PICTURE-WRITING.
[Sidenote: Lateness of the discovery of letters.]
Though it is true, as we have said before, that every manufactured
article involves a long chapter of unwritten history to account for its
present form, and the perfection of the material from which it is
wrought, there is no one of them, not the most artistic, that will so
well repay an effort to hunt it through its metamorphoses in the ages to
its first starting-point, as will the letters that rapidly drop from our
pen when we proceed to write its name. Each one of these is a
manufactured article at which a long, long series of unknown artists
have wrought, expanding, contracting, shaping, pruning, till at length,
the result of centuries of effort, our alphabet stands clear--a little
army of mute, unpretending signs, that are at once the least considered
of our inherited riches--mere jots and tittles--and the spells by which
all our great feats of genius are called into being. Does unwritten
history or tradition tell us anything of the people to whose invention
we owe them? or, on the other hand, can we persuade the little shapes
with which we are familiar to so animate themselves, and give such an
account of the stages by which they grew into their present likeness, as
will help us to understand better than we did before the mental and
social conditions of the times of their birth? One question, at least,
they answer clearly--we know that while in their earliest forms they
must have preceded the birth of History, they were the forerunners and
heralds of his appearance, and if we are obliged to relegate their
invention to the dark period of unrecorded events, we must place it at
least in the last of the twilight hours, the one that preceded daybreak,
for they come leading sunlight and certainty behind them. It will be
hard if these revealers of other births should prove to be entirely
silent about their own. Another point seems to grow clear as we think.
As letters are the elements by which records come to us, it is not in
records, or at least not in early records, that we must look for a
history of their invention. Like all other tools, they will have lent
themselves silently to the ends for which they were called into being.
For a long, long time, they will have been too busy giving the history
of their employers to tell us consciously anything about themselves. We
must leave the substance of records, then, and look to their manner and
form, if we would unravel the long story of the invention and growth of
our alphabet; and as it is easiest to begin with the thing that is
nearest to us, let us pause before one of our written words, and ask
ourselves exactly what it is to us.
[Sidenote: Writing the art of picturing sound.]
In discussing the growth of language, we surmised that words were at
first descriptive of the things they named, in fact, pictures to the
ear. What, then, is a written word? Is it, too, a picture, and what does
it picture, to the eye? When we have written the words _cat_, _man_,
_lion_, what have we done? We have brought the images of certain things
into our minds, and that by a form presented to the eye; but is it the
form of the object we immediately think of? No, it is the form of its
name; it is, therefore, the picture of a sound. To picture _sound_ is,
surely, a very far-fetched notion, one that may have grown out of many
previous efforts to convey thought from mind to mind; but certainly not
likely to occur first to those who began the attempt to give permanent
shape to the thoughts floating within them. So great and difficult a
task must have baffled the powers of many enterprisers, and been
approached in many ways before the first steps towards accomplishing it
were securely taken. We shall find that the history of our alphabet is a
record of slow stages of growth, through which the idea of sound-writing
has been evolved; the first attempts to record events were made in a
different direction. Since, as we have agreed, we are not likely to find
a record of how events were first recorded, and as the earliest attempts
are likely to have been imperfect and little durable, we must be content
to form our notions of the earliest stage in our grand invention, by
observing the methods used by savages now to aid their memories; and if
we wish to determine the period in the history of the human race when
such efforts are likely to have been first made, we must recall what we
have already learned of the history of primitive man, and settle at what
stage of his development the need for artificial aids to memory would
first press upon him.
Stories and poetry are not likely to have been the first things written
down. While communities were small and young, there was no need to write
painfully what it was so delightful to repeat from mouth to mouth, and
so easy for memories to retain; and when the stock of tradition and the
treasure of song grew so large in any tribe as to exceed the capacity of
ordinary memories (stronger, in some respects, before the invention of
writing than now), men with unusual gifts would be chosen and set apart
for the purpose of remembering and reciting, and of handing down to
disciples in the next generation, the precious literature of the tribe.
Such an order of ‘remembrancers’ would soon come to be looked upon as
sacred, or at least highly honourable, and would have privileges and
immunities bestowed on them which would make them jealous of an
invention that would lessen the worth of their special gift. The
invention of writing, then, is hardly likely to have come from the
story-tellers or bards. It was probably to aid the memory in recalling
something less attractive and more secret than a story or a song that
the first record was made.
So early as the time of the cave-dwellers, there was a beginning of
commerce. Traces have been found of workshops belonging to that period,
where flint weapons and tools were made in such quantities as evidently
to have been designed for purposes of barter, and the presence of amber
and shells in places far from the coast, speaks of trading journeys.
With bargains and exchange of commodities, aids to memory must surely
have come in; and when we think of the men of the Neolithic age as
traders, we can hardly be wrong in also believing them to have taken the
next step in civilization which trade seems to bring with it--the
invention of some system of mnemonics.
[Sidenote: Tallies.]
No man or woman would be likely to trust their bargaining to another
without giving him some little token or pledge by way of safeguard
against mistake or forgetfulness. It would be a very trifling,
transitory thing at first; something in the nature of a tally, or a
succession of knots or woven threads in a garment, allied to the knot
which we tie on our handkerchief overnight to make us remember something
in the morning. It seems hardly worthy of notice, and yet the invention
of that artificial aid to memory is the germ of writing, the little
seed from which such great things have come. Unfortunately, our
discoveries of stone-age relics have not yet furnished us with any
suggestion as to how the men of that epoch arranged and carried out the
aids to memory they probably had; but we can trace the process of
invention among still extant races.
Some tribes of Red Indians, for example, keep records on cords called
wampum, by means of beads and knots. When an embassy is sent from one
chieftain to another, the principal speaker carries one of these pieces
of wampum, and from it reads off the articles of the proposed treaty,
almost as easily as if it were from a note-book.
In the Eastern Archipelago, and in Polynesia proper, cord-records of the
same kind were in use forty years ago, and by means of them the
tax-gatherers in the island of Hawaii kept clear accounts of all
articles collected from the inhabitants of the island. The revenue-book
of Hawaii was a rope four hundred fathoms long, divided into portions
corresponding to districts in the island, and each portion was under the
care of a tax-gatherer, who by means of knots, loops, and tufts of
different shapes, colours, and sizes, managed to keep an accurate
account of the number of hogs, dogs, pieces of sandal-wood, etc., at
which each inhabitant of his district was rated. The Chinese, again,
have a legend that in very early times their people used little cords
marked by knots of different sizes, instead of writing.
But the people who brought the cord system of mnemonics to the greatest
perfection were the Peruvians. They were still following it at the time
of their conquest by the Spaniards; but they had elaborated it with such
care as to make it available for the preservation of even minute details
of the statistics of the country. The ropes on which they kept their
records were called _quipus_, from _quipu_, a knot. They were often of
great length and thickness, and from the main ropes depended smaller
ones, distinguished by colours appropriate to subjects of which their
knots treated--as, white for silver, yellow for gold, red for soldiers,
green for corn, parti-coloured when a subject that required division was
treated of. These dependent coloured strings had, again, other little
strings hanging from them, and on these exceptions were noted. For
instance, on the _quipus_ devoted to population--the coloured strings on
which the number of men in each town and village was recorded had
depending from them little strings for the widowers, and no doubt the
widows and the old maids had their little strings from the coloured cord
that denoted women. One knot meant ten; a double knot, one hundred; two
singles, side by side, twenty; two doubles, two hundred; and the
position of the knots on their string and their form were also of
immense importance, each subject having its proper place on the quipus
and its proper form of knot. The art of learning to read quipus must
have been difficult to acquire; it was practised by special
functionaries, called quipucamayocuna, or knot-officers, who, however,
seem only to have been able to expound their own records; for when a
quipus was sent from a distant province to the capital, its own officer
had to travel with it to explain it; a clumsy and cumbrous way of
sending a letter, it must be confessed.
Knot-records were almost everywhere superseded by other methods of
recording events as civilization advanced; but still they continued to
be resorted to under special circumstances, and by people who had not
the pens of ready writers. Darius made a quipus when he took a thong,
and tying sixty knots on it, gave it to the Ionian chiefs, that they
might untie a knot every day, and go back to their own land if he had
not returned when all the knots were undone. The Scythians, however,
who, about the same time, sent a message to Darius, afford us an example
of another way of attaching special meanings to certain objects, and
thereby giving a peculiar use as aids to memory,--writing letters with
objects instead of pen and ink, in fact. Here, however, symbolism comes
in, and makes the mnemonics at once prettier and less trustworthy as
capable of more than one interpretation. The Scythian ambassadors
presented Darius (as Herodotus tells us) with a mouse, a bird, a frog,
and an arrow, and the message with which they had been intrusted was
that, unless he could hide in the earth like a mouse, or fly in the air
like a bird, or swim in water like a frog, he would never escape the
arrows of the Scythians.
Of this last kind of mnemonic was the bow, too heavy for an ordinary man
to bend, which the long-lived Ethiopians sent to Cambyses; and the
twelve memorial stones which Joshua was directed to place in the river
Jordan, in order that the sons might ask the fathers, and the fathers
tell the sons what had happened in that place; and, again, such were the
yokes and bonds which Jeremiah put round his neck when he testified
against the alliance with Egypt before Zedekiah, and the earthen pot
that he broke in the presence of the elders of the people. Signs joined
with words and actions to convey a fuller or more exact meaning than
words alone could convey. Perhaps we ought hardly to call these last
examples helps to memory; they partake more of the nature of pictures,
and were used to heighten the effect of words. But we may regard them as
a connecting link between the merely mechanical tally, wampum and
quipus, and the effort to record ideas we must now consider--picturing.
It must, however, always be borne in mind that, though we shall speak of
these various methods of making records as stages of progress and
development, it is not to be supposed that the later ones immediately,
or indeed ever wholly, superseded the first any more than the
introduction of bronze and iron did away with the use of flint weapons.
The one method subsisted side by side with the other, and survived to
quite late times, as we see in such usages as the bearing forth of the
fiery cross to summon clansmen to the banner of their chieftain, and the
casting down of the knight’s glove as a gage of battle, or, to come down
to homely modern instances, the tallies and knots on handkerchiefs that
unready writers carry to help their memories even now.
Helps to memory of the kinds which we have been speaking of never get
beyond being _helps_. They cannot carry thought from one to another
without the intervention of an interpreter, in whose memory they keep
fast the words that have to be said; they strengthen tradition, but they
cannot change tradition into history, and are always liable to become
useless by the death of the man, or order of men, to whom they have been
intrusted.
[Sidenote: Picturing.]
A more independent and lasting method of recording events was sure to be
aimed at sooner or later; and we may conjecture that it usually took its
rise among a people at the period when their national pride was so
developed as to make them anxious that the deeds of some conspicuous
hero should be made known, not only to those interested in telling and
hearing of them, but to strangers visiting their country, and to remote
descendants. Their first effort to record an event, so as to make it
widely known, would naturally be to draw a picture of it, such that all
seeing the picture would understand it; and accordingly we find that
the earliest step beyond artificial helps to memory is the making of
rude pictures which aim at showing a deed or event as it occurred
without suggesting the words of a narrative; this is called ‘picturing’
as distinguished from picture-writing. That this, too, was a very early
art we may guess from the fact that rude pictures of animals have been
found among the relics of the earliest stone age. Whether or no we are
justified in conjecturing that the pictures actually found are rough
memorials of real hunting scenes, at least we learn from them that the
thought of depicting objects had come, and the skill to produce a
likeness been attained; and the idea of using this power to transmit
events lies so near to its possession, that we can hardly believe one to
have been long present without the other. To enable ourselves to imagine
the sort of picture-records with which the stone-age men may have
ornamented some of their knives, spears, and hammers, we must examine
the doings of people who have continued in a primitive stage of
civilization down to historic times.
Some curious pictures done by North American Indians have been found on
rocks and stones, and on the stems of pine-trees in America, which
furnish excellent examples of early picturing. Mr. Tylor, in his _Early
History of Mankind_, gives engravings of several of these shadowy
records of long-past events. One of these, which was found on the
smoothed surface of a pine-tree, consists merely of a rude outline of
two canoes, one surmounted by a bear with a peculiar tail and the other
by a fish, and beyond these a quantity of shapes meant for a particular
kind of fish. The entire picture records the successes of two chieftains
named Copper-tail Bear and Cat-fish, in a fishing excursion. Another
picture found on the surface of a rock near Lake Superior is more
elaborate, and interests us by showing a new element in picturing,
through which it was destined to grow into the condition of
picture-writing. This more elaborate picture shows an arch with three
suns in it--a tortoise, a man about to mount a horse, and several
canoes, one surmounted by the image of a bird. All this tells that the
chief called King-fisher made an expedition of three days across a lake,
and arriving safely on land, mounted his horse. The new element
introduced into this picture is symbolism, the same that transformed the
homely system of tallies into the Scythian’s graceful living message to
Darius. It shows the excess of thought over the power of expression,
which will soon necessitate a new form. The tortoise is used as a symbol
of dry land. The arch is, of course, the sky, and the three suns in it
mean three days. The artist who devised these ways of expressing his
thought was on the verge of picture-writing, which is the next stage in
the upward progress of the art of recording events, and the stage at
which some nations have terminated their efforts.
[Sidenote: Picture-writing.]
Picture-writing differs from picturing in that it aims at conveying to
the mind, not a representation of an event, but a narrative of the event
in words, each word being represented by a picture. The distinction is
of immense importance. The step from the former to the latter is one of
the greatest which mankind has ever made in the course of its progress
in civilization. When the step had been made the road toward the
acquisition of a regular alphabet lay _comparatively_ open. It was still
beset with difficulties, but none so great as the difficulty of making
this particular step. Let us try and fully understand this. We will take
a sentence and see how it might be conveyed by the two methods. _A man
slew a lion with a bow and arrows while the sun went down._ Picturing
would show the man with a drawn bow in his hand, the lion struck by the
arrow, the sun on the horizon. Picture-writing would present a series of
little pictures and symbols dealing separately with each word--a man, a
symbol for ‘slew,’ say a hand smiting, a lion, a connecting symbol for
‘with,’ and so on. We see at once how much more elaborate and exact the
second method is, and that it makes the telling of a continuous story
possible. We also discover that these various stages of writing
correspond to developments of language, and that as languages grow in
capacity to express nobler thoughts, a greater stress will be put upon
invention to render the more recondite words by pictures and symbols,
till at last language will outgrow all possibility of being so rendered,
and another method of showing words to the eye will have to be thought
of--for all languages at least that attain their full development. That
a great deal may be expressed by pictures and symbols, however, we learn
from the picturing and picture-writing of past races that have come down
to us, and from the present writing of the Chinese, who with their
radical language have preserved the pictorial character that well
accords with an early stage of language.
The Red Indians of North America have invented some very ingenious
methods of picturing time and numbers. They have names for the thirteen
moons or months into which they divide the year--Whirlwind moon, moon
when the leaves fall off, moon when the fowls go to the south, etc., and
when a hunter setting forth on a long expedition wished to leave a
record of the time of his departure for a friend who should follow him
on the same track, he carved on the bark of a tree a picture of the name
of the moon, accompanied with such an exact representation of the state
of the moon in the heavens on the night when he set out, that his
friends had no difficulty in reading the date correctly. The Indians of
Virginia kept a record of events in the form of a series of wheels of
sixty spokes, each wheel representing the life of a man, sixty years
being the average life of a man among the Indians. The spokes meant
years, and on each one a picture of the principal occurrences of the
year was drawn.
A missionary who accompanied Penn to Pennsylvania says that he saw a
wheel, on one spoke of which the first arrival of Europeans in America
was recorded. The history of this disastrous event for the Indians was
given by a picture of a white swan spitting fire from its mouth. The
swan, being a water-bird, told that the strangers came over the sea, its
white plumage recalled the colour of their faces, and fire issuing from
its mouth represented fire-arms, the possession of which had made them
conquerors. The North American Indians also use rude little pictures,
rough writing we may call it, to help them to remember songs and charms.
Each verse of a song is concentrated into a little picture, the sight of
which recalls the words to one who has once learned it. A drawing of a
little man, with four marks on his legs and two on his breast, recalls
the adverse charm, ‘Two days must you fast, my friend, four days must
you sit still.’ A picture of a circle with a figure in the middle
represents a verse of a love-song, and says to the initiated, ‘Were she
on a distant island I could make her swim over.’ This sort of picturing
seems to be very _near_ writing, for it serves to recall words--but
still only to recall them--it would not suggest the words to those who
had never heard the song before; it is only an aid to memory, and its
employers have only as yet taken the first step in the great discovery
we are speaking of. The Mexicans, though they had attained to much
greater skill than this in the drawing and colouring of pictures, had
not progressed much further in the invention. Their picture-scrolls do
not seem ever to have been more than an elaborate system of mnemonics,
which, hardly less than the Peruvian quipus, required a race of
interpreters to hand down their meaning from one generation to another.
This fact makes us regret somewhat less keenly the decision of the first
Spanish archbishop sent to Mexico, who, on being informed of the great
store of vellum rolls, and folds on folds of cloth covered with
paintings, that had been discovered at Anahuac, the chief seat of
Mexican learning, ordered the entire collection to be burnt in a heap--a
_mountain_ heap, the chroniclers of the time call it--lest they should
contain incantations or instructions for the practice of magical arts.
As some excuse for this notion of the archbishop’s, we will mention the
subjects treated of in the five books of picture-writing which Montezuma
gave to Cortez:--the first book treated of years and seasons; the second
of days and festivals; the third of dreams and omens; the fourth of the
naming of children; the fifth of ceremonies and prognostications.
The few specimens of Mexican writing which have come down to us, show
that, though the Aztecs had not used their picture-signs as skilfully as
some other nations have done, they had taken the first step towards
phonetic, or sound-writing; a step which, if pursued, would have led
them through some such process as we shall afterwards see was followed
by the Egyptians and Phœnicians, to the formation of a true alphabet.
They had begun to write proper names of chiefs and towns by pictures of
things that recalled the _sound_ of their names, instead of by a symbol
suggestive of the appearance or quality of the place or chieftain, or of
the _meaning_ of the names. It is difficult to explain this without
pictures; but as this change of method involves a most important step in
the discovery of the art of writing, we had better pause upon it a
little, and get it clear to our minds. There was a king whose name
occurs in a chronicle now existing, called Itz-co-atle, Knife-snake; his
name is generally written by a picture of a snake, with flint knives
stuck in it; but in one place it is indicated in a different manner. The
first syllable is still _pictured_ by a knife; but for the second,
instead of a snake, we find an earthen pot and a sign for water. Now the
Mexican name for pot is ‘co-mitle,’ for water ‘atle;’ read literally the
name thus pictured would read ‘Itz-comitle-atle,’ but it is clear, since
the name intended was ‘Itz-co-atle,’ that the pot is drawn to suggest
only the first syllable of its name, _co_, and by this change it has
become no longer a picture, but a phonetic, syllabic sign, the next step
but one before a true letter. What great results can be elaborated from
this change we shall see when we begin to speak of Egyptian writing.
We must not leave picture-writing till we have said something about the
Chinese character, in which we find the highest development of which
_direct_ representation of things appears capable. Though we should not
think it, while looking at the characters on a Chinese tea-paper or box,
every one of those groups of black strokes and dots which seem so
shapeless to our eyes is a picture of an object; not a picture of the
sound of its name, as our written words are, but a representation real
or symbolic of the thing itself. Early specimens of Chinese writing show
these groups of strokes in a stage when a greater degree of resemblance
to the thing signified is preserved; but the exigencies of quick
writing, among a people who write and read a great deal, have gradually
reduced the pictures more and more to the condition of arbitrary signs,
whose connection with the things signified must be a matter of habit and
memory. The task of learning a sign for every word of the language in
place of conquering the art of spelling does seem, at first sight, to
put Chinese children in a pitiable condition, as compared with
ourselves. To lessen our compassion, we may recall that the Chinese
language is still in a primitive condition, and therefore comprehends
very much fewer distinct sounds than do the languages we know, the same
sound being used to express meanings by a difference in intonation. This
difference could not easily be given in writing; it is therefore, with
the Chinese, almost a necessity to recall to the mind the thing itself
instead of its name.
[Sidenote: Ideographs.]
Beside the ordinary pictorial signs which convey a direct and simple
idea to the mind, men must in pictorial writing need a great number of
signs for ideas which cannot be pictured. All abstract ideas, for
instance, come under this head. But even some things which could
themselves be drawn are not always so portrayed. When a symbol, and not
a direct picture, is used for the thing or idea represented we call the
symbol an _ideograph_. We see, then, that pictorial signs may be used in
several different ways, sometimes as real pictures, sometimes as
ideographs, which again may be divided into groups as they are used--(1)
metaphorically, as a bee for industry; (2) enigmatically, as, among the
Egyptians, an ostrich feather is used as a symbol of justice, because
all the plumes in the wing of this bird were supposed to be of equal
length; (3) by syndoche--putting a part for the whole,--as two eyeballs
for eyes; (4) by metonomy--putting cause for effect,--as a tree for
shadow; the disk of the sun for a day, etc. This system of writing in
pictures and symbols requires so much ingenuity, such hosts of pretty
poetic inventions, that perhaps there is less dulness than would at
first appear in getting the Chinese alphabet of some six thousand signs
or so by heart. We will mention a few Chinese ideographs in
illustration. The sign for a man placed over the sign for a mountain
peak signifies a hermit; the sign for a mouth and that for a bird placed
side by side signify the act of singing; a hand holding a sweeping-brush
is a woman; a man seated on the ground, a son (showing the respectful
position assigned to children in China); an ear at the opening of a door
means curiosity; two eyes squinting towards the nose mean to observe
carefully; one eye squinting symbolises the colour white, because so
much of the white of the eye is shown when the ball is in that position;
a mouth at an open door is a note of interrogation, and also the verb to
question.
[Sidenote: Determinative signs.]
Even Chinese writing, however, has not remained purely ideographic. Some
of the signs are used phonetically to picture sound, and this use must
necessarily grow now that intercourse with Western nations introduces
new names, new inventions, and new ideas, which, somehow or other, must
get themselves represented in the Chinese language and writing.
The invention of determinative signs--characters put beside the word to
show what class of objects a word belongs to--helps the Chinese to
overcome some of the difficulties which their radical language offers to
the introduction of sound-writing. For example, the word ‘Pa’ has eight
different meanings, and when it is written phonetically, a reader would
have to choose between eight objects to which he might apply it, if
there were not a determinative sign by its side which gives him a hint
how to read it. This is as if when we wrote the word ‘vessel’ we were to
add ‘navigation’ when we intended a ship; and ‘household’ when we meant
a jug or puncheon. The Chinese determinative signs are not, however,
left to each writer’s fancy. Two hundred and fourteen signs (originally
themselves pictures, remember) have been chosen out, and are always used
in this way. The classes into which objects are divided by these
numerous signs are minute, and do not appear to follow any scientific
method or arrangement. There is a sign to show that a written word
belongs to the class noses, another for rats, another for frogs, another
for tortoises. One is inclined to think that the helpful signs must be
as hard to remember as the words themselves, and that they can only be
another element in the general confusion. Probably their frequent
recurrence makes them soon become familiar to Chinese readers, and they
act as finger-posts to guide the thoughts into the right direction.
Determinative signs have always come in to help in the transitional
stage between purely ideographic and purely phonetic writing, and were
used by both Egyptians and Assyrians in their elaborate systems as soon
as the phonetic principle began to be employed among their ideographs.
It is an interesting fact that the Japanese have dealt with the Chinese
system of writing precisely as did the Phœnicians with the Egyptian
hieroglyphics. They have chosen forty-seven signs from the many
thousands employed by the Chinese, and they use them phonetically only;
that is to say, as true sound-carrying letters.