ox’s head is itself
an object as truly as the head itself. The two kinds of objects might be
called real or original objects and image objects but for short
“objects” (originals) and “images” serve well enough. Again it should be
remembered that an object is not a real object because it is in three
dimensions or pictures necessarily drawings or paintings. A petroglyph
is as suitable for “picture” writing as a painting (indeed most
hieroglyphics are sculptured not drawn or painted). On the other hand a
petroglyph is no more an “object” than a painting or drawing is.
With these distinctions in mind the following table of the kinds of
symbols used in ancient records will make clear the kinds of primitive
libraries.
(A) Objects
(1) Pictorial
(2) Conventional (Mnemonic)
(a) Ideographic (eye images)
(b) Phonetic (ear images)
(aa) verbal
(bb) syllabic
(cc) (consonantal)
(dd) alphabetic
(B) Images
(1) Pictorial
(2) Conventional (Mnemonic)
(a) Ideographic
(b) Phonetic
(aa) verbal
(bb) syllabic
(cc) (consonantal)
(dd) alphabetic
For each of these kinds of “written” records there is a corresponding
kind of library or record collection.
The question of the order of evolution among these various kinds of
record collections is closely bound up with that of the evolution of
language and handwriting, the very invention of handwriting probably
implying a feeling of need for kept records.
The commonly recognized ways of human utterance are gesture and oral
speech—the one appealing to the eye, the other to the ear, and each
leaving its record probably at different points and in different
molecular form in the brain. Hand gesture came in course of time to be
the highest type of gesture language, evolving as it did into a highly
complex and adaptable type of language, and modern hand writing is
simply a form of hand gesture which, by means of ink or lead or chisel,
or some other material or instrument, leaves a trail of the hand
movement in permanent record.
The question whether gesture language preceded sound language may
perhaps be settled by the answer to the question whether in the
evolution of living beings the eye preceded the ear. If in the age of
reptiles one saw the other glide or the grass move before he heard a
swish or hiss, and if he himself first stayed still in order to escape
being seen rather than heard, then doubtless gesture language began
before sound language, and doubtless again also language began among men
with simple gestures rather than simple cries. The biologists say in
fact that reaction to light came earlier than reaction to sound, eye
before ear, and if this is true, gesture language doubtless preceded
oral speech. But, however it may be about simple utterance, when it
comes to the matter of permanent external documentary record of
utterance, it is clear enough that the records of gesture preceded the
records of sound, and for some six thousand or eight thousand years,
more or less up to yesterday, the only permanent records, or records in
external material, were gesture records. Even phonetic writing, so
called, is not sound record but a record of sounds translated into
gestures; writing is a gesture sign which stands for a sound, not a
record of sound. It is only within our own generation that, through the
invention of the phonograph, oral or other sound utterance has been
recorded in permanent material and libraries of sound records made
possible.
The written recording of even signs for sounds did, however, in the
evolution of record keeping mark a very decided advance over all
previous methods. It was as great an advance perhaps as articulate
speech itself is over gesture language or pantomime, and even greater
than the next great step in human evolution, the invention of alphabetic
writing. It was certainly a longer step in time from the very first
beginnings up to this point than from here to the alphabet, perhaps
longer than from 3400 B.C. to 1913 A.D., and the period of premnemonic
record collections, therefore, it may be said in all seriousness, is
perhaps longer than all later periods of library history put together.
The very first rudiments of record keeping were doubtless developed in
the animal mind long before it learned expression to other animals and
are to be found in the results recorded in its very structure, of its
reactions to its environment. Certainly they began at the point where
any experience, say of contact with an obstacle, left such record that
on the next occasion action was taken in view of the previous
experience.
The first attempt at expression or the effort of one individual to
communicate an idea to another by signs may have been a mere movement to
attract the attention of the other to the simple fact of its existence,
and the first record of expression may have been the simple memory of
this movement in the other’s mind.
However this may be, in the course of time and among human beings memory
was the first record and as long as life was so simple that a man’s
memory was sufficient for his own record uses and he felt no need of
communicating to a distance, whether in space or time, the necessity of
external records was not felt. As soon, however, as the number of a
man’s cattle or cocoanut trees, or the contents of his hunting bag got
beyond his count (perhaps beyond the number of his fingers and toes) or
he felt the need of sending a message of defiance, peace, or ransom to a
neighboring tribe, or from a hunting party back to the cave or wigwam,
he began to make visible records—objects, specimens, images, and
conventional signs of one sort or another. As the art progressed and
became more and more complex, pictures of objects and pictures of
gestures became the usual form of record until finally these pictures
were recognized as standing for certain groups of sounds and phonetic
writing had been invented.
Very soon after the introduction of phonetic writing documents began to
abound and the chances of survival, therefore, to multiply. The Palermo
stone seems to show that actual records by reign and by year of reign
began in Egypt as early as the first king of the first dynasty. However
that may be, within a few centuries of this time records and collections
of records in Egypt had become abundant and varied, and these contained
economic records, records of political and religious events, laws,
censuses, etc., at least. In Babylonia too, long before 3200 B.C., there
had been collections of laws, and a great variety of economic and
religious documents.
In brief it may be said therefore that about 3400, or at least 3200
B.C., the vast number of documents, the firm establishment of phonetic
record, the pains taken to insure permanence and the suggestions of
methodical arrangement and custody point to the beginning of a strictly
historic period.
§ 12. _Memory libraries_
The earliest form of library was, it is to be supposed, the memory
library. This term is not fanciful and does not in any sense attempt
figuratively to identify the human memory as such with the library. A
few years ago this could have been done in an interesting way because a
favorite analogy for conceiving the human brain was the system of
pigeon-holes with different sorts of ideas classified and put away in
their respective compartments furnishing a very exact analogy to a
classified library. This analogy is now found less useful than terms of
brain paths or other figures, although the actual geometrical location
of each word in brain tissue in the case of memory is still not excluded
and this possibility must have its bearing on the psychological study of
memory libraries.
What is meant here by the memory library refers to the modern
psychological study of inward speech and inward handwriting. This
accounts for the existence of inward books and collections of books, and
a collection of inward books is obviously a real library. It makes
little difference where or how these are kept in the brain. They
doubtless imply a library economy at least as different from that of
printed and bound books as the books themselves are different from
papyrus rolls, clay tablets, or phonographic records, but it is a real
collection of books and the psychological study of the place and manner
of their housing and the method of their arrangement and prompt service
to the owner for his use is not a matter of analogy or figure of speech.
The essence of the book is a fixed form of words. The point is that a
certain form of words worked into a unity is preserved in exactly that
form. The author looks at it as a whole, prunes, corrects, substitutes
better words for inferior ones, and generally works over it as a man
works over a painting or statue. At the end of the process when the book
is finished it is a fixed form of words, a new creation, an
individuality. The ordinary habit of thought and conversation does not
reach this point of fixed forms of words although in the case of very
retentive memories, where the complete verbal form of conversation is
remembered, it approaches it. In general men seldom remember the exact
phraseology when they listen to a sermon or a story. On the other hand,
however, the actor or the professional story teller can summon at will
the exact verbal form of a great number of works and each of these works
is properly a book. This permanent fixing of form undoubtedly implies
some substance in which the words are recorded, but if that substance is
the human brain the result is no less a book, a real record in the real
substance, than if recorded in outward substance such as stone or ink.
The practice of keeping such inward records of exact fixed forms of
words is not only the oldest form of record keeping and one extensively
practised in illiterate periods, but it is commonly practised in modern
life by orators who speak without notes, and as a method for the
teaching of children before they learn to read (“memorizing”) as well as
afterwards in the schools.
Among savage peoples the medicine man is often a library of tribal
tradition although the modern ethnologists agree that he was by no means
the only professional repository of tribal records. The ancient
Mexicans, for example, seem to have had special secular chroniclers
whose business it was to memorize public events, and to be a sort of
walking public records office, memorizing public accounts of all sorts
as well as the story of events. According to many critics of the Old
Testament this primitive method continued the chief or only method of
transmitting records in Palestine for 2000 years after it had given
place to writing in Egypt and Babylonia. They hold that the Pentateuch
was formed and transmitted by such oral verbal tradition. The Vedic
books were, it used to be alleged, gathered and handed down by a
rigorous organized system of memorizing, and this has a certain
counterpart in modern times in that memorizing of the Confucian books
and of the Koran which forms a chief part of the system of education in
the respective cases. The strictness with which this method of
transmission of memory books has been carried out to the point of fixing
every word and even letter is perhaps best illustrated from the Jewish
oral tradition as to the sounds of the vowels which apparently continued
oral for centuries before they were represented by the vowel point
signs.
Whether blind Homer composed his songs and recited them throughout
Greece without reducing to writing or not, he might have done so and
would have done as many another before him in doing so. As a matter of
fact the excavations of the last dozen years show pretty clearly a
pre-Homeric Greek writing, and Homer himself indeed once refers to the
written tablet. But however that may be, the race of minstrels began
long before Homer and still exists. In the Middle Ages they were each a
walking library, often with a very large repertory, and the same is
often true to-day among their successors the actors, reciters and the
lecturers. The learning of poems and declamations by school children
often results in an inward collection of definite verbal forms in
considerable numbers. A more complex form of memory library is that of
certain ancients who are alleged to have organized their slaves into a
system, each of the slaves being assigned a certain number of works in a
certain class to learn by heart and kept ready on call to recite when
any one of these should be desired.
These inward or memory libraries may be distinguished into two chief
kinds. As a matter of fact there are almost as many different kinds of
inward books as there are outward books, but as the two chief ways of
expression are voice and gesture, so the records of oral speech and
gesture language, received by eye, ear, or touch, and inwardly recorded,
are the chief kinds of memory books. These are quite distinct as to
their processes of reception and record, and very possibly occupy
different areas of the brain. These differences may in part be realized
from common observation, but one must take pains to guard against the
assumption that the inward record is a photograph. It is entirely
possible that the brain record of the sound “man” differs as much from a
picture of a man as the thread of a phonographic record does. The same
is true as to the inward record of a picture word or alphabetical
handwritten word. The inward record may no more be a microscopic picture
than the stenographic sign is. Nevertheless it is not hard to realize
that there is somehow within a series of recorded impressions which may
be called images, some of which recall sounds and others objects or
gestures. The inward language may or may not have to do with sounds.
Modern pantomime and the sign language of deaf-mutes and Indians are
languages, and it is entirely possible to store in one’s mind an exact
series of signs telling a story in gesture language, just as it is
possible to store the symbols for sounds or oral speech.
One of the most interesting chapters in the antiquities of ancient
nations and of modern savage tribes is the story of liturgical rites,
sacred dances, symbolic processions, and the like. Savage dances e.g.
sometimes rehearse events of the hunt or war or domestic scenes. In many
of these cases what may be called historic events are represented and
the whole ceremony is a rehearsal of these events, although wholly in
gesture expression, with gesture or object symbols and without speech.
It is the recital of visually memorized records in visual symbols, but
the records are just as truly definite accounts of events, or records,
or books if you like, as if they were oral words remembered and
expressed by voice or in writing. In religious dances and dramatic
religious ceremonies, the traditional representations were of ideas
rather than events—the nature of the world and man, the future world and
the means of attaining this,—and these formed groups and sequences of
transmitted ideas quite as definite to the initiated as if expressed
orally or in writing.
In the ceremonial processions of the Egyptians and in the Greek
mysteries, these representations often become very elaborate and were,
apparently, in the secret mysteries, often accompanied by oral
explanations by the exegete. It is possible that in the case of both
Greek and Egyptian mysteries the transmission had even ceased to be
exclusive memory transmission, and that written records, or at least
mnemonic tokens of some elaborateness, were preserved in the various
chests or baskets carried in the ceremonies. However that may be, these
were at least the more elaborate historical successors of symbolic
dances and other ceremonies, transmitted among primitive men through
visual and muscular sense memory, just as poems were preserved in
auditory images and transmitted by oral utterance.
The significant point is that whether the ritual used in the mysteries
was transmitted in auditory or visual images, and whether these symbols
were external and kept in the basket or chest, which was carried about
in the procession, or merely kept in memory, they were, so far as they
were separate, complete and stable image-forms, real words, books, and
libraries.
§ 13. _Pictorial object libraries_
The simplest and presumably earliest form of outward record is the
pictorial object record i.e. an object “in which a picture of the thing
is given, whereby at a glance it tells its own story” as Clodd (p. 35)
says of the corresponding image signs which form what is commonly
thought of as “picture writing”. These pictorial objects are
distinguished from mnemonic objects (quipu, abacus, etc.) as
pictographic image writing is from ideographic and phonetic writing, by
the fact that in themselves they suggest somehow the things meant while
mnemonic objects or images require previous agreement or explanation.
The pictorial objects used for writing may be whole objects or parts of
objects and they may stand for individuals or for classes of things,
e.g. a goat’s head may stand for a certain wild goat killed on a certain
hunting trip or, with numbers attached, it may stand for a herd of
domestic goats.
The earliest records were no doubt whole object records of individuals.
When the hunter first brought home his quarry this had in it most of the
essential elements of handwriting (those left behind could read in it
the record of the trip) and when he brought useless quarry, simply to
show his prowess, it had in it all the elements of the record, as has in
fact the bringing by a dog of a woodchuck to his master or the bringing
home by a modern boy of a uneatable string of fish to “show”. The
bringing home from war of living captives to be slain, or dead bodies to
be hung from the ship’s prow or nailed on the city gates, has the same
motive and the same record character. So too the hanging of criminals on
gibbets has the character both of the record-book and the instruction
book. In these cases the very object itself is kept and exhibited—the
whole object (though without life). Perhaps the nearest approach to the
whole object library, in the sense of a permanent collection of records,
was when all the permanent spoils of a campaign were “devoted” or “laid
up” and kept together for memorial rather than economic purposes in the
treasury of the temple.
A strict modern illustration of this case is a collection of battle
flags taken or carried in a certain war, campaign or battle. Or again if
a modern hunter should have all the spoils of a certain hunt stuffed and
mounted as a record of the hunt, this would be of the same nature—a
whole object record collection with an object to stand for every
individual.
The sample or specimen whole object record as distinguished from the
individual record is in modern times extensively known and used in the
sale of goods by travelling salesmen. In its rudiments as a means of
visible communication of ideas it was doubtless as old and perhaps older
even than the keeping of trophies for record. If e.g. man was
herbivorous before he was carnivorous then doubtless primitive man
scouting for food would bring back specimens for his family just as a
modern boy may bring in specimens of the wild grapes or berries that he
has found for information of the folks at home. The best modern
illustration of the sample or specimen whole object is in museums,
menageries, zoological and botanical gardens, and the like, where
specimens of various kinds of objects are gathered to stand for classes,
without any special regard to the number in the class.
Museums in general illustrate object record. The historical museums
generally and collections of historical relics large and small, together
with mineral, plant or animal collections of rare objects, otherwise
unknown, or species otherwise extinct (e.g. the American bison) are of
the nature of individual whole object records, while all museums come so
close to the idea of the library, either in the matter of record or in
the purpose of message or information, that one is tempted to describe
museums as rudimentary libraries, and libraries as more complex museums.
Art museums are in this aspect a sort of transition between the museum
proper or whole object library and the library proper or the
image-symbol-record collection.
Whole object record is, however, evidently cumbersome, and man,
observing this, early learned a fact very significant for the history of
handwriting i.e. that for record, reminder, or information, a part of an
object may serve just as well as a whole object. This principle of the
abbreviation of signs for the sake of economy is perhaps the most
striking and consistent principle in the whole history of handwriting.
It is the principle which led not only from the whole to the part and
sample but from the part object to the mnemonic object, from object to
image, from image to ideogram, and which prevails throughout the whole
farther development of phonetic handwriting, during which picture
phonetic signs became more and more conventionalized, through syllabic
writing into alphabetic, and it is the law which has produced the
numerous variations in the numberless historical alphabets, issuing also
finally in numberless systems of stenography. This abbreviation is very
early found in war trophies and in hunting trophies. In war it was found
that the heads, hands, ears or scalps of enemies or even the left hand
or right hand or ear, as conventionally agreed upon, was just as good an
evidence of prowess and much more transportable than whole bodies—and
Borneo and Filipino head hunters and American Indian scalpers have
practised this discovery in very recent times.
In the case of hunting trophies the history was the same. Actual bodies
brought back from a hunting trip were not altogether a permanent record,
but after the tribal feast or sacrifice (commonly perhaps in earliest
times both in one) the head and skin remained and formed a potentially
more permanent record. Even in modern times such skins may be kept as
wholes—stuffed for museum purposes or as hunting trophies, and they are,
indeed, often mounted as rugs with both head and tail attached. In this
stage they form what may be still counted as whole object records but
from this stage object abbreviation followed as rapidly as in war
trophies. If the skin was separated from head and horns for economic
reasons, either was found to serve the purposes of record. A man’s
collection of pelts e.g. is obviously a collection of hunting records as
well as a collection of wealth. The Egyptian determinative for quadruped
is, as a matter of fact, the picture not of a whole animal but of a skin
with tail and without head. On the other hand, head and horns served
equally as well for record as skin and tail, whether the purpose was a
mere record of exploits or a record of sacrifices. This precise stage is
amply represented in the modern hunting lodge with its heads of moose or
other animals, and it is possible that the expression so many “head of
cattle” is a relic of this stage.
In each of these cases the principle of the characteristic part obtains
i.e. the abbreviation is not beyond the point where the object can be
recognized at sight as standing for a certain animal.
The principle of the characteristic part once established, the tendency
to abbreviation for the sake of economy in transportation, storage, or
exhibition, led rapidly to the use of the very simplest unmistakable
part showing the individual and then to the simplest unmistakable part
showing kind. In the case of war-trophies head was reduced to scalp, and
this was conventionalized again so that the trophy scalp consisted of a
very small portion from a particular point on the head. In the case of
hunting trophies, the head was reduced to perhaps ears or horns, tusks
or teeth. The process is found definitely illustrated in the Cretan
history in the reduction of the ox’s head to simple horns in ritual use,
and vestiges of this are probably also to be found in the symbolic use
of horns on altars, horns on men as a symbol of power, and the like. On
the other hand the skin and tail separated from the horns followed the
same law of progressive economy and was reduced perhaps to the tail only
(the fox’s brush) or the claws (the primitive claw necklaces).
The modern bounty on wolf scalps contains the whole principle of
characteristic part abbreviation up to this point in a nutshell. It is
the smallest unmistakable readily recognized and nonduplicable part. It
is important for individual record that it should not be possible to
collect two bounties on one wolf or to boast of two fish caught or two
dead enemies, where there has been but one.
It is thus not fancy or jest to say the scalp belt of an American Indian
chief (albeit this did not play such a part in the Indian world as is
commonly imagined), or the tiger-tooth necklace of the African chief, is
a collection of records representing a rather advanced stage of
evolution.
Abbreviations in the case of sample records may be carried one step
farther still, for a single eagle’s feather or a very small piece of fur
shows kind just as well as a head or tail or a whole skin.
Perhaps the best examples of collections of record objects in the most
abbreviated forms are, for individual records, the collections of
trophies worn on the person, and for specimen records the medicine bag
of West Africa.
Individual trophy collections are common to all primitive peoples and
everywhere tended towards abbreviated trophies which could be worn. It
would be more than rash to trace the use of clothing and all personal
adornment to the wearing of trophies as there is some slight temptation
to do, but trophy necklaces, feather bonnets, and the like, were
certainly worn in many tribes and without very much other clothing,
either of protective or ornamental character. The leopard’s tooth
necklace of the African chief, recording the number of leopards slain by
his tribe, and the feather bonnet of the American Indian, are true
record collections. In general all objects of personal adornment among
primitive peoples are symbolic, that is, they have meaning and are of
the nature of writing. They are kept for record rather than as objects
of beauty or for the enhancement of personal beauty. Labrets, for
example, are a sign of aristocratic birth, and even if the objects worn
are ritual rather than trophy in character, still each one has its
symbolic meaning, and the expert may read in each collection a tale of
events or of specific religious ideas almost as clearly as in the
phonetic words of a printed book.
The West African medicine bag, like other medicine bags, contained a
collection of so called fetish objects of all sorts—bits of fur,
feathers, claws, hair, twigs, bark, etc., etc.—but the use of these
objects was not for medicine or magical purposes as commonly understood.
They formed obviously an object record collection quite in the nature of
a collection of books. As each object was drawn out of the bag, the
keeper of the bag recited some appropriate tale or formula for which the
object stood.
This probably casts light on many other so-called fetish collections of
primitive people, as for example those of the North American Indians.
“Mooney says, in describing the fetish, that it may be a bone, a
feather, a carved or painted stick, a stone arrowhead, a curious fossil
or concretion, a tuft of hair, a necklace of red berries, the stuffed
skin of a lizard, the dried hand of an enemy, a small bag of pounded
charcoal mixed with human blood—anything, in fact ... no matter how
uncouth or unaccountable, provided it be easily portable and attachable.
The fetish might be ... even a trophy taken from a slain enemy, or a
bird, animal, or reptile.” (Hodge. HandbAmInd 1:458.)
These fetishes might be kept in the medicine sack (the Chippewa
pindikosan) or “It might be fastened to the scalp-lock as a pendant,
attached to some part of the dress, hung from the bridle bit, concealed
between the covers of a shield, or guarded in a special repository in
the dwelling. Mothers sometimes tied the fetish to the child’s cradle.”
(Hodge. HandbAmInd 1:458.)
These fetishes represent not only events but ideas (a vision, a dream, a
thought, or an action). They represent not only religious and
mythological ideas and tribal records, but individual exploits in war or
hunting and other individual records. In short, the medicine bag the
world over is a collection of recorded ideas, both of historical and
mythological character if not also of an economic character.
So far as the “fetish” objects are not trophy objects, but stand for
ideas, they form a transition to the mnemonic object, but so long as the
object is such as to suggest to the keeper and expounder the idea of the
particular form of words or ideas which he relates, it is still to be
counted as object rather than mnemonic writing e.g. if a bit of fox fur
suggests a story of a fox, it is still to be counted a pictorial object
rather than a mnemonic object.
If twenty eagle feathers, e.g. stand for twenty eagles, or twenty small
bits of fur for twenty reindeer, these sample objects are still used
pictorially, but if a feather head-dress is made of eagle’s feathers,
each feather symbolizing some particular exploit, the matter has passed
over from the pictorial to the mnemonic stage.
§ 14. _Mnemonic object libraries_
Mnemonic writing, as it is generally treated in the textbooks, includes
all sorts of simple memory aids, and is generally, and probably rightly,
regarded by writers of palaeography as preceding picture writing,
although there is an element of abstractness even in the tally or
knotted cord or pebble as compared with the actual imitation or
representation of the picture, and in the evolution of human thinking,
other things being equal, the abstract necessarily follows the concrete
in time and in the order of evolution.
The most familiar examples of mnemonic books are the quipus or knotted
cord books, the notch books, which include tallies and message sticks,
the wampum belts of American Indians, and the abacus. Collections of any
of these kept in the medicine tent or temple, or even the counting
house, are, of course, true libraries, or at least true collections of
written documents as generally understood by the historians of writing.
The knotted cord is best known under the name of quipu, which was the
name for the Peruvian knot record. At bottom the idea does not differ
from the simple tying of knots in a handkerchief as a reminder, or the
sailor’s log line. It has been most commonly used for numerical records,
but in many cases it preserved and transmitted very extensive historical
records. One very simple use was the noting on different colored cords
by knots the number of the different animals taken to market for sale,
and again the price received for these at market.
It is still used among the Indians of Peru and some North American
Indians, also in Hawaii and among various African tribes, and all over
Eastern Asia and the Pacific.
It was the traditional method in China before the use of written
characters, and the written characters themselves were, it is alleged,
made up out of these combined with the pictures of bird tracks.
Among the ancient civilizations there are many remains or reminiscences
of these knot books. They are found among the ancient Egyptian
hieroglyphics (as in the sign for amulet and perhaps in several other
signs); they appear also in the mnemonic knotted fringes to garments in
the Jewish antiquities and, as Herodotus tells us, Darius made use of
such knots to guide certain Ionians who remained behind to guard a
bridge as to when it should be time for them to sail away. In 1680 the
Pueblo Indians of North America marked the days to their uprising in the
same way.
This use of the knotted cord for amulets is among the most widespread of
uses, being found among the medicine men of nearly all primitive
peoples. Juno wore such an amulet, and Ulysses carried one.
Among the ancient Peruvians and Mexicans there were many collections of
quipus in charge of official recorders.
Traces of ancient use survive in the knots of a cardinal’s hat and
perhaps most interestingly of all in the nautical knot used in casting
the log or sounding. We may still travel so many knots an hour or sink
mayhap so many fathoms deep. The knotted measuring line with fathom
marks is probably the direct historical descendant of the Egyptian
measuring line and by the same token probably of the Egyptian sign for
one hundred, the fathom like one of the Egyptian units being at bottom
the stretch of a man’s arm.
[Illustration:
A COLLECTION OF MESSAGE STICKS
FROM HOWITT. NATIVE TRIBES OF S. E. AUSTRALIA,
p. 704
]
Most of the extant quipus have been found in graves. There is a “very
extensive collection” of these in the American Museum of Natural History
in New York, and a recent study of these (by L. L. Locke) concludes that
they were used purely for numerical purposes and not for counting but
for record keeping.
The best known notch books are the message sticks used in Australia and
Africa and the tally used in the British Exchequer up to a recent date
for the keeping of accounts. This is the method, famous in fiction for
the recording on their knife-hilts by Indians and superhuman white
scouts of the number of scalps taken in war. It is the essence of the
so-called Clog Almanac, the nick-stick, and other ways of notching up
accounts still often found in rural communities. The memory of it
survives in the use of the word score or so many tallies, used until
recently of the runs made in baseball.
Collections of notch records are found at least among the Australian
aborigines—and it will be remembered that it was the burning of the huge
collection of tallies in the early part of the last century which
resulted in the setting fire to and burning up of the parliament houses.
It is possible that the notch method was preceded by a system of
stripping off leaves or twigs from a branch, leaving a certain number.
The early pictures of Seshait, goddess of writing among the Egyptians,
who records the years of a king’s reign, suggests possibly this method,
and in this case perhaps also the Egyptian sign for year with its single
projection may refer to this method.
Wampum is one of the best known and most picturesque forms of mnemonic
object writing. It was used by the American Indians for treaties, title
deeds, memorials of events, etc., and considerable collections of these
tribal records were not uncommon. Although in itself a later and more
complex style, in essence it stands for a style still older than the
knot writing which it resembles. Existing examples of wampum leave the
simple mnemonic knot or notch far behind and have progressed even to
figures or pictures often of an advanced or symbolic type, made in the
beads, but the beads themselves stand for what may perhaps be the very
earliest form of mnemonic record—that is the object record where each
object is represented not by a pictorial object but by some sample
object like a pebble or a twig. The heap of pebbles used for counting
was possibly the very earliest mnemonic record.
An extremely interesting modern example of calculation in pebbles and
the representation by them even of sums in addition, multiplication, and
subtraction, turns up among the psychological investigations in the
matter of mathematical prodigies. It appears that most of the famous
lightning calculators have been the children of peasants, and a large
part of these Italian shepherd boys, who apparently used pebbles for the
counting of their sheep and amused themselves by making a plaything of
these. Other lightning calculators (Ampère e.g.) used pebbles, and
Bidder a bag of shot, while others have taught themselves by the use of
marbles, peas, or the use of their fingers. (Bruce in McClure v. 39,
1912, pp. 593-4.) The counting by pebble heaps is found indeed generally
in the playing of children. When it comes to transporting or making more
permanent collections this was done by means of a pouch in the case of
pebbles—one of the earliest forms of record holder and one of the most
ancient forms even of phonetic writings, or tying together in bundles as
in the case of twig bundles found among primitive peoples, or by
stringing together as in trophy necklaces or some forms of the abacus.
[Illustration:
A COLLECTION OF WAMPUM
AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY, N. Y.
Nos. 150.1/1945, 1579 A.D. 50/2287, 2902
]
With these mnemonic object writings is perhaps also to be classed the
symbols formed with bits of wood used in the Indian game of cañute
described by J. P. Harrington. “The San Ildefonso cañute figures present
a symbolism so highly conventionalized and so complex that the term
language might well be applied—a symbolism not essentially different in
origin or practice from human speech, gesture language, African drum
language, conventionalized graphic designs that have a commonly
understood meaning, or writing whether executed in pictograms,
ideograms, phonograms, or phonetic symbols” (AmAnthropol n.s. 14, 1912,
p. 265). “These figures are, it is said, made much in the same fashion
as children graphically represent certain ideas by arranging small
objects.”
§ 15. _Picture book libraries_
Savage tribes in general have not progressed beyond the image stage of
writing or at most beyond a sort of syllabic stage which corresponds to
what we know as the rebus. This picture writing is the known origin
however of all the oldest historical writing systems. As we all know,
children too read their picture books long before they read print or
writing. Picture writing and picture books have always survived among
cultured nations and have a great vogue to-day, especially through the
introduction of pictures into newspapers and through moving pictures.
The earliest existing picture writing of the Stone Age includes many
images of domestic animals in the caves of the Pyrenees with apparently
conventional signs sometimes accompanying them. Prehistoric picture
writing in the Mediterranean regions includes also pottery marks,
figures of animals or parts of animals used to distinguish ships and
having their modern counterpart in the ship’s figurehead, also the
seals, milk-stones of Crete, the rock carvings of Liguria and the like.
The very first beginnings of picture writing are perhaps to be found in
natural object images. The Chinese ascribed the origin of their written
characters to bird tracks, and many primitive peoples used stones which
accidentally resembled animals as images of them.
Perhaps the most natural and earliest reading of records is the reading
of footprints of hunted birds and animals. From these tracks the expert
woodsman may read the kind and number of individuals passing, the
direction that they are taking, and many other details. This fact is
familiar with all hunting, and it is famous in the trailing of both men
and animals by American Indians and by primitive people generally. The
method is still much used in the tracking of criminals by footprints,
and more especially and scientifically in these days by finger-print
records. These records are actual images of parts of individuals, and it
is not incredible, even if not evidenced, that the earliest use of
writing by the Chinese should have been the imitation of birds’ tracks
in clay by some hunter in order to describe the kind of birds that he
had seen.
It has been mentioned at various points in this paper that the record of
number is near, if not at, the beginning of permanent records, and Gow,
in his History of Greek mathematics, has a theory that the record of
numbers above ten began by impressing the ten fingers in the moist
earth.
[Illustration:
RECORD ORNAMENT OF IMITATION LEOPARD TEETH
FROM FROBENIUS. CHILDHOOD OF MAN, p. 27
]
Another very early form was the natural rock having some accidental
resemblance to bird or beast, or else formed by very slight chipping of
a natural image, as in some cases in the Pyrenean caves. Various
American Indian tribes used natural fossils or accidental images in this
way. The transition from a slight chipping to sculpture is, of course,
an easy one.
Perhaps the simplest and most natural transition from pictorial object
to image writing is suggested by the trophy records of an African chief
as described by Frobenius. The actual record trophies of leopard
hunting—the leopard’s teeth—are taken and worn in a necklace by the
chief and form a tribal record. The individual making the killing has,
however, a wooden model of the tooth which he wears as an individual
trophy. This very simple and natural proceeding has in it the germ of
picture writing,—is indeed picture writing.
Among the more primitive forms of picture writing are tattooing and body
painting. Tattooing is used among many savage tribes to-day and all over
the world. This was known in the most ancient times and is often
practised to-day especially by sailors and boys, sometimes quite
elaborately. Among the savage tribes it was used for religious,
political, and economic purposes. One use was as identification mark.
This might be a tribal mark or individual mark, and in either case is
very closely connected with the totem idea. In either case it might also
be used, and was used, as a property or ownership mark to which the
tattoo mark corresponded. This is perhaps linked with the ancient
Egyptian tattooing through the tribal mark of the modern Nubian.
The war paint of the American Indian is as old as the Stone Age in the
Mediterranean and is made most curiously interesting by a considerable
number of so called Pintadores still existent. These Pintadores form the
earliest known step in the history of printing, for they consist of
stamps with which the paint could be applied in various figures after
the fashion of the modern rubber stamp. These figures, like the war
paint of the American Indians, probably had various symbolic meanings
according to the figures and the colors used, and it is not beyond the
bounds of possibility that there were libraries of printed books in this
Stone Age—if by any chance collections of sample impressions from these
stamps were kept for any purpose. At any event, when applied they formed
what some people would call a living library. Certain tablets possibly
used for a similar purpose have been found also among the North American
Indians.
Body and face painting naturally preceded tattooing—the latter being
simply a method of making the record permanent. The methods may or may
not have arisen from the marks made by the pressure of trophy necklaces,
bracelets, etc., on the skin, or from being etched by the sun on the
unprotected skin of light complexioned tribes. However they may have
arisen, these two methods of skin marking are among the very early forms
of record, were often used to record exploits or events, and sometimes
to record an extraordinary number and variety of matters. It seems also
to be established that these body pictures were sometimes intended as
copies of trophy necklaces or other ornaments.
There are many ways beside skin marks in which the idea of image making
might have suggested itself to primitive man, inheriting as he perhaps
did from an animal ancestry a strong instinct for imitation—the shadow,
reflection in water, actual fossils of animals, the etching of sunburn,
the silhouette of a tree or animal against the horizon, natural stone
forms, tracks in clay, etc.—but in skin marks, natural or artificial, we
see the transition process in actual operation.
[Illustration:
TUPAI CUPA’S TATTOO MARKS, SHOWING A GROUP
OF VARIOUS RECORDS
FROM PARSON’S STORY OF NEW ZEALAND, p. 16
]
The fact that savages, when they took off their detachable ornaments to
go to war or for ritual dances and the like, put on paint, suggests
possibly that the painted forms are images of the things removed.
Primitive picture writing on other materials than human skin is found
all over the world. It may be drawn, painted, engraved, chiseled,
modeled, moulded, woven or inlaid. The petroglyphs or aboriginal rock
carvings (more often engravings) and the paintings are the most typical
kinds although perhaps not the most common. Both of these kinds are
found all over the world; most famously perhaps among the Australians,
the Bushmen and the North American Indians. The use by the North
American Indians is said to have reached its highest development among
the Kiowa and the Dakota tribes in their calendars. “These calendars are
painted on deer, antelope, and buffalo hides, and constituted a
chronology of past years. The Dakota calendars have a picture for each
year ... while that of the Kiowa has a summer symbol and a winter
symbol, with a picture or device representing some noteworthy event”
(Hodge). It is said of the petroglyphs that they “record personal
achievements and happenings more frequently than tribal histories ...
are known often to be the records of the visits of individuals to
certain places, signposts to indicate the presence of water or the
direction of a trail, to give warning or to convey a message ... and
many of them ... [are] connected with myths, rituals, and religious
practices” (Hodge). “Sometimes a man painted his robe in accordance with
a dream, or pictured upon it a yearly record of his own deeds or of the
prominent events of the tribe.” “The horses of warriors were often
painted to indicate the dreams of the war experiences of their riders.”
[Illustration:
PICTURE WRITING. LONE DOG’S WINTER COUNT.
SERIES OF VARIOUS RECORDS
FROM MALLERY (1882-3) pl. vi
]
In the matter of abbreviation it was in image writing as in object
writing. It begins with whole object images and passes through various
stages of abbreviation until it goes over from the pictorial to the
mnemonic stage.
In image writing this process has many illustrations running back to the
cave drawings where the head or horns of an ox or goat are given instead
of the whole animal. This convention was used over the whole
Mediterranean region and apparently became the direct ancestor of the
Hebrew aleph, the Greek alpha, and our modern English a. The letter a as
now used in the alphabet appears to be the end of a long historical
process of conventionalizing by which user after user has tried to
simplify the strokes required more and more or, as the modern complacent
“inventors” of the ancient principles which they now call “efficiency”
would say, “reduce the motions required” until the present form has been
reached.
In image writing too is more clearly seen the development of what may be
called sample-and-number abbreviation.
The earliest way of representing several animals seems to have been the
making several like symbols—one for each. Five oxen, e.g. are expressed
by five pictures. It is entirely natural that when a man is writing the
same picture several times, one after another, and knows that others
will know it to be a repetition, the process of conventionalizing, which
goes on so fast under ordinary circumstances, should go even faster,
until pictures four and five become simple scrawls and in the course of
time the whole is reduced to practically a single picture and four
straight lines. Here we have the individual record and the sample record
combined.
True picture writing is not very common on the ancient monuments and is
chiefly to be studied in the primitive writings of uncivilized tribes
such as the Bushmen and the North American Indians. There are, however,
both in the Assyrian and Egyptian hieroglyphics many traces of the older
pictures from which these are derived and the idea of the picture
writing is seen in great fullness in the determinatives of the Egyptian
writing, although it is likely that these are not so much remains as
restorations. They consist, as is well known, of pictures which suggest
something of the meaning of the word, e.g. all words related to writing
are followed by the pictures of the scribe’s palette, with pen and ink
moistener. This suggests at once that the word has something to do with
writing. It is likely that the attaching of these to phonetic signs was
the result of finding that there were so many words which had the same
sounds.
A very simple example of picture writing is given in Hoffman (p. 95)
with its explanation. A canoe with a torch in the bow, three bucks and a
doe, the sign for a lake, and the picture of two wigwams tells the story
of a hunting expedition by torchlight on the lake from which three bucks
and a doe were brought back to the wigwam. A slightly more complex one
is given in Figure 3, which is the record of a shaman’s curing of a sick
man. A more complex one, given on page 26, with its explanation on pages
170-72, is the mnemonic song of an Ojibway medicine man.
One method of picture writing shows an action by several successive
stages of the same act. This is most commonly a picture of corresponding
gesture signs. The picture writing by successive pictures, showing
successive stages of a story, is a favorite method in the modern German
humorous illustrated papers, and has, of course, its perfect modern
counterpart in the cinematograph.
Any collection of wampum belts, birch bark, calendar skins, blankets, or
other picture writing records, is of course a picture library which has
already begun to take on the distinct character of the modern library.
§ 16. _Ideographic records_
Ideograms are the mnemonic stage of image writing. They may be
recognizable pictures but, if so, their meanings have no relation to the
picture itself. The head of an ox, for example, when it stands for an ox
is picture writing, but when it stands for divinity or for the sound “a”
it is an ideogram. All hieroglyphic and alphabetic writing is,
therefore, in a way ideographic, but we are accustomed to distinguish
phonetic writing and to leave for ideograms proper only those pictures
which appeal to eye rather than ear. Some people read even alphabetical
printed words as ideograms—the word suggests its object directly without
being translated into its sounds. Some, on the other hand, cannot read
even to themselves without thinking in sounds or even moving the lips.
Ideographic records so shade into the picture writing or the pictorial
image record on the one hand and into phonetic writing and the book form
common and appropriate to phonetic writing on the other, that it is not
easy to single out any examples of exclusive ideographic record
collections, although of course such collections are entirely
conceivable, and the earliest traces of Egyptian or Sumerian
hieroglyphics seem to suggest the stage where documents were in
ideograms of whole words, but at this stage ideogram and phonogram would
be almost indistinguishable as it would be a subjective matter as to
whether it suggested to any given individual a visual image directly or
only indirectly, through an ear picture.
§ 17. _Types of primitive libraries_
Various illustrations of the different kinds of primitive libraries,
possible or actual, have already been suggested. These may be summarized
as private record collections and tribal record collections, as
pictorial, mnemonic, and mixed, as object, image, and mixed, and as
priestly and secular. The matter may be made perhaps a little more
concrete by considering two types as to which we do not have to rely on
historical allusion, but of which we have concrete examples—votive
offering collections and libraries for the dead. With votive offering
collections are, of course, to be associated the medicine bag, amulets,
magical charm collections, and that whole class of primitive records or
symbolic objects which center in the religious head of the tribe. The
libraries for the dead, consisting as they do of objects buried with the
deceased, are essentially collections of personal records corresponding
with the modern private library. Collections of public records, not kept
with the religious collections, are well attested among primitive
people, and existed from very early times in Egypt and Babylonia, but on
the whole the inference of anthropology seems to be that up to the
neighborhood of the historical period the head of the tribe was both
priest and king, as the Czar of Russia is both Emperor and head of the
orthodox church, and religious and political collections one. The priest
king seems to have been the rule even in early historical times, and
temple and royal archives one, differentiated only as the numbers of the
nation and the complexity of the civilization grew. At all events, we
have abundant remains of temple collections of symbolic objects or
so-called “votive offerings”, including much unmistakable “writing” and
we have also a considerable number of examples of similar objects buried
with the dead, from very various localities all over the world.
The objects gathered together at shrines are commonly known as votive
offerings, but the actual uses and reasons for their collection are much
more various than is suggested by the ordinary meaning of the votive
offering, while, as a matter of fact, most of such objects are not
offerings at all, but only substitute object image records of such
offerings, or even mere symbols for offerings. A good type of this
latter class is the Chinese sacrifice which consists in writing prayers
on a piece of paper and burning the paper. But there are thousands of
illustrations in actual collections of something very close to this,
throwing most interesting light on the writing character of these
collections. The collections formed very soon after the invention of
phonetic handwriting in particular give very clean-cut illustrations of
the meaning of many classes of these temple deposits of symbolic and
mnemonic objects, and this in turn casts light on the primitive object
collections of the shaman and the tribal story teller.
To begin with, a list of the objects found in the Hopi North American
Indian shrines, as given by J. W. Fewkes, will illustrate the fact of
the varied contents of aboriginal shrines: “The temporary offerings in
shrines are prayer meal and pollen, sticks, clay effigies of small
animals, miniature bowls and vases of water, small bows and arrows,
small dolls, turquoise, shells, and other objects.” “Among the permanent
objects not offerings ... human or animal images of wood and stone,
concretionary or botryoidal stones, carved stone slabs, and fossil
shells” (Hodge).
The historical votive offering collections of Greece, Crete, Egypt, and
Babylonia extend over long periods, and the objects recovered from them
include hundreds of thousands of record objects. These include, as in
the case of the Hopi shrines, a great many objects not intended as
offerings at all. The temple treasuries, even in very early times, were
used as a sort of general safety deposit vault, the protection
consisting not only in the watchfulness of the priest but the tabu, or
curse laid upon those who should even approach the objects, and the
general belief that they were in fact under the protection of the god
who would punish theft. Such objects might be taken again by the owner,
as is shown in the case of the Greek temple treasuries, or they were
things held in trust by the priests for the benefit of widows and
orphans as was the case of the Jewish temple. Moreover, even the record
objects were by no means confined to records of the fact, the nature,
and the extent of the offerings made, although a great portion of them
were precisely for this record purpose. Increasingly, and at last very
extensively, they included records of events of war, hunting, and in
later times of the public games. They were in the Greek temples very
extensively biographical or genealogical and tended to be so
progressively. Indeed vast quantities of tablets “laid up” in the
temples had no connection with sacrifice at all but were merely records
deposited as one might deposit family manuscripts or present a printed
autobiography to a public library. The votive collection was simply a
public reference library as distinguished from political archives or
school libraries for instruction or learning.
The more strictly votive records were themselves of great variety. They
include object records, sample records, models, pictures, symbol
records, and phonetic inscription records. But, whatever the form, the
underlying idea or motive is the same, they are records of offerings
made, whether those offerings are sacrifice or thank offerings. The
treasury of the Greek temple was sometimes a separate building by itself
filled with these records. The Jewish temple had separate treasuries for
war trophies and for other votive offerings. Primarily, of course, these
treasuries were in fact intended for the actual objects—the tithe of the
first fruits, the tithe of the spoils taken in war, and the animals
intended for sacrifice, but as these were intended for consumption, the
records took their place and in later times increasingly images and even
verbal statements were used as offerings in place of real objects,
forming, so to speak, a collection of fiction or perhaps better, the
actual records of real spiritual acts performed, signifying petition,
sacrifice, thanksgiving, etc. of the worshiper. The innumerable tables
with record of cattle in the great cattle pens of the Babylonian
temples, although perhaps not to be described themselves as “votive
offerings”, actually correspond to the later practice, where the votive
offering is kept as records of offerings, and correspond very closely in
the case of war trophies, where it often happened that a part was
dedicated and the rest sold or melted down and made into valuable
objects which in turn might, in case of need, be converted into cash and
have an image or some other record substitute.
After the war trophies and perhaps before them, the most significant
class of offerings was that of the first fruits which ranged through the
whole field of human production from the fruit of mines, fields,
orchards, vineyards, hunting, fisheries, flocks, up through the trades
of fuller, potter, baker, tanner, shipwright, wash-woman, butcher, cook,
basket-maker, shoemaker, and so on up to professional men, recorders and
the first copy of literary works. When possible the offering might be
and was originally in kind, but when not, as in the case of the
physician or the recorder, it would be in the shape of money or, more
likely in the case of the physician, an image in some valuable substance
of the particular operation or disease for which fee was received (e.g.
the golden tumors which the Philistines sent to the Jewish shrine).
These were extremely common as the free-will offerings or vow payments
among those who had been healed. When money began to take the place of
barter the replacing of objects by their money value with registry of
same in the books of the temple grew with it and became the tithe-tax
still familiar in the English language and English society.
An extremely interesting library aspect of these (votive) collections is
the actual phonetically written books which were laid up. These can be
best illustrated from the Greek collections of books dedicated, but have
their precise technical equivalent in the books which Joshua, Samuel, or
Moses “laid up” before Jehovah, and indeed the technical term is
precisely that for putting a book into a library or a document into the
archives. The Greek collections included literary works, prize poems,
hymns to Dionysus, Apollo, Asclepius, etc. These may have been of a
strictly votive character, and this is true of many other works by
Pindar, Hesiod, Heraclitus, Aristomache, Aristotle, Agathias, Alcaeus,
and Solon which may perhaps be first fruits. This might also be true, of
course, of the astronomy of Eudoxus, the astronomical table of Onopides,
the calculations of Xenocrates and the log book of Hanno. But these at
least point to very varied contents of these “votive” libraries. These
examples above mentioned were on varied materials as well, including at
least lead, gold, marble, and bronze, apparently, as well as papyrus or
leather. Some of the works were in shorthand. While it is not easy to
conceive of literary works as first fruits in the earlier period of the
primitive writing and for the reason that such forms are themselves a
later development, many of the mnemonic objects preserved in primitive
collections certainly stand for prayers and hymns as well as narrative
records and in the collections of sacred liturgical objects these
represented set liturgical forms of words or dramatic procedures which
are books in quite a developed sense.
A curiously interesting suggestion which seems to throw light on the
literary meaning of votive objects is the statement by Miss Harrison
that the sacred tokens of Zeus as god of the storeroom were symbols, not
statues, and probably sacred tokens such as those carried in chests at
the sacred processions,—magic spells in short, kept in a jar for the
safeguarding of the storeroom. The farther identification of these with
the ambrosia and with Zeus himself seems to make rather clear that many
of the collections of sacred emblems are verbal documents. The relation
of this to what was before said of the keeping of books in jars is
obvious, and the fact is suggested that many of the so-called
collections of votive offerings are of this character, that is, mnemonic
objects, perhaps actual collections of verbal forms.
Libraries for the dead are most familiar and most highly developed in
the Egyptian burial customs. From a very early date various books,
generally known in their collected state now as chapters of the Book of
the Dead, were always buried with the important dead. Another famous
example of this burial of phonetic books with the dead is found in the
so-called Orphic or Petalian gold tablets, found at various points from
Asia Minor to Italy. The most interesting class, however, from our point
of view is the large quantities of quipus which have been found in the
Peruvian graves.
All these libraries should be clearly distinguished from other
collections of buried books, such as those which the Jews made of worn
and mutilated books. They are distinctly collections made for the use of
the dead. Some of them are for use during the journey to the Elysian
fields, the garden of Aalu, or the happy hunting grounds, some
apparently rather for use after reaching them. The Egyptian books are
rather clearly associated with the idea of the amulets and the other
written charms, though on a higher plane. The idea seems to have been
that the deceased should learn them by heart and recite them at various
points as passwords for admission to the various gates or to pass
various defenders of paradise. The Petalian tablets are precisely of the
same character. In the case of the quipus, and of symbolic emblems
generally, the analogy is perhaps rather to be found in the Egyptian
models of tools and servants, and the hunting weapons buried with the
North American Indians, also children’s playthings everywhere, where the
point seems to be to supply the dead with their customary instruments
for use after they have arrived in paradise.
Other objects of dress, ornament, etc., found in graves, strongly
suggest the similar collection during life, where clothing and ornament
is personal record of events or achievements in a man’s life. Probably
not all grave collections include the same elements, but it seems likely
that all three elements of personal record, guides to paradise, and
libraries for paradise, are to be recognized at one point or another.
The quipus form the clearest example, and the long history of knot
amulets suggests that they may have been intended primarily to play
precisely the same part that the various parts or chapters of the Book
of the Dead played. The equally extensive use, however, of knots for
records or reminders, as in the mnemonic fringes, allows the possibility
of the individual personal record, and there is, of course, also the
possibility that the graves in which they were found were the graves of
tribal recorders or reciters who carried with them the implements of
their trade in the same spirit that the hunting weapons were carried,
or, on the other hand, in the spirit of the suicide of a king’s servants
that they might serve him in the other world, and of the Ushabtiu
substitutes for this. These models of servants, boats, war implements,
and the like, in graves seem to be precisely analogous to the miniatures
substituted for actual objects in votive offerings.
Burial with the dead of a person’s favorite belongings has also to be
reckoned with in interpreting these collections. Sometimes all a man’s
favorite possessions were buried with him, and it not infrequently
happens in modern civilized times that a person has a favorite ornament
or possession buried with him. It was only yesterday that a man provided
for having his cremated body sunk in his favorite yacht.
§ 18. _Contents of primitive libraries_
The various kinds of documents in the several sorts of primitive writing
found in the different species of collections have been indicated under
the various headings. It is worth while however to gather these up
together a little and especially in view of the question of actual
origin.
It has been noted that collections of quipu, message sticks, fetishes,
personal ornaments, skin calendars, totems, votive objects and other
pictorial or mnemonic records in temples, graves, medicine tents,
private wigwams, etc., include, in pre-phonetic times, records of
personal exploits and events in personal history, family histories, and
tribal histories, hymns, prayers, amulets, financial accounts, and
economic records of various sorts, annual registers, contracts,
astronomical observations, etc.
All this has its bearing on the actual origin of libraries. Messrs.
Tedder and Brown in their excellent article in the latest edition of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica say that “the earliest use to which the
invention of inscribed or written signs was put was probably to record
important religious and political transactions”. Now as a matter of
fact, the conscious record of events and transactions selected as
important for the knowledge of posterity, or even, what was probably a
much earlier matter, for evidence of contract or practical memorandum,
represents a rather late stage in the evolution of record. It is likely
that there were many record collections before this stage was reached,
trophy, votive, etc., object records and economic records of various
sorts.
In point of fact as King remarks of the earliest Sumerian records, a
large quantity of the earliest records are land deeds, and any one who
looks over the cuneiform documents will be impressed with the fact that
an enormously large proportion of the existing documents of the early
historical period are contracts or lists of cattle or, as in the Cretan
excavation, labels, or lists of arrows and other materials laid up in
storehouses. Among Egyptian documents too, the annals of the Palermo
stone, the earliest systematic annals of Egypt, which incorporate
earlier documents from its own time (say 2700 B.C.) to six or seven
centuries farther back, are to a considerable extent filled with
memoranda of census lists of cattle taken and other lists of
possessions. It has already been noticed that among the commonest
earliest uses of notch, knot and pebble systems was use for the record
of cattle or other numerical lists of possessions.
It would be jumping at conclusions to say that the conventional sign
attached to or accompanying the pre-historic animal paintings of the
caves were numbers. They may quite likely be ownership marks. It is a
curious fact, which has recently been commented on, that these animal
paintings are of domestic animals and if so the ownership marks
themselves would be pictures of the marks actually branded upon the
animals just as such marks are still branded on cattle on the plains and
by New England farmers on their sheep. The fact that the tendency seems
to be to regard the contents of these caves as religious, and the use of
the caves as for religious purposes, suggests an analogy with votive
offerings. If the marks are in fact numbers, the combination of figure
and number suggests at once the innumerable lists of animals in the
Babylonian temple records. Ownership marks themselves are, of course,
not records of events but economic records and are very common before
the use of phonetic writing. One very large class of these is the
pottery mark which was first applied apparently by the man who made them
for himself as an ownership mark and then, as one became more skilled in
one thing and another and barter began, it passed into the trade-mark of
manufacturers which has survived in the modern trade-mark system.
It does not, of course, follow that the earliest documents were not also
religious as well as business and political, or even religious as
distinguished from the political. Actual evidence, so far as it goes,
seems to point to trophy records and votive records,—and votive records
of first fruits or other useful or valuable objects “laid up” are
economic records, but the parallel evidence as to priest king, the
evidence as to religious sanction for the protection of objects, the
hypothesis of priestly guidance in the tribal meal for fair
apportionment of spoils, etc., point to religious supervision of
economic matters. In the savage state the rule is that when food is
scanty the strong eat what they want and the weak starve—the rule of the
wolf pack. The germ of all social order is perhaps the rule that the
weak also shall share in limited food. Founded possibly in
selfishness—the will to keep the weak alive for selfish reasons, it
involves at least power of individual self-control, the considering of
remoter ends and a certain social-consciousness. The right sharing of
food supply requires a strong hand under savage conditions and every
possible sanction of authority. It was quite natural therefore that the
common meal “before God” which plays such a large part in primitive
custom should grow up—and equally natural that it should be the symbol
of peace. The priest, standing for God, divided the offering—no doubt in
the beginning the whole food supply—and perhaps “kept” the natural
relics of the feast in the way of skins and bones.
Provisionally therefore one may venture the hypothesis that the actual
beginnings of record collections were economic under religious
direction,—and are to be found in the remains of tribal feasts “before
God” although it may be fair to say that the rudiments of the matter
already existed when the strong hand of the head of the family or tribe
insisted on a fair distribution of food. Specht (p. 11) speaks of the
bones of sacrifices as “the oldest approaches to a sort of writing”, and
of course, the bones on the family plates, so to speak, were as truly
records of the parts assigned to them, so far as they went (and if their
portions had bones) as the bones of sacrifices! But then there is of
course the farther question: Did the first savage who denied himself for
the sake of one of the weak not have the religious motive, and did not
the first man who forced a tribe of his fellows to do the same, need to
use the religious sanction and invoke the fear of God as well as of his
own right arm? And then, equally of course, there is the farther
question whether the first man was a savage at all.
In the golden age before the mild and carnivorous Abel, before even his
fruitiverous and murderous older brother, before the Fall when all were
still fruit eaters and fruit eaters only, the tabu was—religious
prohibition and religious sanction. And that tabu was on the apples of
Iduna, the fruit of the tree of knowledge between good and evil, which
springs from the fountains of memory and reflection,—the golden apples
of strife which some say give immortality, some death. What is this tree
whose fruit is tangible knowledge, the food of the gods and which was in
the beginning with the first man, but a library, and what did those old
philosophizers mean by what they set down about the first man and the
way they put it? Did they mean that what is food for one is poison for
another or simply that to break tabu spells death whether it is body
food tabu or mind food tabu? Truth to tell the germ of the library is as
early as man’s mind—at least.
Back to this point, the beginning of man, we have actual literary
“authority” in the person of Specht at least, and nearly back to this
point we have good archaeological sources for our collections of written
records. There is, however, no authority in literature or in the
sources, so far as this lecturer knows, for carrying conjecture back
into the territory of the pithecanthropos, who, however, must have made
and left similar involuntary records of his gastronomic activities, but
who presumably never observed them or appointed them for memorial
purposes.
§ 19. _The administration of primitive libraries_
The question of where and by whom and how books were kept and made ready
for users is not one that has been very much discussed although the
questions who were the librarians and where were the books kept has been
more or less implied in the discussions of temple versus secular
collections. Mr. Tedder’s dictum that “these records would naturally be
preserved in sacred places, and accordingly the earliest libraries of
the world were probably temples and the earliest librarians priests” is
modified and perhaps at the same time confirmed by the history of
pre-phonetic libraries. It is true that in primitive tribes the medicine
man is generally a keeper of records, but it is true also that among the
Mexican Indians certainly, and pretty clearly among North American
Indian tribes and in many African tribes, the shaman or medicine man is
not the only keeper of records. It is true also that in the early
Egyptian practice the priests were the keepers of the books whether it
was in the temple, archives or the palace archives, but even here it
seems to be the fact that there were military records, department
records, and local administrative records in the different nomes kept by
scribes who were not priests.
The keeping of records must in fact have begun before there was any
special place, even the simplest hut or medicine wigwam or cave, set
apart for distinctively religious purposes, although the setting apart
of such places is apparently as old as the caves of the Stone Age. With
these qualifications, the history of votive offerings tends to confirm
the statement that the earliest public or tribal libraries were
religious and the corresponding librarians the priests.
In very early times, and in much later times among primitive peoples,
even the art of writing itself was often kept as a secret mystery in the
custody of priests. The name “hieroglyphics” points in this same
direction, and the temple collections of sacred books, the so-called
books of Thoth and books of Hermes, point in the same direction. In
general, however, this monopoly of letters seems rather to have been a
deliberate assumption by the priests, as it is sometimes assumed by
savage royalty, rather than the original situation. It applies, of
course, rather to newly devised kinds of symbols, such as the vast
number of systems of secret writing which have been evolved in all ages,
than to the ordinary current record methods. That some of the earliest
libraries were secret libraries, however, is an interesting fact, and
one which may throw light on the mysterious collections of shrines and
portable collections of objects in the liturgical processions in Egypt.
The methods used by these priest librarians for keeping and using the
books form in themselves an interesting and little studied subject of
very considerable extent.
The different kinds of writing required different sorts of receptacles.
The book chest or bookcase, from which has come through the Greek the
common word for library in languages other than English, was the most
universal and natural way of keeping almost every kind of tangible
record. The wooden chests and clay chests of the earliest historical
periods must have extended well back into the pre-phonetic period and
have also been found among primitive and semi-civilized peoples. They
can obviously be used for quipus, message sticks, or almost any portable
document. The same is true of the clay jar so often used in the earliest
historical period. In the case of wandering tribes, however, less rigid
or fragile materials are certainly better, and the book pouch was,
therefore, in very early, and probably much earlier use than either
boxes or jars. The skin pouch, like the skin water jar, is naturally
suggested and easily made. This early form survives in the medicine bag,
the lawyer’s green bag, and the schoolboy’s bag as well as in mail
pouches for post-office use.
The use of basketry work and perhaps other textile work as bookcase also
certainly extended back into pre-phonetic times and is represented in
primitive usage.
It is not to be supposed, of course, that in these primitive times there
were often separate buildings, such as the later Greek treasuries, or
even separate rooms as in the Egyptian temples, and the archives at
Boghaz Keuei and elsewhere, although separate huts for these and
especially for “collections of liturgical objects” would perhaps be
almost the first use for covered rooms, while sacrificing was still
conducted in the open air.
Something like a pouch or wallet must have been used for the marked
pebbles of the Stone Age and for pebble counting generally before the
grooves and rods of the abacus were invented.
The method of keeping and displaying the books in the boxes, pouches,
rooms or buildings, varied of course according to the nature of the
document. In the modern library there is a great difference between the
machinery necessary to keep and display folded documents, rolled
documents, and ordinary bound books. The pouch may have had compartments
like a modern purse. Basketry, clay and wood cases did have
compartments, one for each roll, in quite early papyrus days.
In some of the late Babylonian libraries the clay tablets were evidently
displayed on shelves but they were more commonly kept in clay boxes or
jars, alabaster boxes, and the like, after the general fashion of the
treasuries in earlier times and until the quantity became great. Twig
records were tied together in bundles, and the stringing together of
records was one of the earliest and most extensively used methods. It
may perhaps be said that it was the typical method of the earliest
records. It is found in the stringing together of trophy objects for
wearing on the person—necklaces, girdles, and draped strings of various
trophies. It is found also early in the history of the abacus where the
perforated pebbles or beads were strung on different rods set in the
ground, and it is of course found in the developed abacus. The
perforations of tablets, bearing the year marks, among the objects from
the earliest dynasties at Abydos, suggest a stringing together of these
annual records, although it is of course possible that these are labels
and the perforations used to attach them to boxes. The analogy with
annual records of primitive people, however, suggests this stringing
together.
What may be called classification of these libraries is found very
early. It is reflected perhaps in the early distinction between temple
and palace libraries, and more clearly in the primitive distinction
between shamans and secular recorders. The putting of like kinds of
works in boxes together, medical works, etc., is found as early as 2700
B.C. in Egypt and quite early in Crete. The labels of Crete point to a
classification of objects if not of object records.
When collections are small no cataloguing is necessary excepting in the
librarian’s mind, and his first mnemonic aid is classification, which is
in fact a sort of cataloguing and takes the place of all other
cataloguing. It is to be noted that in the very earliest records the
librarian goes with the king or the investigating committee when they go
to look up the records.
§ 20. _The beginnings of library schools_
The library school is commonly regarded as, and is, in a sense, a
product of the last century. Library schools are, therefore, still a new
thing. It may not seem so to you who had not been born when some of us
were lecturing at that first American library school up at Columbia
University, but it is the fact that the teachers of that school are
still living and teaching, and there were no schools of library economy
strictly speaking when they began. The well fledged library school as an
avowed school and independent unit is a product of this generation.
Nevertheless library schools too have had their beginnings. In the
immediate past schools or university courses of palaeography or archival
science have been practically library schools. In European countries,
where the handling of documents and manuscripts have been so much the
more difficult share of the problem that library economy and all the
rest has been counted negligible and has in fact been neglected, these
were real library schools, in that they were chiefly or wholly intended
for and used by those who were intending to be librarians. They taught
in fact the things which were most expected of the librarians, just as
the modern schools, in teaching almost exclusively business and
administrative methods, teach the things which the moderns expect of
their librarians. They were and are, therefore, very one-sided library
schools, lopsided on the science side, and yet perhaps not more lopsided
than our own schools are on the side of library economy.
But the beginnings of library schools may be found farther back still in
the schools of the Scriptoria of the middle ages, where librarians made
as well as kept their books, and in the temple schools of Greece and
Egypt, where men were trained to all sorts of professions, including the
keeping of books. Such schools are alleged in Babylonia as early as 3200
B.C., and more primitive still must be counted the schools for the
training in memorizing of ancient India. That some analogies to this
training in the keeping of books existed in the collections of mnemonic
books is not merely inferred in general but found in the alleged
training of keepers of quipus in the use and publication of these
records. The same is possibly true in some of the initiation ceremonies
of primitive tribes where the young men are presumably taught the use of
message sticks, secret languages, and the like. It may fairly be said
that these are remote in nature as well as in time, and yet they are as
truly the predecessors of the library schools of to-day, as these of
to-day are of the library schools of to-morrow, which are likely to
differ very considerably from those of to-day.
It does not take much of a prophet to foresee a radical development in
some of our American library schools within a very few years. When for
example, the Columbia Library school was starting, manuscripts were so
few in this country that their science and economy was a negligible
element in instruction—and as for archives, we had plenty of documents
but the very name archive, with what it connotes, was foreign and almost
unknown in America. Now there are many well recognized archives and some
of our collections of ancient manuscripts are numbered by the thousands.
Many of you will probably live to see more than one library school
equipped with full departments for instruction in palaeography and
archival science, with special curricula for each distinguished from the
general course in library economy. Possibly by that time there will also
be departments of cartography, engraving and numismatics, each with its
corps of instructors. In these respects it was something of a pity that
the library school went out of the university, but on the whole it may
be doubted if it would have ever had the great expansion or ever have
done the great work that it has done for popular education if it had
stayed in the university. In several very fundamental respects certainly
this New York Public Library is a far better environment for developing
a university of librarianship than any university of general studies.
§ 21. _The beginnings of library research_
What we have been saying to-day is only the rough blocking out of a
subject for which anthropology and the excavations in the eastern
Mediterranean region have furnished and are furnishing an enormous
amount of source material, as yet wholly unexplored for library matters.
A small part of the material has indeed been roughly explored and has
yielded rich results in fields where there was absolutely nothing known
before, but the unexplored matter is large and increasing rapidly every
day. Library research it may fairly be said is itself in its beginnings,
and American research in libraries for the older periods hardly yet
begun. Of course, as we know Aristotle had some faint notion of
anthropological methods and all the mythologizing people were, as is
very thoroughly recognized now, pursuing a sort of scientific research
and expressing and thinking in these figures of speech. In this point of
view the myths as to Hermes and Thoth, Seshait and Minerva were, if not
research, at least speculation on the origins.
Research, however, as now understood, is the product of modern natural
science and goes hand in hand with the doctrine of evolution. In this
sense there has already been much good research work in palaeography and
other branches of the book sciences in European countries. In America a
little real scientific work has been done in palaeography, more in the
history of printing and a trifle in some other branches of library
science, but the total is small and little or none of it directly
connected with the library school. It is likely, however, that in the
near future many of the library schools will be teaching methods of
research and giving diplomas which require some real contribution.
Possibly they will even have recognized departments for research. Of
this movement you will be a part and the character of the development
will be in part, possibly in large part, through what you think and do
and become during your course here. Probably we have as little notion of
what record keeping will be a few thousands of years hence, as the
inventor of the knotted cord had of this library school—and yet what we
do may perhaps affect the state of things then as the inventor of the
quipu, the alphabet, papyrus, vellum, printing, the photograph,
phonograph, or any of the great inventions in the evolution of books and
their keeping, has affected the present state of things.
§ 22. _Bibliography_
The best first source for a general idea of primitive libraries is the
readable and well illustrated little book of Edward Clodd called _The
story of the alphabet_, (N. Y., Appleton, 1912).
With this may be put the still briefer first part of Dr. Fritz Specht’s
_Die schrift_ (Berlin, 1909. 3rd ed.).
More extensive general treatments are found in Berger’s _Histoire_
(Paris, 1892), and quite exhaustively in Wuttke’s _Die entstehung der
schrift_ (Leipzig, 1872), also in W. J. Hoffmann’s _The beginnings of
writing_ (N. Y., 1895), a sketchy but comprehensive survey.
For the definition of the library see Graesse Schmidt and the other
treatises on library science, especially the older ones.
For libraries of the gods see the various works on comparative mythology
under the topics of the various writing gods, Hermes, Thoth, Odin, etc.,
or better, since the subject has not been very much worked up, in the
sources The Eddas, The Book of the Dead, The Avesta and for the Indian
matters Muir’s _Sanskrit texts_.
In the matter of antediluvian libraries see the references in Schmidt
and Richardson, but especially the sources gathered as pseudepigraphic
literature of the Old Testament first by Fabricius but now to be had in
more modern editions.
For animal, plant and memory libraries see the literature of so called
“Comparative psychology” given in admirable detail annually in the
Psychological index—looking up the articles on inward speech and writing
as well as on memory.
For Preadamites see Winchell’s _Preadamites_ (Chicago, 1880), and the
works of M’Causland.
For prehistoric and borderland libraries generally in the Mediterranean
region the various works of Mosso may be consulted, especially the _Dawn
of Mediterranean civilisation_, ch. 2, pp. 11-43, “The Origin of
Writing,” and still better, Evans’ _Scripta Minoa_ which is a classic.
For prehistoric western Europe, J. Déchelette’s _Manuel d’archéologie
prehistorique Celtique et Gallo-Romaine_, v. 1., (Paris, 1908), is most
comprehensive for a first survey of a very extensive field.
In the matter of primitive tribes Frobenius’ _Childhood of man_
(Philadelphia, 1909), although curiously sketchy and aggravatingly
brief, seems to be authoritative enough, and certainly gives the layman
in these matters a good idea in short space of the anthropological
aspects of the subject.
One of the very best sources easily accessible to all for getting first
clear impressions as to the use for record by primitive man of all the
prephonetic methods of record is F. W. Hodge, _Handbook of American
Indians North of Mexico_. Smithsonian Institute, Bureau of American
Ethnology, Bulletin 30, Pt. 1 and 2. 59th Congress, 1st Session, House
Documents v. 61 and 62. Among the many articles some of the best, but by
no means the only useful ones, are the following: Adornment, Calumet,
Color symbolism, Dramatic representations, Engraving, Featherwork,
Fetish, Hairdressing, Knots, Labrets, Mourning, Ornament, Painting,
Pictographs, Prayer sticks, Quillwork, Scalping, Shrines, Sign language,
Signals, Tattooing, Totem poles, Wampum.
Add to this for the African tribes Miss Kingsley’s _West Africa_ and
Dennett’s _At the back of the Black Man’s mind_.
For the enormous literature on tattooing see the list of hundreds of
books and articles in the catalogue of the Library of the U. S. Surgeon
General’s Office.
For the quipu an article by L. Leland Locke on _The ancient Quipu, a
Peruvian knot record_ is given in the American Anthropologist v. 14,
1912, pp. 325-32. This gives a modern point of view, has excellent
illustrations and its author promises a bibliography of the extensive
literature immediately.
For message sticks there is a long chapter with illustrations in A. W.
Howitt, _The native tribes of South East Australia_ (London, 1904, pp.
691-710).
An accessible first reference for pebble records and the abacus is the
chapter on systems of numeration in W. W. R. Ball’s _History of
mathematics_ (London, 1888), pp. 114-19, also, and perhaps even better,
J. Gow’s _A short history of Greek mathematics_ (Cambridge, 1884), pp.
26-40. Cf. also article on the abacus in the Pauly-Wissowa Encyclopedia.
In the matter of the votive offerings W. H. D. Rouse’s _Greek Votive
Offerings_ (Cambridge, 1902), is a most suggestive and readable, while
detailed and scholarly book.
On the Orphic tablets, see appendix to Miss Harrison’s _Prolegomena to
the study of Greek religion_ (Cambridge, 1903), pp. 660-74, and text
passim,—the text being one of the classics of modern comparative
religion.
_The end_
------------------------------------------------------------------------
INDEX
A, 109.
Aalu, 128.
Abacus, 76, 98, 147, 148, 163.
Abbreviation, 83, 84, 85, 109.
Abbreviation of signs, 81.
Abel, 42, 139.
Abydos, 149.
Accumulation of experience, 5.
Actor, 67, 70.
Adam, 26, 39-40, 41, 42, 43, 46, 47.
Adamite, 25.
Administration of primitive libraries, 142.
Adornment, 162.
Agathias, 125.
Alcaeus, 125.
Aleph, 56, 109.
Alpha, 56, 109.
Alphabetical printed words as ideograms, 114.
Alphabetical writing, 61.
Ambrosia, 127.
Ampère, 98.
Amulets, 93-94, 116, 128, 132.
Animal libraries, 25, 160.
Annual records, 149.
Annual registers, 132.
Antediluvian libraries, 25, 42, 160.
Anthropology, 14, 117, 156-157.
Apocryphal libraries, 33.
Archaeology, 22.
Archival science, 152.
Archives, 18, 19, 125, 147, 154, 155.
Aristomache, 125.
Aristotle, 125, 156.
Articulate speech, 61.
Asclepius, 125.
Assyrian, 111.
Astrology, 28.
Astronomical observations, 133.
Australians, 107.
Babylonia, 28, 117.
Babylonian libraries, 44, 148.
Babylonian temple records, 123, 135.
Basketry, 147.
Basketry work, 146.
Baskets, 74, 75.
Battle flags, 78.
Beads, 97, 148.
Berosus, 44, 47.
Bibliography, 24.
Bibliotheke, 15, 16.
Bibliothèque, 16.
Bidder, 98.
Birch bark, 113.
Bird tracks, 101, 102.
Blankets, 113.
Body painting, 104, 105, 106.
Bones of sacrifices, 138.
Book, 20.
Book-jars, 127.
See also, Jars.
Book keeping, 20, 142.
Book of the Dead, 127, 130.
Book-pouches, 146.
See also, Pouches.
Bookcase, 145, 146.
See also, Chests.
Books, 38.
Books of Hermes, 144.
Books of Thoth, 144.
Bookshop, 16.
Borneo, 82.
Bounty on scalps, 85.
Boxes, 146, 147, 148, 149.
Bracelets, 106.
Brahma, 27, 29, 30.
Brain, 65, 68.
Brain paths, 65.
Branding of cattle, 135.
Building, 17.
Bundles, 148.
Buried books, 128.
Bushmen, 107.
Business documents, 18, 19.
Business records, 15.
Cain, 42, 43.
Calendar skins, 113.
Calendars, 108.
Calumet, 162.
Cañute, 99.
Cardinal’s hat, 94.
Cartography, 155.
Cassianus, 45.
Cataloguing, 149.
Caves, 143.
Celestial tablets, 28.
Cell complex, 18.
Characteristic part, 83.
Cherubim, 43.
Chests, 74, 75, 145.
See also, Boxes, Bookcase, etc.
Child psychology, 10.
Child-study, 54.
Child teaching, 11.
Children, 23.
Children’s games, 23.
Children’s playthings, 129.
China, 93.
Chroniclers, 68.
Classification, primitive, 149.
Claw necklaces, 85.
Clay boxes, chests or jars, 19, 145, 146, 147, 148.
Clay tablets, 32, 148.
Clog Almanac, 95.
Coadamite libraries, 25.
Codexes, 19.
Collections, 17.
Collections of mnemonic books, 153.
Collections of sacred emblems, 127.
Collections of written records, 140.
Color symbolism, 162.
Columbia University, 151.
Comparative library science, 22.
Comparative mythology, 26.
Comparative psychology, 26.
Confucian books, 69.
Contracts, 132, 133.
Copies of necklaces, 106.
Counting house, 19, 92.
Creator gods, 27.
Crete, 84.
Cries, 10, 60.
Custom, 22.
Dances, 73, 74.
Darius, 93.
Deaf-mutes, 72.
Definition of the library, 159.
Delphis, 33.
Department records, 143.
Determinatives, 111.
Development of ideas, 10.
Dodona, 33.
Dog, 35.
Dramatic representations, 162.
Draped strings, 148.
Drum language, 99.
Earliest librarians, 142.
Earliest libraries, 142.
Economic records, 132, 133.
Eden, 43, 46.
Education, 3.
Egypt, 111, 117.
Egyptian hieroglyphics, 115.
Egyptian models of tools, 129.
Egyptian mysteries, 74.
Egyptian temples, 147.
Egyptians, 51.
Elysian fields, 128.
Engraving, 155, 162.
Enoch, 43.
Eudoxus, 125.
Eve, 46.
Evolution, 9, 22.
Evolution of language, 58.
Face painting, 105.
Family histories, primitive, 132.
Featherwork, 86, 162.
Fetish, 162.
Fetish collections, 88.
Fetish objects, 87.
Fetishes, 89, 132.
Field of library science, 3.
Filipino head hunters, 82.
Financial accounts, 132.
Finger-print records, 102.
First fruits, 123, 136.
Folded documents, 19, 147.
Folklore, 23.
Footprints, 101.
Foretelling, 13.
Fossils, 103, 106.
Fox, 34.
Fox’s brush, 85.
Genetic, 9.
Germ of the library, 140.
Gesture, 58.
Gesture language, 35, 37, 59, 60, 61, 72, 99.
Gesture records, 60.
Gesture signs, 112.
Gestures, 10, 34.
Girdles, 148.
Golden tumors, 124.
Graves, 132.
Greek mysteries, 74.
Greek temple treasuries, 120.
Hairdressing, 162.
Ham, 42.
Hand gesture, 59.
Handwriting, 36.
Hanno, 125.
Haoma, 32.
Happy hunting grounds, 128.
Head of cattle, 83.
Heap of pebbles, 97.
Heidrun, 30.
Heraclitus, 125.
Hermes, 157.
Hesiod, 125.
Hieroglyphics, 57, 144.
Historic libraries, 50.
Historical method of teaching, 10.
Homer, 70.
Horns on altars, 84.
Horns on men, 84.
Horses, painted, 109.
House of wisdom, 28.
Hunting trophies, 81, 82, 83, 84.
Hymns, 132.
Identification mark, 104.
Ideograms, 55, 99, 114.
Ideographic records, 114.
Iduna, 30, 139.
Image collections, 55, 116.
Image writing, 56, 103, 109.
Image, 124.
Imitation, 34.
Indians, 72.
Individual mark, 104.
Initiation ceremonies, 153.
Invention of handwriting, 58.
Inward books, 66, 71.
Inward handwriting, 66.
Inward record, 72.
Inward speech, 66.
Jackdaw, 34.
Jars, 32, 146.
Jewish oral tradition, 70.
Jewish temple, 120.
Jewish temple treasuries, 122.
Juno, 94.
Keeper of records, 142, 143.
Keepers of quipus, 153.
Keepers of the books, 143.
Kiowa, 108.
Knife-hilts, 95.
Knot amulets, 130.
Knot books, 93.
Knots, 162.
Knots for records or reminders, 130.
Knotted cord, 91.
Knotted measuring line, 94.
Koran, 27, 69.
Kvaser, 30.
Labels, 134, 149.
Labrets, 87, 162.
“Laid up”, 125, 136.
Land deeds, 134.
Language of the apes, 34.
Latest book not always best, 6.
Lawyer’s green bag, 146.
Lecturers, 70.
Leopard’s teeth, 103.
Leopard’s tooth necklace, 86.
Libraria, 15.
Librarians, priests, 144.
Libraries for paradise, 129.
Libraries for the dead, 116, 117, 127.
Libraries of the gods, 25, 27, 32, 160.
Library, 8, 19.
Library economy, 155.
Library research, 156.
Library school training, 1.
Library schools, 3, 151.
Library science, 4, 11.
Lightning calculators, 98.
List of arrows, 134.
Lists of cattle, 134.
Literary works, 19.
Liturgical rites, 73.
Living library, 105.
Local administrative records, 143.
Log line, 92.
Magic spells, 127.
Magical charm collections, 116.
Mail pouches, 146.
Manuscripts, 154.
Marbles, 98.
Marks, 106, 135.
Mathematics, 102.
Mead, 32.
Meal “before God”, 137.
Medical works, 149.
Medicine bag, 86, 87, 89, 116, 146.
Medicine man, 68, 142.
Medicine sack, 89.
Medicine temple, 92.
Medicine tent, 92, 132.
Medicine wigwam, 143.
Memory, 62.
Memory libraries, 36, 37, 53, 54, 55, 65.
Mendelism, 7.
Message sticks, 54, 91, 95, 132, 153, 146, 162.
Metal, 19.
Method, 22.
Methodology, 24.
Methods of research, 158.
Methuselah, 46.
Mexicans, 94.
Military records, 143.
Milk-stones, 101.
Minerva, 157.
Minstrels, 70.
Mnemonic collections, 116.
Mnemonic fringes, 93, 130.
Mnemonic libraries, 53, 54, 91.
Mnemonic objects, 90, 119, 126, 127.
Mnemonic records, 132.
Mnemonic writing, 53.
Models, 121.
Mongol libraries, 40.
Monuments, 22.
Moses, 43.
Mourning, 162.
Moving pictures, 100.
Museums, 79.
Mythologers, 32.
Myths, 157.
Natural image, 103.
Natural method, 11.
Natural object images, 101.
Natural relics, 138.
Natural stone forms, 107.
Nautical knot, 94.
Necklace, 103, 148.
Nectar, 32.
New York Public Library, 17.
New York Public Library school, 3.
Nick-stick, 95.
Nisibis, 44.
Noah, 26, 42, 43.
North American Indians, 107, 111.
Notch books, 91, 95.
Notch records, 95.
Object abbreviation, 82.
Object collections, 116, 119.
Object libraries, 53, 55.
Object record collection, 88.
Objects buried with the dead, 118.
Odin, 27, 29, 30, 31.
Odrörer, 31.
Old Testament, 69.
One book library, 17.
Onopides, 125.
Oracles, 33.
Oral speech, 58.
Oral verbal tradition, 69.
Origin of libraries, 133.
Ornament, 162.
Ornament a personal record, 129.
Orphic tablets, 128, 164.
Ownership mark, 104.
Painting, 162.
Palaeography, 152, 154, 157.
Palermo stone, 63, 134.
Pantomime, 61, 72.
Paper, 19.
Papyrus, 148.
Papyrus rolls, 32.
Paradise, 129.
Parrot, 34.
Patriarchal libraries, 25.
Patriarchs, 25.
Peace, 137.
Peas, 98.
Pebble records, 91, 97, 98, 163.
Pebbles, 147, 148.
Pentateuch, 69.
Personal adornment, 87, 132.
Peruvians, 94.
Petalian tablets, 128, 129.
Petroglyphs, 57, 108.
Philosophizers, 140.
Phonetic records, 52-53, 64, 122.
Phonetic signs, 112.
Phonetic writing, 51, 115.
Phonograms, 55, 99.
Phonograph, 158.
Phonographic records, 66.
Photograph, 158.
Pictographs, 99, 162.
Pictorial collections, 116.
Pictorial image record, 115.
Pictorial object libraries, 76.
Pictorial objects, 90, 103.
Pictorial writing, 56.
Picture book libraries, 53, 54, 100.
Picture books, 100.
Picture library, 113.
Picture writing, 53, 76, 100, 103, 111, 112, 114, 115.
Picture writing by successive pictures, 113.
Pictures, 121.
Pintadores, 105.
Plants, 25, 34, 37.
Playing of children, 98.
Political archives, 121.
Pottery marks, 101, 136.
Pouch, 98, 146, 147.
Prayer sticks, 162.
Prayers, 132.
Preadamite libraries, 25, 39, 40, 160.
Predynastic libraries, 53.
Prehistoric libraries, 50, 53, 161.
Prehistoric period, 50.
Prehistoric western Europe, 161.
Prehuman libraries, 25.
Prephonetic libraries, 53.
Priest-king, 136.
Priest librarians, 145.
Priestly collections, 116.
Primitive art, 14.
Primitive libraries, 14, 116, 159.
Primitive libraries, contents, 132.
Primitive picture writing, 107.
Primitive tribes, 161.
Primitive writing, 132.
Printed books in the Stone Age, 105.
Private library, 117.
Private record collections, 116.
Prophecy, 12.
Pseudepigraphic literature of the O. T., 160.
Psychology of children, 24.
Public documents, 18.
Public records, 117.
Pueblo Indians, 93.
Purse, 147.
Quillwork, 162.
Quipus, 54, 76, 91, 92, 94, 128, 130, 132, 146, 163.
Race history of man, 9.
Rebus, 100.
Receptacles, 145.
Reciters, 70, 130.
Record, 35, 60.
Record by primitive man, 161-162.
Record collections, 36, 138.
Record keeping, 35, 54, 61.
Record objects, 120.
Records of cattle, 134.
Reflection in water, 106.
Registry, 19.
Religious collections, 117.
Research, 157, 158.
Robes, painted, 109.
Rock carvings, 101.
Rolls, 19, 147.
Safety deposit, ancient, 120.
Sample record, 111.
Scalp belt, 85.
Scalping, 162.
Scalps, 82.
Schoolboy’s bag, 146.
Schools for library science, 4.
Schools in ancient India, 153.
Schools in Babylonia, 153.
School libraries, ancient, 121.
Science, 3.
Score, 95.
Scribes, 143.
Scriptoria, 153.
Sculpture, 103.
Seals, 101.
Secret languages, 153.
Secret libraries, 144.
Secret writing, 144.
Secular collections, 116.
Secular recorders, 149.
Seshait, 96, 157.
Seth, 42, 43.
Shadow, 106.
Shaman, 119, 143, 149.
Shelves, ancient, 148.
Shepherd boys, 98.
Ship’s figurehead, 101.
Shrines, 119, 145, 162.
Sign, 20.
Sign language, 162.
Signals, 162.
Signposts, 108.
Silhouette, 107.
Single book library, 21.
Single cell origins, 9.
Single word book, 21.
Sippara, 44.
Skin calendars, 132.
Skin marks, 106, 107.
Solon, 45, 125.
Soma, 30, 32.
Sound language, 59.
Sound records, 61.
Spoils, 78.
Stamps, 105.
Stenography, 81.
Stone, 19.
Storeroom, 127.
Story teller, 67.
Stringing together of records, 148, 149.
Study of beginnings, 5.
Sumerian, 52.
Sumerian hieroglyphics, 115.
Sumerian records, 134.
Sumerians, 51.
Sunburn, 107.
Symbol records, 121.
Symbolic emblems, 129.
Symbolic processions, 73.
Tablets, 19, 105, 123.
Tablets “laid up”, 121.
Tablets of destiny, 28.
Tablets of wisdom, 28.
Tabu, 120, 139, 140.
Tallies, 91, 95, 96.
Talmud, 27.
Tattooing, 104, 105, 162.
Temple deposits, 119.
Temple libraries, 142, 144, 149.
Temple schools, 153.
Temple treasuries, 120.
Temples, 142.
Thank offerings, 122.
Thoth, 27, 29, 157.
Tithe-tax, 124.
Totem poles, 162.
Totems, 104, 132.
Tracking of criminals, 102.
Tracks in clay, 107.
Trade-mark, 136.
Trailing, 102.
Treasuries, 78, 122, 146.
Tribal feasts, 138.
Tribal libraries, 144.
Tribal mark, 104.
Tribal meal, 137.
Tribal record collections, 116.
Tribal recorders, 130.
Tribal records, 68.
Tribal story teller, 119.
Trophy collections, 86.
Trophy necklaces, 86, 98, 106.
Trophy objects, 148.
Trophy records, 103, 133, 136.
Twig bundles, 98.
Twig records, 96, 97, 148.
Ulysses, 94.
Universe, 8.
University of librarianship, 155.
Ushabtiu, 130.
Vedas, 27, 29, 30, 69.
Vellum, 19.
Vishnu, 45.
Votive collections, 121, 124, 132.
Votive libraries, 125.
Votive offerings, 116, 118, 123, 127, 135, 163.
Wampum, 54, 96, 162.
Wampum belts, 91, 113.
War paint, 104, 105.
War trophies, 81, 84, 123.
Whole object records, 77, 82.
Wigwams, 132.
Wood, 19.
Wood cases, 147.
Wooden chests, 145.
Wooden models, 103.
Word, 20.
Writing, 60.
Writing ape, 36.
Written tablets, 70.
Xenocrates, 125.
Zeus as god of the storeroom, 126, 127.
Zodiac, 28.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Transcriber’s note:
Excepting clear outliers, variations in capitalisation and hyphenation
have been retained.
Page 40, ‘preadamite’ changed to ‘Preadamite,’ “libraries are Preadamite
survivals!”
Page 42, ‘Negro’ changed to ‘negro,’ “and negro contemporaries”
Page 93, ‘Egyptain’ changed to ‘Egyptian,’ “the ancient Egyptian
hieroglyphics”
Facing page 102, full stop struck following ‘p. 27,’ “Childhood of Man,
p. 27”
Page 139, ‘carniverous’ changed to ‘carnivorous,’ “mild and carnivorous
Abel”
Page 161, punctuation and capitalisation changed for clarity from “the
Dawn of Mediterranean civilisation. Ch. 2. pp. 11-43 The Origin of
Writing and still better Evans, Scripta Minoa” to “the Dawn of
Mediterranean civilisation, ch. 2, pp. 11-43, “The Origin of Writing,”
and still better, Evans’ Scripta Minoa”
Page 164, title italicised, “_Prolegomena to the study of Greek
religion_”
Index B, comma inserted after ‘also,’ “See also, Pouches.”
Index C, comma inserted after ‘146,’ “Clay boxes, chests or jars, 19,
145, 146, 147, 148.”
Index F, ‘Foot prints’ changed to ‘Footprints,’ “Footprints, 101.”
Index L, comma struck after ‘always,’ “Latest book not always best, 6.”
Index L, second ‘bag’ struck, “Lawyer’s green bag, 146.”
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