The Wallam-Olum (painted records) of the Leni Lenape Indians have
often been called into question as regards their authenticity, but
the evidence of Lederer, Humboldt, Heckewelder, Tanner, Loskiel,
Beatty, and Rafinesque, all of whom professed to have seen them,
rather discounts such unbelief in their existence. They consisted
of picture-writings, or hieroglyphs, each of which applied to a
whole verse, or many words. The ideas were, in fact, amalgamated in a
compound system, and bear exactly the same relation to written language
as the American tongues did to spoken language; that is, they were
of an agglutinative type, a linguistic form where several words are
welded into one. There are several series, one of which records the
doings of the tribes immediately subsequent to the Creation. Another
series relates to their doings in America, and consists of seven
songs, four of sixteen verses of four words each, and three of twenty
verses of three words each "It begins at the arrival in America," says
Rafinesque ("The American Nations"), "and is continued without hardly
any interruption till the arrival of the European colonists towards
1600." But this second series is a mere meagre catalogue of kings.