TOTEMIC WRITING

INDIAN PETITION TO THE UNITED STATES CONGRESS

([See Page 68])

THE STORY OF
THE ALPHABET

by
EDWARD CLODD

AUTHOR OF

"THE STORY OF PRIMITIVE MAN", "PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION", "THE STORY OF CREATION", ETC. ETC.

"The two greatest inventions of the human mind are writing and money—the common language of intelligence, and the common language of self-interest."—

Marquis de Mirabeau.

WITH NINETY ILLUSTRATIONS

LONDON
GEORGE NEWNES, LIMITED

SOUTHAMPTON STREET, STRAND

1900

THIS LITTLE HISTORY OF

A B C

IS DEDICATED TO

DOROTHY DAY

BY HER LOVING GRANDFATHER

PREFACE

If this little book does not supply a want, it fills, however imperfectly, a gap; for the only work in the English language on the subject—Canon Isaac Taylor's "History of the Alphabet"—is necessarily charged with a mass of technical detail which is stiff reading even for the student of graphiology. Moreover, invaluable and indispensable as is that work, it furnishes only a meagre account of those primitive stages of the art of writing, knowledge of which is essential for tracing the development of that art, so that its place in the general evolution of human inventions is made clear. Prominence is therefore given to this branch of the subject in the following pages.

In the recent reprint of Canon Taylor's book no reference occurs to the important materials collected by Professor Flinders Petrie and Mr. Arthur J. Evans in Egypt and Crete, the result of which is to revolutionise the old theory of the source of the Alphabet whence our own and others are derived. This opens up a big question for experts to settle; and here it must suffice to present a statement of the new evidence, and to point out its significance, so that the reader be not taken into the troubled atmosphere of controversy. That he may, further, not be distracted by footnotes, references to the authorities cited are printed in the text.

E. C.

Rosemont, 19 Carleton Road,
Tufnell Park, N.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Acknowledgments are gratefully tendered to Messrs. Macmillan, Messrs. Longmans, Mr. John Murray, Messrs. Eyre & Spottiswoode, Mr. Edward Arnold, Messrs. Witherby, the Cambridge University Press, and the Anthropological Institute for permission to reproduce Illustrations from their several publications.

THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY

"What is ever seen is never seen," and it may be questioned if one in ten thousand of the readers of to-day ever pauses to ask what is the history of the conventional signs called the Alphabet, which, in their varying changes of position, make up the symbols of the hundred thousand words and more contained in a comprehensive dictionary of the English tongue.

Professor Max Müller says that "by putting together twenty-three or twenty-four letters in every possible variety. We might produce every word that has ever been used in any language of the world. The number of these words, taking twenty-three letters as the basis, would be 25,852,016,738,884,976,640,000, or, if we took twenty-four, would be 620,448,401,733,239,439,360,000; but," as the Professor warns us, in words the force of which will be manifest later on, "even these trillions, billions, and millions of sounds would not be words, because they would lack the most important ingredient—that which makes a word to be a word—namely, the different ideas by which they were called into life, and which are expressed differently in different languages." (Lectures on Language, ii. 81.)

These words themselves, as will also be shown concerning the ear-pictures by which they are represented, reveal in their analysis a story of the deepest interest. In the happy simile quoted by the late Archbishop Trench in his Study of Words, they are "fossil history," and, as he adds, "fossil poetry and fossil ethics" also. To cite a few examples, more or less apposite to our subject, "book" is probably from the Anglo-Saxon bóc, a "beech," tablets of the bark of that tree being one of the substances on which written characters were inscribed. Parallel to this are the words "library" and "libel," both derived from the Latin liber, the inner bark or rind of a tree used for paper; while, as everybody knows, the word "paper" preserves the history of the manufacture of writing material in Egypt from the pith of the papyrus reed, the use of which goes back, as will be shown hereafter, to a high antiquity, and the classic name of which, biblos, has been applied to "bible." "Code" is derived from the Latin codex, "a tree-trunk"; "letters" comes through the French lettre from the Latin lino, litum, "to daub" or "besmear," an early mode of writing being the graving of characters on tablets smeared with wax. "Tablet" is the diminutive of "table," which comes from the Latin tabula, "a board," and the ancient writing instrument, called a stylus, illustrates the passage of language from the concrete to the abstract in its application to the way in which a writer expresses his ideas. We speak of his "style," just as we say "he wields an able pen," this word being derived from the Latin penna, "a feather." The phrase lapsus calami, "a slip of the pen," preserves record of the use of the reed (Latin calamus), which also survives in "quill," from Old English quylle, "a reed." But the metal pen has a longer history than was suspected, since Dr. Waldstein has found one, cut and slit like our modern specimens, in a tomb of the third century b.c., at Eretria in the island of Eubœa in the Ægean. "Volume," from Latin volumen, "a roll," tells us what was the usual form of books in ancient times, the old form of preservation and custody of legal records surviving in "Rolls of Court," "Master of the Rolls," and so forth. So in "diploma," which, literally, is a paper folded double, from Greek diploō, "to fold." Both "diplomacy" and "duplicity" mean "doubling," but the force of the parallel may not be pursued here. Finally—for the list might be extended indefinitely—"parchment" is borrowed from Pergamus, a town in Asia Minor, where skin came into general use, Ptolemy V. (205-185 b.c.), so runs a doubtful story told by Pliny, having prohibited the export of papyrus from Egypt.

As words, under the analyses now indicated, yield the history of their origin and of the changes both in spelling and meaning which follow their passage from older forms, and likewise reveal the reasons which governed the choice of them, so the letters of which they are made up bear witness to similar laws of development. The story which it is the purpose of this little book to endeavour to extract from them has mutilated and imperfect chapters, and, moreover, missing chapters which may never be recovered. But sufficing material survives for piecing together a narrative of the triumph of the human mind over one of the most difficult tasks to which it could apply itself; a task which, unwrought, would have made advance in the highest sense impossible beyond a certain point. In the highest sense, because man has gone a long way without knowledge either of reading or writing. These "two R's" are not necessary in matters of personal contact with his fellows, while in other ways progress is independent of them. An illiterate man may be an accomplished landscape artist, a skilful engineer, a successful farmer or trader, and prosperous in many ways where the aim of life is to "live by bread alone." It is true that much of the intellectual and spiritual record of man's past was long preserved in the form of oral tradition. But to the volume of such record there is a limit, while time and caprice alike work havoc in it. Memory, great as was its capacity of old, before dependence on books impaired it, was not infallible, nor, as the world's stock of knowledge increased, could it "pull down its barns and build greater wherein to bestow its goods." We have, by an effort of the imagination well-nigh impossible to make, only to assume the absence of any means of material record of the involved and myriad events which fill the world's past, to conceive the intellectual poverty of the present. We have only to assume the absence of any medium whereby we could communicate with friends at a distance, or whereby the now complex and countless dealings between man and man could be set down and every transaction thus "brought to book," to realise the hopeless tangle of our social life. All that memory failed to overlap would be an absolute blank; the dateless and otherwise uninscribed monuments which the past had left behind would but deepen the darkness; all knowledge of the strivings and speculations of men of old would have been unattainable; all observation and experience through which science has advanced from guesses to certainties irretrievably lost; life could have been lived only from "hand to mouth," and the spectacle presented of an arrested world of sentient beings. Save in fragmentary echoes repeated by fugitive bards, the great epics of East and West would have perished, and the immortal literatures of successive ages never have existed. The invention of writing alone made possible the passage from barbarism to civilisation, and secured the continuous progress of the human race. It is solely through the marvellous perfecting, through stages of slow advance, of a scripture that "cannot be broken," that the past is as eloquent, as real, as the present. "The pen is mightier than the sword" in accumulating and preserving for both gentle and simple the store of the world's intellectual wealth, unto which "all the things that can be desired are not to be compared."

These reflections are commonplace enough, but they may not be wholly needless, and an example or two of the impression made on the barbaric mind by written symbols may help us the better to appreciate what our case would be without them. In the narrative of his adventures in the Tonga Islands, published about ninety years ago, William Mariner tells how anxiety to escape from the place where, on the wreck of the ship Port au Prince, he and some other Englishmen had been cast ashore, led him to write, by means of a solution of gunpowder and a little mucilage for ink, a letter which he entrusted to a friendly native to give to the captain of any vessel that might happen to touch at Tonga. Finow, the king, came to hear of this, and got hold of the letter. But he could make "neither head nor tail" of it. However, by threats of death if he refused, one of Mariner's shipmates was made to interpret the mystic signs to Finow, who, still puzzled, sent for Mariner and ordered him to write down something else, saying, when Mariner asked for a subject, "Put down me." This done, Finow sent for another sailor, who read the royal name aloud, whereupon the king appeared more bewildered than ever, exclaiming. "This not like me; where are my legs?" Then it slowly dawned upon him that it was possible to make signs of things which both the writer and the interpreter had seen. But the bewilderment returned when Mariner told him that he could write down a description of any one whom he had never seen, or of an event which happened long ago or far away, when these were told him. Thereupon Finow whispered to him the name of Tongoo Aho, a former king of Tonga, who, it had come to Mariner's knowledge, was blind in one eye. When Mariner set these things down, and the king had them read to him, it was explained that "in several parts of the world messages were sent to great distances through the same medium, and, being folded and fastened up, the bearer could know nothing of the contents; and that the histories of whole nations were thus handed down to posterity without spoiling by being kept. Finow acknowledged this to be a most noble invention, but added that it would not at all do for the Tonga Islands; that there would be nothing but disturbances and conspiracies, and he should not be sure of his life perhaps another month. He said, however, jocularly, that he should like to know it himself, and for all the women to know it, that he might make love with less risk of discovery, and not so much chance of incurring the vengeance of their husbands." (Mariner's Tonga Islands, i. 116, ed. 1827.) The Smithsonian Reports, 1864, tell a story of an Indian who was sent by a missionary to a colleague with four loaves of bread, accompanied by a letter stating their number. The Indian ate one of the loaves, and was, of course, found out. He was sent on a similar errand and repeated the theft, but took the precaution to hide the letter under a stone while he was eating the bread, so that it might not see him!

Barbaric ideas fall into fundamentally-related groups, and the examples just given are connected with the widespread belief in the efficacy of written characters to work black or white magic, to effect cures, and otherwise act as charms—a belief largely derived from the legends which ascribe the origin of writing to the gods—legends themselves the product of Ignorance, the mother of Mystery. In an Assyrian inscription, Sardanapalus V. speaks of the cuneiform or wedge-shaped characters as a revelation to his royal ancestors from the god Nebo; among the Egyptians, Thoth was the scribe of the gods, and their oldest forms of writing were named "the divine." Chinese tradition ascribes the invention of writing to the dragon-faced, four-eyed sage Ts'ang Chien, who saw in the stars of heaven, the footprints of birds, and the marks on the back of the tortoise, the models on which he formed the written characters. At this invention "heaven caused showers of grain to descend from on high; the disembodied spirits wept in the darkness, and the dragons withdrew themselves from sight." On the altars raised to Ts'ang Chien throughout the Celestial Land, every scrap of fugitive paper which has writing on it is burned in his honour. In Hindu legend, Brahma, the supreme god of the Indian Trinity, gives knowledge of letters to men; and Nâgari, in which alphabet the sacred books are written, is spoken of as "belonging to the city of the gods." The handwriting of Brahma, legend further says, is seen in the serrated sutures of men's skulls; and as Yahweh or Jehovah wrote the "Ten Words" with his own finger, so Brahma inscribed the holy texts of the Veda on leaves of gold. The story of the culture-hero, Cadmus, introducing the alphabet from Phœnicia into Greece is well known; while in Irish legend, Ogmios, the Gaelish Hercules, is familiar as the inventor of writing. But perhaps less familiar is that in the Northern Saga which attributes the invention of runes to Odin:—

"Thought-runes shalt thou deal with If thou wilt be of all men Fairest-souled, wight and wisest. These are ded, These first cut, These first took to heart high Hropt." (Odin.)

Belief in the power of the spoken word, notably as a curse, has world-wide illustration; and not less is that in the power of the written word or of the pictorial symbol. Cabalistic formulæ and texts from sacred writings play a large part; the virtue in Jewish phylacteries and frontlets was believed to depend on the texts which they enclosed; the amulets worn by Abyssinians to avert the evil eye and ward off demons have the secret name of God chased on them; passages from the Koran are enclosed in bags and hung on Turkish and Arab horses to protect them against like maleficence; prayers to the Madonna are slipped into charm-cases to be worn by the Neapolitans; while not so many years back (indeed, so persistent are superstitions, that kindred practices obtain throughout Europe to this day) sick folk in the Highlands were fanned with the leaves of the Bible.

Fig. 1.—Magical Pictograph against Stings

In his instructive and entertaining book on Evolution in Art, Professor Haddon refers to a series of valuable observations on the use of picture-writing as a charm against diseases and stings of venomous animals, among the Semang tribes of East Malacca, made by Mr. H. Vaughan Stevens, and edited by Mr. A. Grünwedel. The women wear bamboo combs on which are drawn patterns of flowers or parts of flowers believed to be antidotes to fevers and other invisible diseases; for injuries and wounds such as those caused by a falling bough in the jungle, or the bite of a centipede, other means are employed. Among the magic-working devices incised in bamboo staves by the Semang magicians, Mr. Vaughan Stevens gives illustrations of one against the stings of scorpions and centipedes (Fig. 1), and of another against a skin disease (Fig. 2).

In the first-named there is depicted the figure of an Argus pheasant, the wheel-like patterns beneath which represent the eye-marks in the tail-feathers. On the left is an orange-coloured centipede, the head of which points to the tail of the pheasant. The dotted lines round the centipede are tracks which it leaves on a man's skin. On the other side of the Argus are two blue scorpions, the figures at the end of their tails representing a swelling in the flesh of the persons stung by them. The female of this kind of scorpion is more poisonous than the male, and is said to cause double stings, which are denoted by the two rows of dots in the top figure. "The significance of this bamboo is that as the Argus pheasant feeds on centipedes and scorpions, so its help is invoked against them by striking the bamboo against the ground."

Fig. 2.—Magical Device against Skin Disease

The other example, which exhibits a much more complicated and conventionalised device, is designed as a charm against two kinds of skin disease, the one represented by fish scales indicating leprous white ulcers, the other represented by oval figures indicating hard knots on and under the skin. The rows stand for the several parts of the body which are affected, and the figures increase in size to show that the disease will spread if not cured. Although the way in which the charm is applied is not clear, there is no doubt that belief in its virtue belongs to the large class of barbaric ideas grouped under sympathetic magic, i.e. that things outwardly resembling one another are thought by the barbaric or illiterate to possess the same qualities. The result is that effects are brought about in the individual himself by the production of similar effects in things belonging to him, or, what is more to the purpose, in images or effigies of him. Here it suffices to say that the most familiar examples of "sympathetic magic" are the making of an image of the person whose destruction is sought, of wax, clay, or other substance, so that as the wax is melted, or the clay dissolved in running water, his life may decline or wear away to its doom. Such examples are gathered alike from civilised and barbaric folk, from Devonshire and the Highlands to North America and Borneo.

Things are invested with mystery in the degree that their origins and causes are unknown; and the beliefs and customs, of which a few among the teeming illustrations have been given, invite the reflection that, had writing remained the monopoly of any caste or class, it would have remained an engine of enslavement, instead of becoming an engine of liberation of the mind. "Knowledge is power," and whatever has ensured the possession and the retention of power over his fellows has been seized upon by man—notably by man as priest, from medicine-man to Pope, as wielder of weapons of authority, the more dreaded when unseen or intangible. Signs which were unadapted, and, things being what they then were, impossible, for general use, and moreover needing great expenditure of time and labour to master them, would come under this head, and it was only through their ultimate simplification that they could become serviceable to the many, and made vehicles of the diffusion of knowledge. How monstrous and penal an instrument of inequality learning itself long continued among ourselves is shown in the fact that "benefit of clergy"—one among many evidences of the old conflict between the civil and the sacerdotal powers—was not wholly repealed until the year 1827. Under this statute, exemption from trial for criminal offences before secular courts was extended, by law passed in the reign of Edward I., not only to ecclesiastics, but to any man who could read. A prisoner sentenced to death might be claimed by the bishop of the diocese as a clerk and haled before him, when the ordinary gave the man a Latin book from which to read a verse or two. If the ordinary said "Legit ut clericus"—i.e. "he reads like a clerk"—the offender was only burnt in the hand, and then set free.

CHAPTER II

THE BEGINNINGS OF THE ALPHABET

We may, without further preface, advance to our main purpose, which is to supply an account of the stages through which the alphabets of the civilised world passed before they reached their, practically, final form. Here, as in aught else that the wit of man has devised and the cunning of his hand applied, the law of development is seen at work. In the quest for traces of any fundamental differences between him and the animals to which he stands in nearest physical and psychical relation, he has been variously described as tool-maker, fire-maker, possessor of articulate speech, and so forth; but the further that observation and comparison have been made, the more apparent has it become that those differences are of degree and not of kind. Some evidence in support of this has been already summarised in previous volumes of this series; and here it suffices to say that it is in the inventive arts, as e.g. the production of fire, of the mode of which nature supplied the hints, and the making of pictorial signs, in which the mimetic instinct, shared by some of the lower animals, comes into play, that, restricting the comparison to things material, man appears upon a higher plane. But this has been reached by processes of development involving no break in the continuity of things.

In this "story" we start with man as sign-maker. His prehistoric remains supply evidence of artistic capacity in a remote past, and set before us in vigorous, rapid outline what his life and surroundings must have been. On fragments of bone, horn, schist, and other materials, the savage hunter of the Reindeer Period, using a pointed flint flake, depicted alike himself and the wild animals which he pursued. From cavern-floors of France, Belgium, and other parts of Western Europe, whose deposits date from the old Stone Age, there have been unearthed rude etchings of naked, hardy men brandishing spears at wild horses, or creeping along the ground to hurl their weapons at the urus, or wild ox, or at the woolly-haired elephant. A portrait of this last named, showing the creature's shaggy ears, long hair, and upwardly curved tusks, its feet being hidden in the surrounding high grass, is one of the most famous examples of palæolithic art.

Here let us pause to say that the apparent absence of other indications of man's presence, showing passage from lower to higher stages of culture, led to the assumption that vast gaps have occurred in his occupancy of north-western and other parts of Europe. The theory of absolute disconnection between the Old Stone Age and the Newer Stone Age long held the field, but it has disappeared before the evidence against tenantless intervals of areas in prehistoric times. And so with succeeding periods. There is no warrant for assuming entire effacement of one race, with resulting clear field for the immigration of another race; and modern archæological research is producing the links which connect the rude art of Northern with that of Southern Europe, and, what will be shown to be of great moment, with that of the Eastern Mediterranean. The examples of this must remain rare, since only pictographs on some durable material, or specimens of the fictile art, would survive the action of time. But, happily, if they are infrequent, they are widely distributed. For to those yielded by the bone-caverns already referred to are to be added rock-carvings in Denmark, and figures on limestone cliffs of the Maritime Alps; there are curious graphic signs, suggestive to some eyes of a primitive script, in the Marz d'Azil cave; while still more interesting are the animal and fylfot or swastika-like figures (the swastika is a solar symbol) "painted probably by early Slavonic hands on the face of a rock overhanging a sacred grotto in a fiord of the Bocche di Cattaro." To this last-named example, given by Mr. Arthur Evans in his paper on "Primitive Pictographs" (Journal of Hellenic Studies, xiv. ii. 1894) may be added some pregnant remarks by the same authority. "When we recall the spontaneous artistic qualities of the ancient race which has left its records in the carvings on bone and ivory in the caves of the 'Reindeer Period,' this evidence of at least partial continuity on the northern shores of the Mediterranean suggests speculations of the deepest interest. Overlaid with new elements, swamped in the dull, though materially higher, Neolithic civilisation, may not the old æsthetic faculties which made Europe the earliest-known home of anything that can be called human art, as opposed to mere tools and mechanical contrivances, have finally emancipated themselves once more in the Southern regions, where the old stock most survived? In the extraordinary manifestations of artistic genius to which, at widely remote periods and under the most diverse political conditions, the later populations of Greece and Italy have given birth, may we not be allowed to trace the re-emergence, as it were, after long underground meanderings, of streams whose upper waters had seen the daylight of that earlier world?" (Presidential Address to the Anthropological Section, British Association. Nature, 1st Oct. 1896.)

But man at the same stage of culture being everywhere practically the same, there is, in the paucity of examples from the Europe of the past, compensation in the specimens of graphic art found among extant barbaric folk. It is probable that a good proportion of these lack significance, but the pictograph is the parent of the alphabet, and therefore the careful transcripts of rock and other paintings which explorers have made may yet prove to be of value when interpreted in the light of examples whose gradations have been traced. Since the extinction of the Tasmanians, whom anthropologists regard as the nearest approach to Palæolithic man, the Australians stand, in certain respects, at the bottom of the scale, although the ingenuity of their social organisations warrants hesitation in making them the nadir of human kind. But as the reproductions show (Figs. 3 and 3a), their attempts at art are inferior to the spirited designs of the prehistoric cave-dwellers.

Fig. 3.—Aboriginal Rock Carvings (Australia)

Fig. 3a.—Aboriginal Rock Paintings (Australia)

Mr. R. H. Mathews, who has made an extensive survey of the rock-paintings and carvings, says that one type serves for another, so lacking are all in variety; "the stencilled and impressed hands, the outlines of men and animals rudely depicted in various colours, appearing to be universally distributed over the continent." He adds that "although it will be better not to attempt to suggest meanings to the groups of native drawings until a very much larger amount of information has been brought together ... still when we know that drawings such as these by uncivilised nations of all times, in various parts of the world, have ultimately been found to be full of meaning, it is not unreasonable for us to expect that the strange figures painted and carved upon rocks all over Australia will some day be interpreted. Perhaps some of these pictures are ideographic expressions of events in the history of the tribe; certain groupings of figures may portray some legend; many of the animals probably represent totems; and it is likely that a number of them were executed for pastime and amusement." (Journal of the Anthropological Institute, xxv. 2, p. 153.) In their recently published "Native Tribes of Central Australia," Messrs. Spencer and Gillen divide the rock-paintings into two series, those of ordinary type, and those which, found in places strictly taboo to women and children and uninitiated men, are associated with totems, i.e. with the natural object, whether living or non-living, from which the tribe believes itself to be descended. These totemistic figures, called Churinga (a general native term for sacred objects) Ilkinia, are frequently in the form of spiral and concentric circles, others being portraits of the totems themselves, as low in type as the centipede or witchetty grub.

Fig. 4.—Bushman Paintings

Fig. 4a.—Bushman Paintings

The faces of sandstone caverns in South Africa are often covered with paintings which are the handiwork of Bushmen (Figs. 4, 4a, and 4b). With a skill showing some advance on the art of the Australian aborigines there is depicted, usually in black or brownish-red colour, the hunting and other exploits which make up life among a people who represent the aboriginal races of the southern portion of the continent. Some of the drawings border on caricature; others, in the words of an observer, "suggest actual portraiture. The ornamentation of the head-dresses, feathers, beads tassels, &c., seemed to have claimed much care, while the higher class of drawings indicate correct appreciation of the actual appearance of objects, and perspective and foreshortening are well rendered." (Mark Hutchinson, Journal of the Anthropological Institute, xiv. p. 464.)

Fig. 4b.—Specimen of Bushmen Rock Sculptures

Fig. 4c.—Engravings found on Rocks in Algeria

(compare with Bushmen type)

These probably now degraded folk, who live on lizards, locusts, and roots when other food fails, have a good store of legend and folk-lore. Fig. 5 seems to portray their belief in "sympathetic magic," if, as conjectured, it represents the dragging of an hippopotamus or other amphibious animal across the land for the purpose of producing rain. The Semangs of the Malay Peninsula use a bamboo rain-charm (Fig. 6), on which the wind-driven showers are depicted in oblique lines, and, among many other examples wherein the higher and lower culture meet together, there is one supplied by old Rome, where it was the custom to throw images of the corn-spirit into the Tiber so that the crops might be drenched with rain. As showing the persistency of superstitions, here is a paragraph anent the severe drought in Russia last autumn: "In another village of the district of Bugulma some moujiks opened the grave of a peasant who had lately been buried, and then poured water over the corpse, in the belief that this was the best method of bringing rain."—Daily Chronicle, 24th August 1899.

Fig. 5.—Bushman Rain-Charm.

Fig. 6.—Semang Rain-Charm.

Fig. 6a.—Record of Expedition.

The New World is rich in ancient monuments often adorned with symbolic devices, but older than these are the pictographs covering erratic blocks and cliff escarpments from Guiana to Nova Scotia, and westward to the Rockies. Some are incised in the hard stone to a depth of half an inch; others are traced in broad lines of red ochre or other colour, their weather-worn state witnessing to a high antiquity. Their purpose is often not easy to explain, but we know that therein lie the germs whence alphabets sprung. One picture (Fig. 6a) on the face of a rock on the shore of Lake Superior, copied and interpreted by Schoolcraft, records an expedition across the lake, led by Myeengun, or "Wolf," a noted Indian chief. The crew of each canoe is denoted by a series of upright strokes, Myeengun's chief ally, Kishkemanusee, the "Kingfisher," being in the first canoe. The arch with three circles (three suns under heaven) shows that the voyage took three days. The tortoise (a frequent symbol of "land" in North American picture-writing) seems to indicate the arrival of the expedition, while the picture of the mounted chief evidences that the event took place after the introduction of horses into Canada. Some of the examples, less easy to explain, represent the migration of tribes; some, like the sculptured eagle near the borders of Quauhuahuac ("the place near the eagle") are symbolic boundary-marks; while others are direction-marks. Some have life-size human figures, rayed or horned; one engraved on a rock overlooking the Big Harpeth, in Tennessee, depicts a sun visible four miles off. Doubtless a large number of this class (Fig. 6b) are merely the outcome of that rude artistic fancy of man which, as has been seen, has had continuous expression from prehistoric times.

Fig. 6b.—Various Types of the Human Form

CHAPTER III

MEMORY-AIDS AND PICTURE-WRITING

The printed letters or sound-signs which compose our alphabet are about two thousand five hundred years old. "Roman type" we call them, and rightly so, since from Italy they came. They vary only in slight degree from the founts of the famous printers of the fifteenth century, these being imitations of the beautiful "minuscule" (so called as being of smaller size) manuscripts of four hundred years earlier. Minuscule letters are cursive (i.e. running) forms of the curved letters about an inch long called "uncials" (from Latin uncia, "an inch," or from uncus, "crooked"), which were themselves derived from the Roman letters of the Augustan age. These Roman capitals, to which those in modern use among us correspond, "are practically identical with the letters employed at Rome in the third century b.c.; such, for instance, as are seen in the well-known inscriptions on the tombs of the Scipios, now among the treasures of the Vatican. These, again, do not differ very materially from forms used in the earliest existing specimens of Latin writing, which may probably be referred to the end of the fifth century b.c. Thus it appears that our English alphabet is a member of that great Latin family of alphabets, whose geographical extension was originally conterminous, or nearly so, with the limits of the Western Empire, and afterwards with the ancient obedience to the Roman See." (Canon Isaac Taylor's History of the Alphabet, vol. i. p. 71.)

The age of our own alphabet being thus indicated, we may postpone further remark on its lineal descent, and pass to inquiry into the primitive forms of which all alphabets are the abbreviated descendants, and also to reference to some primitive methods for which they are substitutes.

A survey of the long period which this development covers shows four well-marked stages, although in these, as in aught else appertaining to man's history, there are no true lines of division. The making of these, like the apparent lines of longitude and latitude of the cartographer, is justified by their convenience. These stages are:—

(a) The Mnemonic, or memory-aiding, when some tangible object is used as a message, or for record, between people at a distance, and also for the purpose of accrediting the messenger. As will be seen, it borders on the symbolic; indeed, it anticipates that stage.

(b) The Pictorial, in which a picture of the thing is given, whereby at a glance it tells its own story.

(c) The Ideographic, in which the picture becomes representative, i.e. is converted into a symbol.

(d) The Phonetic, in which the picture becomes a phonogram, or sound-representing sign. The phonogram may be—(1) verbal, i.e. a sound-sign for a whole word; (2) syllabic, i.e. a sound-sign for syllables; or (3) alphabetic, a sound-sign for each letter.

To recapitulate stages (b), (c), and (d):—

In stage (b) the sign as eye-picture suggests the thing;

In stage (c) the sign as eye-picture suggests the name;

In stage (d) the sign as ear-picture suggests the sound;

and it is in the passage from (c) to (d), whereby constant signs are chosen to stand for constant sounds, that the progress of the human race was assured, because only thereby was the preservation of all that is of abiding value made possible.

Fig. 7.—Quipu, for Reckoning, &c.

(a) The Mnemonic Stage.—This is well represented by "quipus" or knotted cords, and by wampums or shell-ornamented belts. The quipu (Fig. 7) has a long history, and is with us both in the rosary on which the Roman Catholic counts his prayers, in the knot which we tie in our handkerchief to help a weak memory, and in the sailor's log-line. Herodotus tells us that when Darius bade the Ionians remain to guard the floating bridge which spanned the Ister, he "tied sixty knots in a thong, saying: 'Men of Ionia ... do ye keep this thong and do as I shall say:—so soon as ye shall have seen me go forward against the Scythians, from that time begin and untie a knot on each day; and if within this time I am not here, and ye find that the days marked by the knots have passed by, then sail away to your own lands'" (iv. 98). And the same obviously handy device is of widespread use, reaching its more elaborate form among the ancient Peruvians, from whose language the term "quipu," meaning "knot," is borrowed. It consists of a main cord, to which are fastened at given distances thinner cords of different colours, each cord being knotted in divers ways for special purposes, and each colour having its own significance. Red strands stood for soldiers, yellow for gold, white for silver, green for corn, and so forth, while a single knot meant ten, two single knots meant twenty, double knots one hundred, and two double knots two hundred. Such simple devices served manifold purposes. Besides their convenience in reckoning, they were used for keeping the annals of the empire of the Incas; for transmitting orders to outlying provinces; for registering details of the army; and even for preserving records of the dead, with whom the quipu was buried, as in old Egypt the biography or titles of the deceased were set forth in hieroglyph and deposited in the tomb. Quoting from Von Tschudi's Peru, Dr. E. B. Tylor says that each town had its officer whose special function was to tie and interpret the quipus. They were called Quipucamayocuna, or knot-officers; but although they attained great facility in their work, they were seldom able to read a quipu without the aid of an oral commentary. When one came from a distant province, it was necessary to give notice with it whether it referred to census, tribute, war, and so forth. But by constant practice they so far perfected the system as to be able to register with their knots the most important events of the kingdom, and to set down its laws and ordinances. Although vain attempts to read the quipus have been made in the present day, Dr. Tylor adds that there are still Indians in Southern Peru "who are perfectly familiar with the contents of certain historical quipus preserved from ancient times; but they keep their knowledge a profound secret, especially from the white men." (Early History of Mankind, p. 160.) This knot-reckoning is in use among the Puna herdsmen of the Peruvian plateaux. On the first strand of the quipu they register the bulls, on the second the cows, these again they divide into milch-cows and those that are dry; the next strands register the calves, the next the sheep and so forth, while other strands record the produce; the different colours of the cords and the twisting of the knots giving the key to the several purposes. Akin to this is the practice among the Paloni Indians of California, concerning whom Dr. Hoffman reports that each year a certain number are chosen to visit the settlement at San Gabriel to sell native blankets. "Every Indian sending goods provided the salesman with two cords made of twisted hair or wool, on one of which was tied a knot for every real received, and on the other a knot for each blanket sold. When the sum reached ten reals, or one dollar, a double knot was made. Upon the return of the salesman, each person selected from the lot his own goods, by which he would at once perceive the amount due, and also the number of blankets for which the salesman was responsible." The natives of Ardrah, in West Africa, use small cords, each knot in which has a meaning; and among the Jebus, the objects knotted into strings tell their separate tale, cowrie shells placed face to face denoting friendship; an arrow, war; and so forth. Other tribes have devised message-sticks somewhat after the well-known native Australian type. More highly-developed knot-reckoning is found among the Mexican Zuni, and in more primitive form among some North American Indians; but, not tarrying to detail these, we cross the Pacific, noting, on our passage, that a generation ago the Hawaiian tax-gatherers kept accounts of the assessable property throughout the island on lines of cordage from four to five hundred fathoms long. Knots, loops, and tufts of different shape, size, and colour indicated the several districts, and the amount of tax to be paid by each inhabitant was defined by marks of the same character as those now specified, with such variety as to prevent confusion. The Shû-King, a sacred historical book of the Chinese, records the use of knotted cords prior to the invention of writing. The number and distances of the knots served as conventional mnemonics, and also as imperial records, until written characters replaced them. "Legend refers the tying of knots in strings to about 2800 b.c., when Fo-hi invented eight symbols, and at the same time pictorial representations of these knotted strings were taken to indicate the object thereby symbolised." These Morse-like symbols are:—

(C. Gardner, Journal Ethnological Society, 1870, vol. ii. p. 5)

Another Chinese legend says that "the most ancient forms were five hundred and forty characters, formed by a combination of knotted strings and the eight symbols, made in the form of birds' claws in various states of tension, and that all these five hundred and forty characters were suggested to the inventor by the marks (left by the claws) upon the sand." The use of looped or knotted cords is depicted in Egyptian hieroglyph, and among other tribes of the African continent the Jebus of to-day evidence the survival of this primitive memoria technica, while from Melanesia to Formosa the knotted cord, as in Australia and Africa the message-stick, render service as means of communication between man and his fellows. The nine incisions, with a longer cut across them to denote ten, is a mode of decimal reckoning and of record found alike among Red Indians and London bargees. The same purpose explains the custom, in force well within the present century, of our Exchequer in keeping certain accounts by means of notched tallies. The tally was a squared stick of well-seasoned hazel or willow, in one side of which notches of different breadth, indicating pounds, shillings, and pence, were cut to mark the amount of money lent by any person to the Government, the same amount being cut in Roman numerals, together with the lender's name and date of the loan, on the two opposite sides. The stick was then split down the middle, and one half handed to the lender, the other half being kept in the Exchequer. When the money fell due, the lender surrendered his half for comparison with its fellow, and the two being found to "tally," the loan was repaid. It was through the overheating of stoves in the burning of heaps of accumulated tally-sticks that the Houses of Parliament were destroyed in 1834. Fifty years ago in Scotland (and the like may happen in out-of-the-way hamlets to-day), the baker's boy took a "nick-stick" with his bread, and made a notch in the stick for every loaf he left on his rounds. So it was, Dr. Hoffman tells us, with the Pennsylvanian dairyman, who kept account of the milk which he sold by marking notches for pints and quarts on a stick. As these notches correspond to entries of transactions in our daybooks and ledgers, so the once widely-used Clog Almanack corresponded to our modern Whitaker. It consisted of a square-shaped "clog" or "block" of wood (sometimes of metal), and was designed chiefly to show when the Sundays and holidays fell, certain symbols or hieroglyphs being drawn against saint and other festal days—as, for example, an axe for Saint Paul, a true-lovers' knot for Saint Valentine, and a harp for Saint David. With this may be compared the hieroglyphic wheels named "record of the gods," formerly in use for recording time among the Indians of Virginia. "These wheels had sixty spokes, each for a year, as if to mark the ordinary age of man, and they were painted on skins kept by the priests. They marked on each spoke or division a hieroglyphic figure to show the memorable events of the year." (Tylor, p. 93.)

Wampum-belts are of much narrower geographical distribution than quipus. They consist of hand-made beads or perforated shells arranged in various more or less conventionalised patterns on bark filaments, hemp, or deerskin strips or sinews, the ends of the belts being selvedged by sinews or hempen fibres. The patterns are pictorial symbols recording events in the history of the tribe or treaties between tribes; the belts being also used to note land boundaries or personal property, sometimes even passing, in the old days, as shell-money in all parts of New England from one end of the coast to the other. As illustrating a common purpose for which the wampum record was used, Peter Clarke tells us, in his Origin and Traditional History of the Wyandotts (a tribe of the Huron-Iroquois stock), that "in the last decade of the eighteenth century, the king or head chief, Sut-staw-ra-tse, called a meeting at the house of Chief Adam Brown, who had charge of the archives, which consisted of wampum belts, parchments, &c., contained in a large trunk. One by one they were brought out and shown to the assembled chiefs and warriors. Chief Brown wrote on a piece of paper and tacked it to each wampum belt, designating the compact or treaty it represented, after it had been explained from memory by the chiefs appointed for that purpose. There sat before them the venerable king, in whose head were stored the hidden contents of each wampum belt, listening to the rehearsal, and occasionally correcting the speaker and putting him on the right track whenever he deviated." Clarke goes on to say that "when the majority of the people removed to the south-west, they demanded to have the belts, as these might be a safeguard to them. Some of these belts recorded treaties of alliance or of peace with other tribes which were now residing in that region, and it might be of great importance to the Wyandotts to be able to produce and refer to them. The justice of this claim was admitted, and they were allowed to have the greater part of their belts." And modern inquirers tell us that, in so far as the wampums still possess utility, it is as evidence of a subsisting treaty or a title-deed. Few examples, however, of the vast number of belts once in the possession of the North American tribes (and these almost exclusively confined to the Iroquois country) survive, since in the displacement of the red man by the white their value from the land-right point of view has disappeared. Four interesting specimens, known as the "Hale Series of Huron Wampum Belts," which were presented by Dr. Tylor to the Pitt-Rivers Museum at Oxford in 1897, form the subject of lengthy memoirs by the donor and the late Horatio Hale in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute (xxvi. 3, pp. 221-54). Of these only the barest summary is needful. The first and oldest example, dating from before the middle of the seventeenth century, is named the "Double Calumet Treaty Belt" (Figs. 8, 9). It is nine beads in width, and although imperfect, is still nearly four feet long. On a dark ground of the costly purple wampum there is the device of a council-hearth in what was probably the centre of the belt, flanked on one side by four and on the other side by three double calumets, i.e. double-headed peace-pipes, each possessing a bowl at both ends. Of course a pipe of this sort is of no use for smoking. It is a creation of the heraldic imagination, like the double-headed eagle of some modern European powers. This, first appearing on the arms of the German Emperor in the middle of the fourteenth century, may have been derived through contact with the East from Hittite bas-reliefs, as the cherub of our grave-stone cutters is derived through the Hebrews from the Assyrians, and the symbolic design of the Good Shepherd from the old type of Hermes, the ram-bearing god.

Fig. 8.—Double Calumet Wampum

Fig. 9.—Double Calumet Council Hearth

Returning to the "double calumet," Mr. Hale was told by Mandorong, an Indian chief, that it was a peace-belt, representing an important treaty or alliance of ancient times. The second example is called Peace-Path Belt, which name indicates its purpose; the third, of which a good portion has probably vanished, is named the Jesuit Missionary Belt (Fig. 10), and is believed "to commemorate the acceptance by the Hurons of the Christian religion" as taught by the Jesuits.

Fig. 10.—Jesuit Missionary Wampum

Fig. 11.—Four Nations' Alliance Wampum

The figures are worked on fifteen rows of white beads on a dark ground, the oval or lozenge-shaped design near the centre representing a council. On each side of this are religious emblems—on one side the dove, on the other side the lamb—and beyond each are Greek crosses representing the Trinity. "The latest date which can be ascribed to this belt is the year 1648, the eve of the expulsion of the Hurons by the Iroquois." The fourth example (Fig. 11), called the "Four Nations' Alliance Belt," is sixty years younger, and, as denoted by the four squares forming the chief device, is a land-treaty made between the Wyandotts and three Algonquin tribes.

Fig. 11a.—Penn Wampum

This reference to records which mark a certain approach to the ideographic stage of writing would be incomplete if no account was given of the most celebrated wampum record in existence (Fig. 11a), the Penn Belt, preserved in the archives of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. It derives its name from a well-authenticated tradition that it is the identical belt given, probably in 1701, to William Penn by the Iroquois "to confirm the friendly relations then permanently established between them." It is composed of eighteen strings of white wampum, thus evidencing its relation to an important transaction, and has in the centre two figures delineated in dark-coloured beads, one an Indian grasping the hand of a man who, as wearing a hat, is doubtless intended to represent a European. The oblique bands are the symbol of the federation of Iroquois known as the "Five Nations," and represent by synecdoche (or the putting of a part for the whole) the entire native Iroquois "long-house," as the communal dwelling is called. "The Iroquois league is spoken of in their Book of Rites as Kanastat-sikowa, the 'great framework.' It was this mighty structure, which, when the belt in question was given, overshadowed the greater part of North America, that was indicated by the rafters, shown as oblique bands." (Hale, J.A.I. xxvi. p. 244.)

(b) The Pictorial Stage.—The necessity of identifying personal as well as tribal property, especially in land and live stock, led to the employment of various characters more or less pictographic, which have their representatives in signaries used in ancient commerce and in manufacturers' trade marks. Professor Ernst of Caracas believes that he can recognise survivals of Indian picture-writing in the marks used for branding cattle; and among Mr. Arthur Evans's remarkable discoveries of pre-Mycenæan relics in Crete, the significance of which will be dealt with later on, are seal-stones engraved with signs which are not merely fanciful or ornamental, but designed to convey information about their owners. "For example, a boat with a crescent moon on either side of the mast may have been the signet of an ancient mariner who ventured on long voyages;" perchance a feat to be proud of, since even a one-moon voyage seems to have been too much for the average Homeric mariner (cf. Iliad, II. 292-4). "Another signet, with a gate and a pig on one of its faces, would be proper to a well-to-do swineherd." Other seals bearing the device of a fish may indicate a fisherman; of a harp, a musician, and so on. (The Mycenæan Age, p. 270: Tsountas and Manatt.) The painful operation of tattooing is known to have symbolic and religious, even more than decorative, significance, as marking the connection of the man with his clan-totem or individual totem. But it has also a utilitarian purpose, as among certain Red Indian tribes, who tattoo both sexes, so that in case of war the captured individuals may be identified and ransomed. Totemic and mythic animals are tattooed upon various parts of the body; in one case the design worn by a landowner among the Kavuya Indians of California was used as his property mark by being cut or painted upon boundary trees and posts, so that his title to his possessions was proved by the portable title-deed which he bore, reminding us of the leading incident in Rider Haggard's Mr. Meeson's Will. "In New Zealand the facial decorations of a dead man were reproduced upon the trees near his grave; while among the Yakuts and Bushmen the facial marks, or even totems, were furthermore employed as property marks, the Bushmen carving them upon growing squashes and melons." (Hoffman, p. 39.) The various Indian tribes appear to have made more frequent use of the totem name rather than of the personal name, perhaps because of the common barbaric notion that a man's name is an integral part of himself, through which, whether he be living or dead, mischief may be wrought by the sorcerer who knows the name—a notion the force of which would be lessened where the name is generic and shared in common. On the grave-posts of both Australian black fellows and North American Indians the totem symbol is reversed, as in our mediæval chronicles the leopards of English kings are reversed on the scutcheon drawn opposite the record of their death. With this we may connect the classic symbol of the inverted torch which the modern sculptor depicts on funereal monuments. In his great work on the History, Condition, and Prospects of the Indian Tribes, published over fifty years ago (a work, however, which needs checking from other authorities), Schoolcraft gives some illustrations of the red man's grave-posts, of which three are here reproduced.

Figs. 12, 13.—Indian Grave-posts

Fig. 14.—Tomb-board
of Indian Chief

Fig. 12 shows the dead warrior's totem, a tortoise, and beside it a headless man, which is a common symbol of death among Indian tribes. Below the trunk are three marks of honour. The next and more elaborated figure (13) records the achievements of Shingabawassin, a celebrated chief of the St. Mary's band. His totem, the crane, is shown reversed. The three marks on the left of the totem represent important general treaties of peace to which he had been a party; the six strokes on the right probably indicate the number of big battles which he fought. The pipe appears to be a symbol of peace, and the hatchet a symbol of war. In like manner head-boards erected over a woman have the various articles used by her in life, as cutting and sewing instruments and weaving utensils, depicted upon them. The third example (14) represents the adjedatig or tomb-board of Wabojeeg, a celebrated war chief, who died on Lake Superior about 1793. His totem, the reindeer, is reversed, and his own name, which means the White Fisher, is not recorded. The seven strokes note the seven war parties whom he led; the three upright strokes as many wounds received in battle. The horned head tells of a desperate fight with a moose.

Fig. 15.—Hunter's
Grave-post

Fig. 15 is a reduced copy (Hoffman) of the grave-board of an Innuit hunter. The vocation of the dead man is shown in the baidarka, or boat, in which he is depicted as rowing with a companion. The object beneath represents a rack for drying fish and skins. Next to this are figures of a fox and a land otter, and the network drawing at the bottom is a copy of the hunter's summer dwelling. These temporary structures denote the abode of a skin-hunter, those used by fishermen being dome-shaped. Hoffman adds that "this differentiation in the shape of roofs of habitations applies to their pictorial representation and not to their actual form." In close connection with these mortuary boards there is the ornamentation of door-posts which we find among British Columbian, Polynesian, and Maori tribes; also the carvings on canoes and other personal effects to mark ownership or to identify the property with the totem. But to pursue this would take us into the domain of savage art generally, reference to which is warranted here only in its mnemonic uses as keeping alive knowledge of events which would otherwise perish. Obviously, the examples given above can fulfil only a limited purpose, because only the initiated can know their meaning. As Dr. Tylor remarks, such mode of record "may be compared to the elliptical forms of expression current in all societies whose attention is given specially to some narrow subject of interest, and where, as all men's minds have the same framework set up in them, it is not necessary to go into an elaborate description of the whole state of things; but one or two details are enough to enable the hearer to understand the whole. Such expressions as 'new white at 48,' 'best selected at 92' ('futures fairly active' is a good example), though perfectly understood in the commercial circles where they are current, are as unintelligible to any one who is not familiar with the course of events in those circles, as an Indian record of a war-party would be to an ordinary Londoner." (Early History of Mankind, p. 86.) This applies with even greater force to the large group of symbolic mnemonics whose purpose is more restricted, whether it be as help to the singer in his verses, to the medicine-man in his incantation, to the hunter in his quest, or, as among ourselves, to the tramp on his rounds. The subjoined copy of a cadger's map (Fig. 16), given in Hotten's Slang Dictionary (1869), is an addition to the number of survivals which are found in so-called civilised communities, and has fit place among the examples of pictorial mnemonics in matters of 1, love; 2, sorcery; 3, the chase; 4, war; and 5, politics which follow it.

Fig. 16.—A Cadger's Map of a Begging District

Explanation of the Hieroglyphics

1. Love.—Fig. 17 is a reduced copy of a love-letter, drawn upon birch bark (a material used elsewhere, as among the Yukaghirs of Siberia), which an Ojibwa girl sent to her sweetheart at White Earth, Minnesota. She was of the "Bear" totem, he of the "Mud Puppy" totem; hence the picture of these animals as representing the addresser and the addressee. The two lines from their respective camps meet and are continued to a point between two lakes, another trail branching off towards two tents. Here three girls, Catholic converts, as denoted by the three crosses, are encamped, the left-hand tent having an opening from which an arm protrudes with beckoning gesture. The arm is that of the writer of the letter, who is making the Indian sign of welcome to her lover. "This is done by holding the palm of the hand down and forward, and drawing the extended index finger towards the place occupied by the speaker, thus indicating the path upon the ground to be followed by the person called."

Fig. 17.—Ojibwa Love-letter

Fig. 18.—Love-song

Fig. 18 is the record of a love-song. 1, represents the lover; 2, he is singing and beating a magic drum; in 3, he surrounds himself with a secret lodge, denoting the effects of his necromancy; in 4, he and his mistress are joined by a single arm to show that they are as one; in 5, she is on an island; in 6, she sleeps, and as he sings, his magical power reaches her heart; and in 7, the heart itself is shown. To each of these figures a verse of the song corresponds.

1. It is my painting that makes me a god. 2. Hear the sounds of my voice, of my song; it is my voice. 3. I cover myself in sitting down by her. 4. I can make her blush, because I hear all she says of me. 5. Were she on a distant island I could make her swim over, 6. Though she were far off, even on the other hemisphere. 7. I speak to your heart.

Fig. 19.—Mnemonic Song of an Ojibwa Medicine-man.

2. Sorcery.—Fig. 19 is the song of an Ojibwa medicine-man incised upon birch bark. These conjurers, who correspond to the Siberian shamans, affect the usual mystery of the priestly craft all the world over, and affirm, like those who know better, that their thaumaturgic powers are the direct gift of the god. Him they name Manabozho—probably some ancestral deity, since he is the great uncle of the anish'inabēg or "first people." In 1, Manabozho holds his bow and arrow; 2, represents the medicine-man's drum and drumsticks used in chanting and in initiation ceremonies; 3, a bar or rest observed while chanting the incantation; 4, the medicine-bag, made of an otter skin, in which is preserved the white cowrie shell as the sacred emblem of the cult; 5, the medicine-man himself, horned to show his superior power; 6, a funnel-like object, known as a "jugglery," used in legerdemain and other hocus pocus; 7, a woman, signifying the admission of her sex to "the society of the grand medicine"; 8, a bar or rest, as at 3; 9, the sacred snake-skin medicine bag, which has magic power; 10, another woman; 11, another otter-skin "bag o' tricks," showing that women members are allowed to use it; 12, a female figure, holding a branch of some sacred plant used in the exorcism of the demon of disease. In any reference to savage therapeutics it cannot be too often insisted upon that diseases are never ascribed to natural causes. "The Indians believed that diseases were caused by unseen evil beings and by witchcraft, and every cough, every toothache, every headache, every fever, every boil, and every wound, in fact all their ailments, were attributed to such a cause. Their so-called medical practice was a horrible system of sorcery, and to such superstition human life was sacrificed on an enormous scale.... In fact, a natural death in a savage tent is a comparatively rare phenomenon; but death by sorcery, medicine, and blood-feud arising from a belief in witchcraft is exceedingly common." (Professor Powell's Indian Linguistic Families of America North of Mexico, p. 39.)

Fig. 20.—Wâbeno destroying an Enemy

Fig. 20 records the destruction of an enemy by an Ojibwa wâbeno or bad medicine-man. The box-like objects represent the four degrees of the cult society to which the wâbeno belonged, the number of posts indicating the series. The figure next to these is that of the assistant to the wâbeno, who is shown with a waving line extending from his mouth to the oval-like object intended to represent a lake upon an island in which the victim lives. He is shown prostrate beneath the wâbeno with a spot upon his breast, the small oblong figure between the two being the sacred drum. (See 2 in the foregoing illustration.) The meaning of the pictograph is that the wâbeno was employed to work black magic on the man. He took a piece of birch bark and cut upon it the effigy of the victim, then, after beating the drum to the chanting of incantations, he pierced the breast of the effigy, applying red paint to the puncture. This, under the principle of "sympathetic magic," was believed to bring about the death of the victim, whom, through his living on the island, the wâbeno could not reach.

Fig. 21.—Etching on Innuit Drill-bow

White magic, in which the beneficent powers are at work, is illustrated by the Innuit pictograph on an ivory drill-bow (Fig. 21), on the right of which are two huts, nearest to which stands the medicine-man who has been called in to exorcise the disease from a couple of sufferers. He is catching hold of the animal by whose help the disease-demon is expelled, or to whom, mayhap, as a sort of scapegoat, the disease is transferred. In the second exorcism, the medicine-man is grasping the patient by the arm, while he chants the formulæ wherewith to cast out the demon. The figure on the left is making a gesture of surprise at his relief, while beyond him are two demons struggling to escape beyond the power of the medicine man.

Fig. 22.—Ojibwa Hunting Record

3. The Chase.—Fig. 22 records a hunting expedition. The two lines represent a wave-tossed river, on which floats a bark canoe, guided by the owner. In the bow a piece of birch bark shields a fire of pine knots to light up the course taken by the steersman. By this means the game, as it comes to the water to drink, can be seen from the shaded part of the canoe, in front of which two deer are shown. Next to these is a circle representing a lake, from which peep the head and horns of a third deer. To the right of the lake a doe appears, and beyond her the two wigwams of the hunter. The four animals may represent the quarry secured.

Fig. 23.—Hidatsa
Pictograph on a
Buffalo Shoulder-blade

Fig. 23, drawn on a buffalo shoulder-blade by a Hidatsa Indian, tells his efforts to track companions who had gone buffalo-hunting. The trail of the animal and the pursuers is shown in the dotted lines. Of the three heads the lowest is that of the seeker, who is depicted shouting after his missing friends; then he is shown advancing and still shouting, till his call is returned from the spot where the hunters have camped.

Fig. 24.—Alaskan Hunting Record

Fig. 25.—Record of Starving Hunter

Fig. 24, incised on an ivory drill-bow, is a pictograph of an Alaskan sea-lion hunt. In 1, the speaker points with his left hand in the direction to be taken, and, 2, holds a paddle to show that a voyage is intended. In 3, the right hand to the side of the head denotes sleep, while the left hand with one finger elevated means one night. The circle with two dots in the middle, 4, signifies an island with huts; 5 is the same as 1; 6 is another island; 7 is the same as 3, but with two fingers elevated to indicate two nights. In 8 the speaker with his harpoon makes the sign of a sea-lion with his left hand, which he thrusts outward and downward in a slight curve to represent the animal swimming; 9, 10, a sea-lion shot at with bow and arrow; 11, two men in a boat, the paddles pushed downwards; and 12, the speaker's hut. The native account, as translated, reads thus: "I there go that island, one sleep there; then I go another that island, there two sleeps; I catch one sea-lion, then return mine." (Colonel Mallery, quo. Hoffman, Transactions of the Anthropological Society, Washington, vol. ii. p. 134, 1883.) "Hunters who have been unfortunate, and are starving, scratch or draw upon a piece of wood characters like those in Fig. 25, and place the lower end of the stick in the ground on the trail where it is most likely to be discovered," the stick being inclined towards the hunter's dwelling. The horizontal line 1, denotes a canoe, 2, the gesture of the man with both arms extended, signifies "nothing," while the uplifting of the right hand to the mouth, 3, means "food" or "to eat," and the left hand outstretched points to 4, the hut of the famished man. Here we are actually within the ideographic stage, and, as will be shown in due course, handling material identical in character with that found in Egypt and other nations of antiquity. But, as already remarked, and as will be evidenced in abundance throughout these pages, there are no well-marked divisions between the stages of development.

A varied interest attaches to Fig. 26, which depicts some general features of Alaskan life on a piece of walrus tusk. In 1, a native is resting against his house, and on his right stands a pole surmounted by a bird, apparently a totem-post. 2. A reindeer. 3. One man shooting at another with an arrow. 4. An expedition in a dog-sledge, and, 5, in a boat with sail and paddle. 6. A dog-sledge, with the sun above; perhaps indicating the coming of summer. 7. A sacred lodge. The four figures at each outer corner represent young men armed with bows and arrows to keep off the uninitiated from the forbidden precincts. The members of the occult society are dancing round a fire in the centre of the lodge. 8. A pine tree up which a porcupine is climbing. 9. Another pine tree, from which a woodpecker is extracting larvæ. 10. A bear. 11, 12. Men driving fish into, 13, the net, above them being a captured whale, with harpoon and line attached.

Fig. 26.—Alaskan Hunting Life

4. War.—Schoolcraft, who has been already drawn upon for an example (page 53), records the finding of the bark letter copied in Fig. 27. It was fastened to the top of a pole so as to attract the notice of other Indians who might happen to be passing. Beginning on the right of the middle row we have 1, the officer in command, sword in hand; 2, his secretary, and 3, the geologist of the party, indicated by his hammer. Then follow 4, 5, two attachés; 6, the interpreter; and 7, 8, two Chippewa guides. In the top row is 9, 10, a group of seven soldiers, armed with muskets. A prairie hen and tortoise, 11, 12, represent the animals secured for food.

Fig. 27.—Indian Expedition

Fig. 28.—Biography of Indian Chief

Fig. 28 gives the biography of Wingemund, a noted Delaware chief. To the left is 1, the tortoise totem of the tribe; then 2, the chief-totem; and 3, the sun, beneath which are ten strokes representing the ten expeditions in which Wingemund took part. On the opposite side are indicated, 4, 5, 6, 7, the prisoners of both sexes taken, and also the killed, these last being drawn as headless. In the centre are the several positions attacked, 8, 9, 10, 11; and the slanting strokes at the bottom denote the number of Wingemund's followers.

Fig. 29.—War-song

Fig. 29 is a war-song. Wings are given to the warrior, 1, to show that he is swift-footed; in 2 he stands under the morning star, and in 3 under the centre of heaven, with his war-club and rattle; in 4, the eagles of carnage are flying round the sky; in 5, the warrior lies slain on the battlefield; while in 6 he appears as a spirit in the sky. The words of the song are as follows:—

1. I wish to have the body of the swiftest bird. 2. Every day I look at you; the half of the day I sing my song. 3. I throw away my body. 4. The birds take a flight in the air. 5. Full happy am I to be numbered with the slain. 6. The spirits on high repeat my name.

5. Political and Social.—The [frontispiece] is a copy of a petition sent by a group of Indian tribes to the United States Congress for fishing rights in certain small lakes near Lake Superior. The leading clan is represented by Oshcabawis, whose totem is 1, the crane; then follow 2, Waimitligzhig; 3, Ogemagee; and 4, a third, all of the marten totem; 5, Little Elk, of the bear totem; 6, belongs to the manfish totem; 7, to the catfish totem.

From the eye and heart of each of the animals runs a line connecting them with the eye and heart of the crane to show that they are all of one mind, and the eye of the crane has also a line connecting it with the lakes on which the tribes want to fish, while another line runs towards Congress.

Fig. 30 is a copy of a letter found above St. Anthony's Falls in 1820. "It consisted of white birch bark, and the figures had been carefully drawn. 1, Denotes the flag of the Union; 2, the cantonment then recently established at Cold Spring, on the western side of the cliffs; 4 is the symbol of Colonel Leavenworth, the commanding officer, under whose authority a mission of peace had been sent into the Chippewa country; 11 is the symbol of Chakope, the leading Sioux chief, under whose orders the party moved; 8 is the second chief, named Wabedatunka, or, 10, the Black Dog, who has fourteen lodges, 7 is a chief also subordinate to Chakope, with thirteen lodges, and 9 is a bale of goods devoted by the Government to the objects of the peace. The name of 6, whose wigwam is 5, with thirteen subordinate lodges, was not given."

The letter was written to make known the fact that Chakope and his followers, accompanied or supported by the American officer, had come to the spot to make peace with the Chippewa hunters. "The Chippewa chief, Babesacundabee, who found the letter, read off its meaning without doubt or hesitation." (Schoolcraft, vol. i. p. 352.)

Fig. 30.—Letter offering Treaty of Peace

Fig. 31 represents the census roll of an Indian band at Mille Lac, in the territory of Minnesota, sent in to the United States agent by Nagonabe, a Chippewa Indian, during the annuity payments in 1849.

Fig. 31.—Census Roll of an Indian Band

As the Indians were all of the same totem, Nagonabe "designated each family by a sign denoting the common name of the chief. Thus 5 denotes a catfish, and the six strokes indicate that the Catfish's family consisted of six individuals; 8 is a beaver skin; 9, a sun; 13, an eagle; 14, a snake; 22, a buffalo; 34, an axe; 35, the medicine-man, and so on." (Lubbock, Origin of Civilisation, p. 47.)

Fig. 32.—Record of Departure (Innuit)

Fig. 32 supplies a striking example of the cumbersomeness of the pictograph as contrasted with the sound-symbol. It is a copy of a record which an Innuit placed over the door of his dwelling to notify to his friends that he had gone on a journey. The persons thus notified are indicated in 1, 3, 5, 7; 2 is the speaker, who denotes the direction in which he is leaving by his extended left hand; 4 is the gesture sign for "many," and 6 for sleep, the upraising of the left hand showing that he will be some distance away; 8, his intended return is denoted by the right hand being pointed homeward, while the left arm is bent to denote return.

(c) The Ideographic Stage.—As the characters pass from the pictorial to the emblematic or the symbolic, their meaning, obviously, becomes more obscure, save to the initiated. "They do not," as Colonel Mallery remarks, "depict, but suggest objects; do not speak directly through the eye to the intelligence, but presuppose in the mind knowledge of an event or fact which the sign recalls. The symbols of the ark, dove, olive-branch, and rainbow would be wholly meaningless to people unfamiliar with the Mosaic or some similar cosmology, as would be the cross and the crescent to those ignorant of history." And even in pictography, as the same excellent authority observes, "it is very difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish between historical and traditional accounts obtained from Indians. The winter counts (i.e. the reckoning of time by winters, and the applying of names instead of numbers to them, as, e.g., 'catching-wild-horses winter,' the device for which was a lasso), while having their chief value as calendars, contain some material that is absolute and verifiable tribal history." The difficulties of interpretation, as the examples given evidence, are in the larger number being "merely mnemonic records, and treated in connection with material objects formerly, and perhaps still, used mnemonically." (Mallery, "On the Pictographs of the North American Indians," Fourth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, 1886.)

The signs of advance from the pictorial to the ideographic stage which are to be noted among the Red Indians, are more sharply marked in the hieroglyphs and phonetic characters on the stone monuments and manuscripts found among the relics of the vanished peoples of Mexico and Yucatan.

A number of fatuous theories about the connection of Central American culture with that of the Old World have been broached, from the time when Lord Kingsborough published his lavishly-illustrated book to prove that the ancient Mexicans were the descendants of the lost Ten Tribes of Israel to the present day, when Dr. Augustus Le Plongeon brings us his "proofs" that Yucatan was the primitive home of Adam, and avers that he has discovered not only the grave of Abel, but disinterred his heart therefrom, and found the knife wherewith Cain slew him! (Queen Moo and the Egyptian Sphinx, p. 138.) Now, among the certainties which modern research has reached is that of the independent origin and development of civilisation in the New World. Man himself, whether or not descended from a single pair, had his origin in one region, probably the Indo-Malaysian, since there we find his nearest congeners, the anthropoid apes, while the pliocene beds of Java have recently yielded a remarkable corroboration of the theory in the fossil bones which bring man near to the common stem whence the highest animals have diverged. At a period when the general temperature of the globe was milder than now, the ancestors of the existing four leading groups—the Ethiopic, Mongolic, American, and Caucasic—spread themselves over the several zones of the habitable world, the American group migrating from Asia and Europe across the then existing land-connection between those continents and the New World, where those various stages of development which are still to be witnessed from the Arctic regions to Cape Horn were reached. Of these the Mexican plateau affords interesting and valuable material in the chipped flint implements evidencing a Stone Age, and in the marvellous buildings which vie both in their cyclopean dimensions and ornamented features with the palaces, tombs, and temples of Egypt and Assyria, testifying to the relatively high culture of the races that raised them. These peoples, usually grouped together as the ancient Mexicans, are known as Mayas and Aztecs. The duration of the empire or confederation of the Mayas is unknown, but about two hundred years before the Spanish conquest of America they appear to have been invaded and subdued by the Aztecs, whose rule extended from the Atlantic to the Pacific in the countries now forming Mexico and portions of the United States. The remains of the two races are both imperfect and entangled, so that any coherent story is not to be extracted from them. But the evidence points to the Mayas as the intellectually superior race; the Aztecs, who still form the bulk of the population of South Mexico, borrowing largely from them, especially in the matter of the gods. "If written language be a test of intelligence, the Mayas were ahead not only of the Mexican people, but also of the Peruvians. The latter are believed to have made no nearer advance towards writing than the tying of tally-knots on strings, and the Mexicans, while they had invented paper, wrote down their ideas, save in the cases of a few phonetic signs, as children would, by means of pictures; but the Mayas, like the Egyptians, had proceeded beyond pictures to hieroglyphs, where symbols, more or less arbitrary, stand for words or syllables, and the mind prepares itself to invent an alphabet." (Mercer's Hill Caves of Yucatan, p. 73.) Some of the more remarkable hieroglyphic-bearing monuments of the Mayas have been found in the palace of Palenque, the Spanish name of the old Yucatan capital. They are on stucco slabs above figures some of which show curious correspondence to Egyptian statues, wearing the pleasant but immobile expression of the latter, and decorated with a similar headdress, while in one case (Fig. 33), a cartouche enclosing an inscription is carved on the plinth. The concluding panels of one of the codices form what may be called the Mexican Book of the Dead. It enforces the scheme of duty which precedes by vividly depicting the trial and judgment of the soul after death, and detailing the perils of the journey on the way to Mictlan (Payne, ii. 407).

Fig. 33.—Statue from Palenque

Time and fanaticism have made sad havoc with the manuscripts, and no satisfactory key to their decipherment has been found, only a few words here and there being interpreted. They were executed in bright and varied colours, with a feather pencil, on prepared skins, paper, or rolls of cotton or aloe-fibre cloth, and the pictographic system thus created was applied to the purposes of ordinary life, and served as a species of writing. Matters of only passing importance were recorded on fibrous paper made from the leaves of the maguey plant; "records intended to be permanently kept were painted on the prepared skins of animals, those of the deer and bear being more commonly used. These paintings or 'pinturos' are usually executed on both sides of the skin, which was oblong in shape and often of great length, having the ends protected by boards." (Payne's History of the New World called America, vol. ii. p. 404.) These boards are called analtees, a word which may be translated annals. The earlier hieroglyphic characters were executed by priests, who were required to be old men, widowers, and under vows of chastity and seclusion. Such writing was known only to the initiated.

Tradition says that the Aztecs destroyed many of the Maya picture records because they recalled the grandeur of the conquered people. But the Spaniards in their turn destroyed much more. Zumárraga, Bishop of Mexico, and Landa, Bishop of Yucatan, made such bonfires of carvings, statues, paintings on wood, and of priceless picture and hieroglyph writings on native paper and deerskin, that only about half-a-dozen fragments of the Yucatan books have ever been found since. Bishop Landa, probably from knowledge obtained from Maya priests, attempted the framing of a key of interpretation, his aim being the translation of certain religious and devotional writings for the use of converts. In this he indicates a certain number of alphabetic characters, but the key did not work, and Dr. Isaac Taylor draws the conclusion that "the systems of picture-writing which were invented and developed by the tribes of Central America are so obscure, and so little is really known about their history, that they must be regarded rather as literary curiosities than as affording suitable materials for enabling us to arrive at any general conclusions as to the nature of the early stages of the development of the graphic art." (Hist. Alph., i. 24.) Notwithstanding this somewhat sweeping verdict, the Maya-Aztec scripts have value, if only for purposes of comparison. There is preserved in the museum at Mexico a whole series of pictographs exhibiting incidents as varied as the migrations of tribes, the annals of the people, sacrifices to the gods, and the education of children, the tasks set them, the punishments inflicted on them, and the food given them. To the hieroglyph there succeeds the gradually conventionalised sign, of which examples from Red Indian scripts have been given:—the arrow, to denote an enemy; several arrows, several enemies; the direction of the arrow's point, the direction taken by the enemy; a piece of maize cake protruding from the mouth, to denote eating; the symbol for water between the lips, to signify drinking; horizontal lines, with arrow-headed characters on them, to denote the hoed or cultivated ground, some of these ideographs being coloured to correspond with the thing suggested; and, as an example of the more abstruse, the extended arms, probably to denote negation,—all marking the advance to phonetic syllabic writing. The names of persons and places are sometimes indicated by symbolic figures; e.g. Chapultepec, or "grasshopper hill," is represented by a hill and a grasshopper; Tzompanco, "the place of skulls," by a skull on a bar between two posts, as enemies' skulls used to be set up; and Macuilxochitl, the "five flowers," by five dots and a flower. Sometimes we find the species of pun known as the rebus adopted. A picture is made to stand for the sound of the word, as e.g. among ourselves in guessing games, when a whisk broom and a key stand for "whiskey," or in the series of pictures of an eye, a saw, a boy, a swallow, a goose, and a berry, which stand for the sentence, "I saw a boy swallow a goose-berry." In Abbot Islip's Chapel in Westminster Abbey his name is rebused as an eye and the slip of a tree with the hand apparently of a slipping man hanging to it. In Bishop Oldham's chantry in Exeter Cathedral his name is represented by an owl (Owle-dom, the old spelling of the name); and in St. Saviour's Church the name of Prior Burton is sculptured as a cask with a thistle on it, "burr-tun."

Fig. 34.—Itzcoatl

(d) The Phonetic Stage.—The ancient Mexican script supplies examples of the change from the pictographic to the phonetic stage. The name of one of the kings was Itzcoatl, or "Knife-Snake." In the manuscript known as the Le Tellier Codex this king's name (Fig. 34) is represented by a serpent (coatl) with stone knives (itzli) upon its back. This is mere picture-writing, but in the Vergara Codex we find the rebus form (Fig. 35). "The first syllable, itz, is represented by a weapon armed with blades of obsidian, itz (tli), but the rest of the word, coatl, though it means snake, is written, not by a picture of a snake, but by an earthen pot, co (mitl), and above it the sign of water, a (tl). Here we have real phonetic writing, for the name is not to be read, according to sense, 'knife-kettle-water,' but only according to the sound of the Aztec words, Itz-co-atl." Dr. Tylor adds that there is no sufficient reason to make us doubt that this purely phonetic writing was of native Mexican origin, and that after the Spanish Conquest it was turned to account in a new and curious way. The Spanish missionaries, when embarrassed by the difficulty of getting the converts to remember their Ave Marias and Paternosters, seeing that the words were, of course, mere nonsense to them, were helped out by the Indians themselves, who substituted Aztec words as near in sound as might be to the Latin, and wrote down the pictured equivalents for these words, which enabled them to remember the required formulas. Torquemada and Las Casas have recorded two instances of this device.

Fig. 35.—Rebus
of Itzcoatl

Pater noster was written by a flag (pantli) and a prickly pear (nochtli), while the sign of water, a (tl) combined with that of aloe, me (tl), made a compound word, ametl, which would mean "water-aloe," but in sound made a very tolerable substitute for Amen. M. Aubin found the beginning of a Paternoster of this kind in the metropolitan library of Mexico (Fig. 36), made with a flag, pan (tli), a stone, te (tl), a prickly pear, noch (tli), and again a stone, te (tl), which would read Pa-te-noch-te, or perhaps Pa-tetl-noch-tetl. After the conquest, when the Spaniards were hard at work introducing their own religion and civilisation among the conquered Mexicans, they found it convenient to allow the old picture-writing still to be used, even in legal documents. It disappeared in time, of course, being superseded in the long run by the alphabet, and it is to this transition period that we owe many, perhaps most, of the picture documents still preserved. "One of the picture-writings in the museum at Mexico is very probably the same that was sent up to Vera Cruz, to Montezuma, with figures of newly-arrived white men, their ships and horses, and their cannon with fire and smoke issuing from their mouths." (Tylor, Anahuac, p. 232.) In the general history of the development of writing, the Mexican script therefore supplies us only with an example of approximation to the phonetic system, its advance to the final alphabetic stage being probably arrested by the subjugation of the Mayas to an intellectually inferior conqueror, who, borrowing much, and contributing nothing of advantage, himself yielded to the superior force of Spain.

Fig. 36.—Paternoster Rebus

CHAPTER IV

THE CHINESE, JAPANESE, AND COREAN SCRIPTS

China, whose inertia is being aroused by foreign "pin-pricks," is the land of arrested developments, and consequently its writing has remained for probably two thousand years at a rudimentary stage, furnishing an interesting object-lesson on the early processes of advance, after the disuse of knotted cords ([see p. 43]), from the Ku-wăn, or "ancient pictures," to the Ling-shing, or "pictures and sounds." The language has never got beyond the monosyllabic stage; it has no terminations to denote number, case, tense, mood, or person, the same word without change of form being used as a noun, verb, or other "part of speech," so that a sentence can be construed only by the place of the several words composing it. As Dr. Marshman tersely puts it, "the whole of Chinese grammar depends upon position." For example, while the root-meaning of ta is "being great," it may, as a noun, mean "greatness"; as an adjective, "great"; as a verb, "to be great," or "to make great"; and as an adverb, "greatly." And, moreover, not only position, but also tone and gesture, contribute to the interpretation of the spoken language.

Fig. 37.—Chinese Picture-writing and Later Uncial

The characters fall into six wen or classes:—1, pictorial, giving a picture of the thing itself; 2, indicative, i.e. designed by their form and the relation of their parts to suggest the idea in the mind of their inventor; 3, composite, i.e. made up of two characters, the meanings of which blend in the meanings of the compounds; 4, inverted, or, as the term implies, topsy-turvy; 5, borrowed, i.e. having another meaning attached to them; 6, phonetic, i.e. one part indicating the sense and another part the sound. In Chinese phrase the ideogram is the "mother of meaning" and the phonogram the "mother of sound." The materials used largely determine the form which writing takes, and in the modern or cursive characters which are shown underneath the primitive forms we see the result of use of the rabbit's-hair pencil of the Chinese scribe. Respecting the first class, it suffices to say little, because it explains itself (Fig. 37). The sun was drawn as a circle, the moon as a crescent, a mountain was indicated by three peaks, rain by drops under an arch, and so forth. But, as has been sufficiently shown, such devices carry us a very little way; there is no literature possible under a mere graphic system. The third, or composite class, is the most interesting as supplying the key to the common idea of the character represented. Sometimes the characters indicate a dry humour. A "wife" is denoted by the signs for "female" and "broom," a sort of metonymy for a woman's household work; for a male child the signs "field" and "strength" are used, because he will till the soil. The Chinese, it will be remembered, are a purely agricultural people, and the compound for "profit" is "grain" and "a knife." The characters for "mountain" and "man" signify "hermit"; an "eye" and "water" mean "tears"; and the verb "to listen" is indicated by an ear between two doors. The signs for the noonday sun are the "sun" and "to reign"; "light" as an abstract quality is represented by figures of the sun and moon placed side by side; a "man" and "two" stand for mankind; a couple of women stand for "strife," three for "intrigue," while a "woman under two trees" means "desire" or "covetousness." But the inadequacy of these and the other symbols to supply characters for the demands of a language in which the same sound has to stand for a multitude of ideas gave rise to the phonetic group, whose development from picture-writing more or less ideographic took place many centuries b.c. The primary symbols or combinations of vowels and consonants number about four hundred and fifty. The variations in tone in pronouncing these sounds increase the total of monosyllabic words to be understood by the ear to something over twelve hundred. But the Chinese dictionaries contain above forty thousand words, and it is the symbols for each of these which are provided by the phonetic symbols. These were compound signs, the first character, as shown above, being a phonogram or sound-word, and the second character a determinative, i.e. ideogram or sense-word. They are, as Professor Whitney says, "rather an auxiliary language than a reduction of speech to writing." The sign for "man" has nearly six hundred combinations, all denoting something relating to man; that for "tree" has about nine hundred, to indicate various kinds of trees and wood, things made of wood, and so forth; while, to borrow a concrete example, pe, which means "white," has, with a "tree" prefixed, the meaning of "cypress"; with the sign for "man" it means "elder brother"; with the sign for "manes" it means the vital principle that survives death; and so forth. Chow is the Chinese word for "ship," so a picture of a ship stands for the sound chow. But the word chow means several other things, and the determinative or "key" sign indicates these. "Thus the ship joined with the sign of water stands for chow, 'ripple'; with that of speech for chow, 'loquacity'; with that of fire for chow, 'flickering of flame,' and so on for 'waggon-pole,' 'fluff,' and several other things which have little in common but the name of chow" (Tylor, p. 102). Although, theoretically, the Chinaman has to make an enormous number of characters before he can write his own language, so that, at the age of twenty-five, a diligent student has barely acquired the same amount of facility in reading and writing which is usually attained by an English child—using the twenty-six characters of his alphabet—at the age of ten; practically some four or five thousand characters suffice for average needs, and the convenience of "a system enabling those who speak mutually unintelligible idioms, to converse together, using the pencil instead of the tongue," caused the abandonment of an attempt to make nearer approach to an alphabetic system which was promoted by the Chinese Government some centuries ago.

In contrast to this, the Japanese, with that pliability which has helped to put them in the van of Oriental peoples, selected, as a result of contact with Buddhism, which came to them by way of China, certain signs from the wilderness of Chinese characters, and constituted these as their alphabet or irofa so called, on the acrologic principle ([p. 104]), from the names of its first signs, like our alphabet from alpha, beta. Their language being polysyllabic, involved the result that whatever signs were used must be syllabic, and hence the adoption of a syllabary was easy. But, of course, like all syllabaries, this has the defect of necessitating the use of that larger number of signs with which the alphabet dispenses. The origin of the Japanese syllabaries, of which there are two, dates from the end of the ninth century of our Lord. One, the Hirakana, derived from a cursive form of Chinese called the tsau or "grass" character, contains about three hundred syllabic sound-signs; the other, known as the Katakana, is derived from the kyai or "model" type of the Chinese character, and is the simpler of the two in having only a single character for each of the forty-seven syllabic sounds in the Japanese language. But neither demands detailed treatment here, since with the intrusion of the Roman alphabet among Western imports into Japan its substitution for the cumbrous syllabaries is probably only a matter of brief time, and the Japanese script may then take its place with the Maya and the Aztec as a graphic curiosity.

Chinese is the official script of Corea, but the lower classes use a phonetic alphabet which, in the judgment of some authorities, is derived from a cursive form of the Nâgari script of India, having, so it is thought, been introduced by Buddhist teachers. Both past and present times afford striking examples of the influence of religion in the diffusion of alphabets, missionaries obviously making use of their own alphabet in the translation of their sacred books into the language of their converts. Whatever connection there may have been between Corean and Indian scripts is not, however, traceable, owing to the changes in the former. But in truth we know little about the matter, and there is something to be said in support of an old tradition that King Se-jo, who reigned five hundred years ago, commanded his chief grammarian, Song Sammun, to devise an alphabet that should supersede the cumbersome Chinese; whereupon that scholar took the Tibetan characters as foundation, but as those were only consonantal, he turned to the ancient Chinese and transformed six of its simplest radicals into the Corean vowels, naming the vowels and consonants "mother" and "child" respectively. The letters were "bunched together" so as to look like the Chinese characters (Fig. 38), the purpose being "to facilitate the transliteration of the Chinese text in a parallel column." There is a curious tradition, reminding us of the Chinese legend of the origin of writing, that the Corean characters were suggested by the straight and oblique lattice-work of the native doors.

Fig. 38.—Chinese and Tibetan Triglot

CHAPTER V

CUNEIFORM WRITING

Thus far curiosity alone gives the stimulus to acquaintance with ancient scripts—a feeling of aloofness attending all that we learn of Chinese, Maya, and other systems having no historical connection (for the derivation of Chinese from pre-Babylonian writing is not proved) with those from which our alphabet is probably derived. With the story of these the real interest begins, because within some of them lie the sources of the alphabets of the civilised world, while all of them have borne a share in the preservation of intellectual and spiritual treasures, the loss of which would have arrested the progress of the vigorous sections of mankind.

Dealing first with those of Mesopotamia, a romance, not lacking excitement, gathers round the wedge-shaped or cuneiform characters (Lat. cuneus, "a wedge") inscribed on clay tablets and cylinders, and on the great monuments of Assyria, Babylon, and other Oriental empires of past renown. The very existence of these relics was forgotten for some sixteen hundred years, and when they were unearthed from the rubbish-heaps of centuries, no one dreamed that any serious meaning was to be attached to the fantastic angular-shaped characters which covered bricks and tablets. In 1621, Pietro della Valle, a Spanish traveller, visited the famous ruins of Persepolis, and he appears to have been the first to suspect that the arrow-headed signs were inscriptions, although he was unable to decipher them. He, however, made the shrewd observation that as the thick end of the supposed letters was never at the right but at the left of the oblique characters, the signs must have been written from left to right.

"Built on a great platform, artificially constructed for the purpose, which commands a wide plain, and has a lofty mountain shaped like an amphitheatre at its rear, the stranger ascends the spot by a magnificent staircase, or pair of staircases, which separate in opposite directions to meet at the summit. Here are the gigantic remains of several palaces, great porticos with winged bulls and reliefs representing, gods and princes. In the live rock of the mountains at the rear tombs have been hewn, evidently to receive the occupants of the palaces, and all the rocks and walls are covered with the cuneiform or arrow-headed inscriptions, consisting of very simple elements, which are nothing but thin wedges and angles

but with these elements combined in wonderful variety.... But no record of the language or its import had survived, and the ignorant inhabitants of the neighbourhood looked upon the texts with greater awe than they did the winged monsters that loomed over the plain. They were to them symbols of magic import, which, if duly pronounced, would unlock the hidden treasures guarded by the lions and the bulls." (Mahaffy's Prolegomena to Ancient History, p. 168.)

The savants of the seventeenth century were not "wiser in their generation" than the rude nomads who pitched their tents under the shadow of the stone monsters. Many years after Della Valle's visit the Oriental scholar, Hyde, in a book on the Ancient Persian Religion, soberly suggested that the signs were designed by some fantastic architect to show into how many combinations the same kind of stroke would enter. It is a wonder that he did not, with equal sobriety, suggest that they were related to the well-known Norman "hatchet-work." And so the guessing went on. One antiquary contended that they were talismanic signs; another that they were mystic formulæ of the priests, or astrological symbols of the old Chaldean star-worshippers; another saw in them a species of revealed digital language wherewith the Creator talked to Adam, whence the primitive speech of mankind was derived; while others conjectured them to be Chinese, or Samaritan, or Runic, or Ogam characters. Most fantastic of all, one ingenious theorist saw in them the action of numberless generations of worms!

But by the middle of the eighteenth century a sane school of investigators had found its leader. A great traveller, Carsten Niebuhr, father of the famous historian of early Rome, was the first to divine the true character of the inscriptions. He agreed with Della Valle that they were written from left to right, and he saw that they were made up of three different sets of characters, each meaning the same thing. But beyond showing, in his careful transcript published in 1764, that one of the three scripts was simpler in character than the others—all, as he assumed, being alphabetic varieties of one language—he could not go. The meaning still remained a mystery. Thirty years later, Münter, a Danish philologist, correctly guessed that the diagonal bar

, which occurred frequently, was a sign for the separation of words, and, next, he discovered the vowel signs, which, as distinct characters, are absent from the Hebrew and other Semitic languages. This was a great step towards final decipherment. Herodotus (i. 125, &c.) speaks of the Achæmenid dynasty of Persian kings who were the lords of Asia in the sixth and fifth centuries b.c. The ruins of Persepolis are identified as the remains of their palaces. Of this royal house the famous Darius was a member, and Herodotus tells how that monarch, "having gazed upon the Bosphorus, set up two pillars by it of white stone with characters cut upon them, on the one Assyrian and on the other Hellenic, being the names of all the nations which he was leading with him" (iv. 87). The engraving of the same inscription in two or more different languages (of course necessitated by making their decrees known to the various peoples whom they ruled) was thus shown to be a custom of the Persian kings.

Put upon the quest, a French scholar, M. de Sacy, born at Paris in 1758, copied some inscriptions of the Sassanid dynasty, which reigned in Persia a.d. 226-651. These were written in a known alphabet which is a mixture of Persian and Aramaic, called Pehlevi, and were shown by De Sacy to run in the following form:—"I, (M or W,) king of kings, son of (X,) king of kings, did thus and thus." Then, grouping together the several facts, came Dr. Georg Friedrich Grotefend, to formulate the theory that the Persepolitan inscriptions were written in three languages, and not three alphabets of one language, as Carsten Niebuhr had surmised. The recurrence of certain groups of characters led him to the inference that "the inscriptions were a fixed formula, only differing in the proper names." If these inscriptions began, like those read by De Sacy, with the formula, X, the king of kings, son of D, the king of kings, then it was clear that D was X's father; and, further, that D's father was not a king, because his name was not followed by that title, D being therefore the founder of a royal race. Now, Hystaspes, father of Darius, was not king, but satrap under Cambyses; and, joining his knowledge of history to his skill in philology, Grotefend found the key to the royal name. He lived for thirty years after this discovery, but added nothing to his triumph save "a fortunate guess of the name Nebuchadnezzar in one of the Assyrian inscriptions." Other decipherments followed; but it was reserved for the genius and industry of our countryman, the late Sir Henry Rawlinson, to discover the key whereby the ancient languages of Persia, Babylon, and Assyria can be read, and thus "a chapter of the world's history that had been well-nigh wholly lost made known to mankind." That eminent scholar in no wise exaggerated the importance of his work in claiming that its value in the interpretation of cuneiform writing is almost equal to that of the discovery of the Rosetta Stone in the interpretation of the hieroglyphic texts of Egypt (Archæologia, xxxiv. p. 75).

Fig. 39.—Rock Inscription at Behistun

The story of Rawlinson's achievement is warrant of the claim. About sixty years ago, being then a lieutenant, he was sent to Persia to drill the army of the Shah. His interest in Oriental history and antiquities was already keen, and he was glad to find himself in regions rich in materials the obscurity of whose meaning quickened inquiry. Among these was a trilingual inscription, dating from the early part of the sixth century b.c., cut on the face of a bare precipitous rock at Behistun, about twenty miles from Kirmanshah, a district abounding in monuments of the past (Fig. 39). At the risk of life and limb he climbed the face of the steep cliff to make copies of such portions of the inscriptions as were accessible with the means at his command, and after a series of efforts, continued at intervals through several years, he finally secured a complete transcript of so much of the writing as time had left uninjured. The inscription is in three languages—Babylonian, Mede or Scythian, and Persian—arranged in parallel columns containing above one thousand lines. It commemorates "the life and acts of Darius Hystaspes, his conquests, and the nations under his sway." Bas-reliefs portray that monarch, bow in hand, sitting with his feet on the prostrate usurper, Gaumates, while a train of nine rebel princes, whose names are inscribed above their effigies, stand before the "king of kings," chained together by the neck. Two of the monarch's soldiers are in the rear. Over Gaumates is written: "This is Gaumates, the Magian; he lied; he said, I am Smerdis, son of Cyrus." The same formula occurs over the heads of each of the nine captives. "This is (M); he lied; he said he was king of (N)." The inscription begins with a solemn invocation to Ormuzd, the old Persian god of light and purity, and passes on to detail the claim of Darius to the throne of the Achæmenids and the possessions of the Persian crown. It tells of the defeat of Smerdis, and of the revolt of Susiana, a province lying between Persia and Babylonia. "I sent thither an army, and the rebel Atrina was brought in chains before me; I slew him." The same story is narrated concerning other rebellious subjects. Of one Phraortes, it is told that his nose, ears, and tongue were cut off, and that he was "crucified at Ecbatana, together with his accomplices." Then the inscription proceeds:

"King Darius saith: These countries rebelled against my power. By lies they were separated from me. The men thou seest here deceived my people. My army took them, according to my orders. King Darius saith: Oh, thou that shalt be king hereafter, see that thou art not guilty of deceit. Him that is wicked, judge as he should be judged, and if thou reignest thus thy kingdom will be great. King Darius saith: What I did, I did ever by the grace of Ormuzd. Thou that readest upon this stone my deeds, think not that thou hast been deceived, neither be thou slow to believe them. King Darius saith: Ormuzd be my witness that I have not spoken these things with lying lips." (Cf. Transactions of Royal Asiatic Society, 1844-46, 1851; also Life of Sir Henry Rawlinson, pp. 146, 153, 326.)

As Professor Mahaffy points out, the exact correspondence of this record, "especially in the many proper names it contains, with the names of persons and provinces described by Herodotus, is a convincing proof of the accuracy of the deciphering. It will give some notion of the style of the documents that have been preserved. It will also prove the accuracy of the accounts given by Herodotus and Xenophon of the character of the ancient Persians, in whom an honest love of truth and hatred of lies was the prominent feature—a feature which we justly honour more than any other in a nation, but in which most Oriental nations, and indeed the Greeks also, were woefully deficient." (Prolegomena, p. 186.)

Sir Henry Rawlinson's decipherment of the great inscription of Behistun did perhaps more than aught else to open the long-closed door to the secret of Mesopotamian culture. The Persian inscription is in a language which is the mother-tongue of modern Persian, and its meaning being discovered, the interpretation of the Medic or Scythic, and of the Babylonian, the oldest of the three, followed, while the several characters supplied a valuable object-lesson in the stages of the development of writing from the ideographic through the syllabic, and thence of approach to the alphabetic.

Cuneiform writing appears to have been originally inscribed upon a vegetable substance called likhusi, but the abundant clay of the alluvial country afforded material whose convenience and permanence brought it into general use. Upon this the characters were impressed by a reed or square-shaped stylus, the clay-books being afterwards baked or sun-dried. For inscriptions on stone or metal a chisel was used. The writing of the Assyrian scribes is often exceedingly minute, the tablets containing a mass of matter in a tiny space. The work was trying enough to sometimes require the use of a magnifying-glass, and among Sir Austin Layard's discoveries at Nineveh was that of a lathe-turned crystal lens which was probably used for the purpose. Obviously the substances chosen account for the angular form of the characters; as the dyer's hand is "subdued to what it works in," so the nature of the material in which the sculptor seeks to express his conceptions largely determines for him the limits of that expression. Phidias himself could not have produced his Pallas Athene from the stubborn granite of Syene; and, as the outcome of the Egyptian temperament, the sphinxes of the Nile valley might have worn a less relentless look had they been fashioned of the marble of Pentelicus. Much as the abrupt cuneiform character tends, however, to obscure the traces of its derivation, there are sufficing proofs that it is of pictographic origin, although no examples of picture-writing in Mesopotamia corresponding in primitiveness to those already given from barbaric sources have been discovered. In the linear Babylonian, as it is called, the hieroglyph for "sun" is a diamond-shaped figure

which later on became

, and in the latest cuneiform,

. Evidently the earliest sign was a circle, which could not be easily traced on the stone or clay, and hence appears as the angular character shown above. The annexed table, which is a copy of one supplied by Mr. Pinches to Professor Keane, and published in his admirable monograph, Man Past and Present, gives a set of typical examples of the derivation of cuneiform characters from the earliest known pictographs.

Evolution of the Akkadian Cuneiforms.

As an illustration bearing upon the specimens set forth in the table we have the ideogram of Nineveh

. The archaic form of this character

proves that it was compounded of the ideographic picture of a house, enclosing the ideogram of the fish

, thus preserving record of the instructive fact that imperial Nineveh was at first, as its name implies (nun, "fish," is the name of the fourteenth letter of the Semitic alphabet), a collection of fishermen's huts (cf. Taylor, i. 41). The frequent mixture of old and new forms in cuneiform writings and the different values sometimes given to the same sign, have increased the difficult task of interpretation. As in the earlier stages of other languages, determinatives were used; e.g. all names of men were preceded by a single upright wedge, of countries by three horizontal wedges, and so on. But in the examples given in the table, the gradual conventionalising of the signs is seen, as in that for "ox," wherein the modification of the head and horns of the animal into the phonogram is obvious, while the Behistun inscription exhibits well-defined stages of approach to simplification. The cumbrous cuneiform which fills the third column has five hundred symbols, ideograms, phonograms, and homophones; the Medic, which occupies the second column, is written in ninety-six pure syllabic signs; while the Persian tells the same story in thirty-six alphabetic signs, four only of the primitive ideograms being retained. This survival of use of ideograms, it may be noticed in passing, has illustration among ourselves in many ways. As certain parts of the body, e.g. hand, foot, bosom (in Anglo-Saxon fæthem, i.e. "fathom," or the space of both arms extended), and forearm (Latin ulna, Anglo-Saxon eln, whence "ell"), became and remain standards of measurement, so it is with certain modes of reckoning. The digits, I, II, III, IIII (Latin digitus, "a finger") are unquestionably pictures of fingers, and Grotefend contends with good reason that V is a picture of the four fingers closed and the thumb extended, while X would represent the two hands, IV the subtraction and VI the addition of a finger. The use of a primitive decimal notation is widespread among barbaric peoples. In chess problems the several pieces are pictorially represented; in the planetary signs, ☿ is the caduceus or wand of Mercury; ♀ is the mirror of Venus, while the entomologist, in cataloguing his specimens, uses these symbols for the male and female respectively. In ♂ we have the shield and spear of Mars; in ♃ , the sign for Jupiter, the arm wields a thunderbolt; and the mower's scythe ♄ is the symbol of Saturn (connected with Latin sero, satum, "to sow"), the god of agriculture. The signs of the Zodiac, which were mapped out by the old Chaldeans, supply a still more cogent example. In the form in which they are depicted on the ancient temple of Denderah, in Egypt, there may be traced evidence of their primitive pictorial character, a character still recognised in the headings of the months in our almanacks (cf. Whitaker's), and to be detected in current symbols. For example, the curved horns of the ram survive in ♈ , the sign for Aries; the head and horns of the bull in ♉ , the sign for Taurus; the arrow and a portion of the bow in ♐ , the sign for Sagittarius; while, as Dr. Taylor points out, "the curious symbol

is found to preserve the whole outline of Capricornus, the small circle being the head of the goat, with the forelegs below, and the body and tail extending to the left." Then in such entries in the almanack as "

rises 4h. 25m.," "

11h. 54m.," "

10th 9.32 morn.," "

3420" in tables of the configuration of Jupiter's satellites, as also in the symbols for money, weights, measures, and so forth, the not wholly dispensed with picture-writing may be detected. The well-nigh vanished trade signs doubtless served a useful purpose as pictographs in guiding the illiterate to the shops of which they were in quest; and here and there the barber's pole with its spiral bandages reminds us of the phlebotomy of the past; the golden balls of the great financiers of Florence hang out from pawnbrokers' shops their delusive signal to the thriftless; while the "grasshopper" of Messrs. Martin, the "leather bottell" of Messrs. Hoare, and other remnants of goldsmiths' trade signs, remind us how many of these swung before the shops of Cheape and Lombard Street in olden time.

To return to the cuneiform. It will be remembered that in the case of the monosyllabic Chinese, with its dictionary of forty thousand words, the symbols of these are compounds of phonograms or sound-words with determinatives as keys to the precise meaning to be attached to the phonograms. Now the languages of the ancient peoples of the Euphrates valley are polysyllabic, and hence arose the necessity for signs denoting full syllables, both complex, "in which several consonants may be distinguished, or simple syllables composed of only one consonant and one vowel or vice versâ." (Maspero's Dawn of Civilization, p. 728.) And among the libraries of Babylon there were discovered a number of little grammatical documents on bricks, called syllabaria, where a list of characters is given, with the phonetic sign explained in simple syllables at one side, and, when used ideographically, at the other. When a syllabary had thus been adopted, the grouping into words was effected by combining the syllables. "But a polysyllabic language did not lend itself so readily as the Chinese monosyllabic to syllabism," and Halévy explains how the difficulty was met. It was met, at least in some degree, by the adoption of the principle of Acrology (Greek akron, "extreme" = at the top or start), i.e. by the choice of a name from the likeness which it suggested between the form of the letter and some familiar thing whose name began with the letter in question. This re-naming of letters by a word beginning with them occurred in the Egyptian, Russian, Runic, and other alphabets. For example, in Russian, the letter b is not called beta but buki, "a beech," while d has lost the old name of delta and acquired that of dobro, "an oak." In the Runic letters of our forefathers b is named beorc or "birch," and th "thorn," while the acrologic system comes nearer home to us in the old nursery rhymes: "A was an Archer, who shot at a frog; B was a Butcher, who had a big dog," &c.

Now this advance to syllabism had been effected, long before the Babylonians appear on the scene, by the older inhabitants of Mesopotamia, the Akkadians, or, more correctly, the Akkado-Sumerians, the Akkadians being settled on the highlands, and the Sumerians on the plains, of that region. The racial affinities of either are not determined, some ethnologists holding that they are of Finno-Turkic origin, others that they belong to the Tatar-Mongolic branch. Neither is it known at what period they immigrated into Chaldea, since at the dawn of history they are already merged in the Semitic conquering race. Some thousands of years b.c. Chaldea had been invaded by the people afterwards known as Babylonians, whose primitive home, in common with that of other Semites, as the Hebrews, Phœnicians, &c., is conjectured to have been in South Arabia. The Babylonians, mixing their blood with that of the subject peoples, settled as agriculturists on the rich alluvial lowlands, while an offshoot from them, the Assyrians, occupied the mountainous and wooded country to the north of the great rivers, keeping their Semitic purity of descent. These "Romans of the East," as they have been called, were soldiers and merchants, strong in the conviction that "trade follows the flag," and hence embarking in many an aggressive enterprise to beat the Phœnician and other rivals in commerce. But, resting on the sword alone, the Assyrian empire perished by the sword.

As for the Akkadians (using this term to include the pre-Semite inhabitants), they had passed the barbaric stage when they invaded Chaldea. They knew the use of metals: they were skilful architects, and; what was of importance in the marshy districts where dams and canals were indispensable, good engineers; their laws mark an advanced social organisation; their writing, as has been seen, had become syllabic; and their literature, besides recording the details of their daily life, supplies the key to a religion which profoundly influenced the Babylonians, and, through them, the Hebrews, ultimately affecting the whole of Christendom. That religion was a blend of higher and lower ideas. At base it was Shamanistic. Natural phenomena—sun, moon, stars, the earth, and so forth—were worshipped, but, as in all religions, that which touches man more closely in his affairs and relations has the firmer hold, and hence there was an active belief in magic, with its allied apparatus of charms, spells, and incantations. Side by side with formulæ embodying superstitions common to barbaric folk all the world over, we find penitential psalms, appeals to the great gods, and spiritual utterances, some of which are on a plane with Hebrew sacred poetry. All this body of literature, secular and sacred, made up the vast store of books in the libraries whose interpretation is one of the brilliant successes of modern scholarship, and whose contents bring home to us the priceless value of the art of writing to mankind.

Up to a recent date, the oldest known example of cuneiform writing was supplied by a porphyry cylinder seal of the Semite king, Sargon I., who flourished 3800 b.c. (Fig. 40). It bears this inscription:—"Sargon, King of the city of Akkad, to the Sun-god (Sarnas) in the city of Sippara I approached." It is this same king concerning whom a myth, which may have been the origin of the myth about the infant Moses in the bulrushes, is recorded on a tablet preserved, together with the seal, in the British Museum.

Fig. 40.—Cylinder Seal of Sargon I.

Another famous cuneiform relic is the Stele of the Vultures, a large portion of which is in the Louvre. It dates from about 4500 b.c., and besides its sculptured panels, one of which depicts vultures carrying away the heads of the slain in battle (whence its name), it records the victory of E-anna-du, priest-king of Sirpurra, over the "people of the land of the Bow," on the Elamite frontier, a tribute of corn being imposed on the conquered state. Other inscriptions testify that "in the fourth millennium before the Christian era art was fully developed, statues set up, the chariot used in war, silver and copper worked, weaving and the making of pottery known, and an elaborate system of calculation into thousands evolved." But the antiquity of these witnesses pales before that evidenced by the rubbish-mounds of the city of Nuffar or Nippur, in Northern Babylonia. Several records of Sargon I. were found among the thousands of tablets dug from the later deposits, but discoveries were made beneath these on which Dr. Peters, in reporting on the epigraphic material secured by Mr. Haynes, writes as follows:—"We found that Nippur was a great and flourishing city, and its temple, the temple of Bel, the religious centre of the dominant people of the world at a period as much prior to the time of Abraham as the time of Abraham is prior to our own day. We discovered written records no less than six thousand years old, and proved that writing and civilisation were then by no means in their infancy. Further than that, our explorations have shown that Nippur possessed a history extending backward of the earliest written documents found by us, at least two thousand years." (Nippur; the Narrative of the University of Pennsylvania's Expedition, vol. ii. p. 241.) Upon which Dr. Hilprecht comments: "I do not hesitate to date the founding of the temple of Bel and the first settlements in Nippur somewhere between 6000 and 7000 b.c., and possibly earlier." (Academy, 30th April 1898, p. 465.)

Fig. 41.—Tell-el-Amarna Tablet (circa 1450 b.c.)

Fig. 42.—First Creation Tablet

Although they are nearly five thousand years later, deeper interest attaches to the three hundred and twenty clay tablets, inscribed with the cuneiform character (Fig. 41), which were discovered in 1887 among the ruins of Tell-el-Amarna, the Arabic name of a village on the east bank of the Nile, about one hundred and eighty miles south of the once renowned city of Memphis. The village stands on the site of a city founded by Amenophis III., so that the date of the documents, among which are letters received by that king, is known to range from 1500 to 1450 b.c. Two of the tablets contain legends, and one gives a hymn to the war-god, but the larger number comprise communications passing between the kings of Egypt and the kings of Western Asia, many of them being docketed with the date and name of the sender written in Egyptian hieroglyph. One tablet from a Hittite prince is written in the old Akkadian tongue. They furnish valuable information upon the political and commercial relations between Egypt and Babylonia, and upon negotiations between the kings both for wives and subsidies. "Being all in the cuneiform character, they were unlikely to be readily deciphered at the Egyptian court. Hence it was the custom of the Babylonian kings to send interpreters with them, and reference is made to such messengers in several of the letters. But a scribe able to read and write the cuneiform was undoubtedly kept by the Pharaohs for purposes of translation and for inditing replies. Some of the tablets are copies of such replies, written in cuneiform, but retained for reference, just as we in the present day keep copies of important letters."

Fig. 43.—Deluge Tablet (Chaldean Epic) OBVERSE.

Fig. 44.—Deluge Tablet (Chaldean Epic) REVERSE.

The actual contents of the Tell-el-Amarna tablets are of secondary importance to the fact that cuneiform writing was in use in Palestine fifteen hundred years before Christ, and, therefore, that Babylonian myths and legends had, in all probability, circulated freely there centuries before the Book of Genesis took shape. Thus the legends of the Creation, the Fall, and the Deluge, the Chaldean origin of which is established (Figs. 42, 43, 44), "can very well have existed in Palestine at the time it was invaded by the Israelites, who would have learned them from the people they subdued, and would have found plenty of time to modify them into the forms in which they appear in Hebrew literature." (The Witness of Assyria, p. 11, by Chilperic Edwards.)

CHAPTER VI

EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPHICS