THE EUROPEAN DIFFUSION OF PICTOGRAPHY
AND ITS BEARINGS ON THE ORIGIN OF SCRIPT
The idea, formerly prevalent among classical scholars, that, before
the introduction of the Phoenician alphabet, there was no developed
system of written communication in Ancient Greece, has now fairly
broken down. In itself such an assumption shows not only a curious lack
of imagination, but a deliberate shutting of the eyes on the evidence
supplied by primitive races all over the world.
Was it possible, in view of these analogies, to believe that a form of
early culture which reached the stage revealed to us by Schliemann’s
discoveries at Mycenae was, from the point of view of written
communication, below that of the Red Indians? To myself, at least, it
was clear that the apparent lacuna in our knowledge must eventually
be supplied. It was with this instinctive assurance that I approached
the field of Cretan investigation, and the results of the discoveries
in the source and seminary of the Mycenaean culture of Greece have now
placed the matter beyond the range of controversy. The clay archives
found in the Palace of Knossos and elsewhere have proved that the
prehistoric Cretan had already, a thousand years before the appearance
of the first written record of Classical Greece, passed through every
stage in the evolution of a highly developed system of script.
There is evidence of a simple pictographic stage, and a
conventionalized hieroglyphic system growing out of it. And there is
evidence in them of the evolution out of these earlier elements of a
singularly advanced type of linear script of which two inter-related
forms are known.
A detailed account of these fully equipped forms of writing that thus
arose in the Minoan world will be given elsewhere.[1] For the moment I
would rather have you regard these first-fruits of literary produce in
European soil in their relation to the tree of very ancient growth and
of spreading roots and branches that thus, in the fullness of time, put
them forth. I refer to the primitive picture- and sign-writing that was
diffused throughout the European area and the bordering Mediterranean
region from immemorial antiquity.
In attempting a general survey of the various provinces--if we may
use the word--in which the remains of this ancient pictography are
distributed, it is necessary in the first instance to direct attention
to one so remote in time and circumstances that it may almost be
legitimately regarded as belonging to an older world.
I refer to the remarkable evidence of the employment of pictographic
figures and signs, and even of some so worn by use that they can
only be described as ‘alphabetiform’, among the wall-paintings and
engravings of the ‘Reindeer Period’--to use the term in its widest
general signification.
The whole cycle of designs by the cave-dwellers of the late
Palaeolithic periods may, to a very large extent, be described as
‘picture-writing’ in the more general sense of the word. The drawings
and carvings of reindeer and bisons, or more dangerous animals, such as
the mammoth, the cave bear, and lion, doubtless commemorated personal
experiences. In one case, at any rate, the naked man stalking an
aurochs, engraved on a reindeer horn, we have an actual record of the
chase.
[Illustration: FIG. 1. Stalking Aurochs.]
But over and above this more elaborate kind of picture story, the mass
of new materials--due in a principal degree to the patient researches
of Messieurs Cartailhac, Capitan, the Abbé Breuil, and the late M.
Piette--have thrown quite a new light on the development of pictography
among the late Palaeolithic peoples. Such a series of polychrome
wall-paintings as have been discovered in the great Cave of Altamira
near Santander, in Spain--paralleled by those found in the Grotte
de Marsoulas and elsewhere on the French side of the Pyrenees, with
their brilliant colouring and chiaroscuro, present this primaeval art
under quite new aspects. Moreover the superposition of one painting or
engraving over another on the walls of the caverns has supplied fresh
and valuable evidence as to the succession of the various phases
of this ‘parietal’ art. We have to deal with almost inexhaustible
palimpsests.
What is of special interest, however, in the present connexion, is
that, side by side with the larger or more complete representations,
there appear, in the lowest layer of these rock palimpsests,
abbreviated figures and linear signs which already at times present a
truly alphabetiform character.
Here we have the evidence of a gradual advance from simpler to more
elaborate forms. On the other hand, the _converse process_, the
gradual degeneration of more pictorial forms into their shorthand,
linearized equivalents, can often be traced in the series of these
representations. The Abbé Breuil, for instance, has recently published
a series of tables showing the progressive degeneration and stylization
of the heads of horses, goats, deer and oxen.[2] Without subscribing
to his views in all their details, it is evident that this derivative
series, as a whole, can be clearly made out. The abbreviation of the
oxheads in Fig. 2 is fairly clear up to No. 12, though whether the
further procession is to be traced in the spiraliform signs that follow
may be more open to doubt. It is worth noting that a curious parallel
to these very ancient examples of the degeneration of the ox’s head
is to be found among the Cretan and Cypriote signs of the Minoan and
Mycenaean Age.
[Illustration: FIG. 2.]
But the course followed by evolution of figured representations during
the ‘Reindeer Period’ leads to another result, which also has parallels
in the history of later art, but which does not seem to be so generally
recognized. The degeneration, illustrated by Fig. 2, of more or less
complete figures into mere linear reminiscences, is very familiar
to us. It is well illustrated, for instance, in the relation of the
demotic and hieratic Egyptian signs to the hieroglyphic. But what is
sometimes forgotten is that the simple linear forms are sometimes the
older, and that, even as, I think, can be shown in the case of some of
the Egyptian hieroglyphs, the linearization of the pictorial form was
merely a going back to what had really been the original form of the
figure. I have also been struck with the same phenomenon in tracing
the genesis of some of the hieroglyphic characters of Minoan Crete. We
have only to look at the rude attempts of children to depict objects to
see that simple linear forms of what may perhaps be called the ‘slate
pencil’ style precedes the more elaborate stage of drawing. Art begins
with skeletons, and it is only a gradual proficiency that clothes them
with flesh and blood.
[Illustration: FIG. 3.]
So it seems to have been with the Reindeer men. It has already been
noticed that the stratigraphy of the paintings and engravings on the
Cairoan walls, as investigated by the Abbé Breuil, shows that those of
the earliest phase were line sketches of the simplest kind.[3] They
are just such as a child might draw. They seem often to have been left
incomplete from mere laziness, just so much of the figure being given
as to enable its identification. No. 9, for instance, in the table
given in Fig. 3, is a mere outline of the front of a mammoth’s head,
even the tusks and eye being omitted. No. 2 shows only a little more
of a bison’s head. The eye at the beginning of the table seems to be
human, and may be the ideograph of the individual who drew it. Besides
these recognizable sketches there are other linear representations of
the slightest kind, but which, there can be little doubt, conveyed a
definite meaning to those who drew them. Of these a certain number,
moreover, are purely alphabetiform in character. There is an X, an L, a
T upside down, and they have learned to dot their _i_’s.
It is strange, indeed, that in the very infancy of its art mankind
should have produced the elemental figures which the most perfected
alphabetic systems have simply repeated. The elements of advanced
writing were indeed there, but the time had not yet come when their
real value could be recognized. It has only been after the lapse of
whole aeons of time, through the gradual decay and conventionalization
of a much more elaborate pictography, that civilized mankind reverted
to these ‘beggarly elements’, and literature was born. Yet it is
well to remember that the pre-existence of this old family of linear
figures, and their survival or re-birth, the world over, as simple
signs and marks, were always thus at hand to exercise a formative
influence. There may well have been a tendency for the decayed elements
of pictographic or hieroglyphic writing to assimilate themselves with
such standard linear types.
It is certain that groups of singularly alphabetiform figures appear at
times associated with the handiwork of the ‘Reindeer Period’. A good
example of such a group is seen on the flank of a bison, painted in red
and black on a wall of the Marsoulas Cave[4] (Fig. 4). Another curious
group shows examples of the constantly recurring pectiform or
comb-shaped figure. Others have been taken to represent the roof of
some kind of hut. The only human sign is an open hand, which may be
regarded as identical with the prototype of the Phoenician ‘kaph’, the
‘palus’ sign--our k. In its pictographic form it is found among the
Cretan hieroglyphs, and a linearized version identical with ‘kaph’
recurs among the Minoan linear characters.
In Fig. 5[5] are collected some specimens of signs or symbolic figures
from the Cave of Castillo, on the Spanish side of the Pyrenees, showing
amongst others the ‘hand’ and some figures which may represent hats.
A remarkable group of three alphabetiform signs occurs on a fragment
of reindeer-horn discovered by M. Piette in the Cave of Gourdan.[6]
One of these shows a great resemblance to an A or Aleph. A harpoon of
reindeer-horn, again, from La Madeleine,[7] shows a group of eight
linear signs, among which we may detect, however, several repetitions.
In the face of these and similar examples, are we to conclude with the
late M. Piette[8] that there was a regular alphabetic script during the
Pleistocene period, which in turn had been preceded by a hieroglyphic
system?
[Illustration: FIG. 4.]
[Illustration: FIG. 5.]
The artistic achievements of the men of the Reindeer Period attained
such a high level that even such a conclusion could hardly excite
surprise. In their portrayal of animal forms--in their power of seizing
the characteristic attitude of the creature represented--they show
themselves on a level with those later ‘Minoan’ artists of prehistoric
Crete and Greece who produced such masterpieces as the wild goat and
kids or the bull-hunt on the Vaphio Cups. We now know that the Minoan
race had also a highly developed form of linear script. Might not their
remote predecessors on European soil have evolved the same?
[Illustration: FIG. 6.]
That they had sufficient intellectual capacity to evolve a system of
writing, can hardly be doubted. There were, no doubt, some inferior
elements among the population of the Reindeer Period. It is possible
that certain low cranial types of the Neanderthal class may have
survived till late Pleistocene times; and the stratified remains, for
instance, of the Grotte des Enfants at Grimaldi, near Mentone, show
that its occupation by scions of a fine proto-European race--akin
to the ‘men of Cro-Magnon’--alternated during a certain time with
occupation by a race of negroid intruders presenting characteristics as
low as those of the Australian black men.[9] But the prevailing type
of skull associated with the interments in the Mentone Caves--those
of men with upright jaw and finely cut nose--struck no less competent
an observer than Sir E. Ray Lankester as exhibiting a perfection of
development and a cranial capacity worthy to be compared with those of
civilized Europeans of the present day.
We must, however, still remember that, whatever the intellectual
capacity of these archaic people, they did not possess that heirloom
of the Ages, the accumulated experience of the later races of mankind.
Art, indeed, seems to have come to them by nature, and they had other
germs of civilization--an incipient cult of the dead, some taste
for personal ornament. They were possessed of a variety of arms and
implements of stone and bone and other materials. They could kindle
fire and even mitigate the darkness of their subterranean vaults with
primitive stone lamps. They seem to have been skilful trappers, and
had even learned to bridle the horse. Yet many of the most simple
acquirements of primitive culture were still unknown to them. They knew
neither the potter’s nor the weaver’s, nor the husbandman’s craft. They
went mother-naked, and their principal dwellings were the caves and
dens of the earth.
This is emphatically not a people to be credited with an advanced form
of script. It seems more probable that the groups of linear signs that
occur should rather be regarded as mnemonic symbols, and the mere
isolated characters perhaps as individual marks. Some, it may be, had
acquired a magical value. A mnemonic series may be paralleled by the
well-known example of a mnemonic song of an Ojibway medicine-man, in
which every sign suggests a whole order of ideas.
It is noteworthy that among the more abbreviated representations
from the hands of the men of the Reindeer Period the human figure
is little brought into play, though the eye and hand do occur. In
general, moreover, we see little of the reaction of gesture language on
their pictorial records. In a scene from the walls of the Cave of Les
Combarelles,[10] however, a male figure is depicted with a hand raised,
and the other held straight out--evidently representing some expressive
utterance of gesture language (Fig. 7).
Another good instance of a gesture occurs among the strange anthropoid
figures with animal profiles, which, nevertheless, Messieurs
Cartailhac and Breuil consider to represent human subjects masked or
travestied.[11] On the roof of the hall of the Altamira Cave is one of
these quasi-human subjects, with the arms raised, with open palms in
front of its head, an attitude on which its discoverers justly remark:
‘It is impossible to overlook the analogy of this gesture with that
which throughout all antiquity and amongst nearly all peoples indicates
supplication or prayer.’[12] As a sign of adoration it has given rise to
the Egyptian hieroglyphic _Ka_.
[Illustration: FIG. 7.]
Had the men of the Reindeer Period a fully developed speech in addition
to this gesture language? That they had the elements of such, of
course, stands to reason. Mere animal cries and what may be called
‘voice signs’ might have carried them far, nor would it be possible to
say at what point the transition from such primitive methods of oral
communication to what might legitimately be called articulate speech
was overpassed.
But there are at least some weighty reasons for doubting whether this
higher stage was really attained by Palaeolithic man. In North America,
which, like other parts of that continent, seems to have received
its first human settlers at a comparatively late geological date, a
considerable amount of physical conformity is perceptible among the
Red Indian tribes. But we are confronted by the significant fact that
this racial unity is nevertheless compatible with the existence of a
multiplicity of native tongues. It has been observed that the number
of known stocks or families of Indian languages in the United States
amounts to over three score, differing among themselves ‘as radically
as each differs from Hebrew, Chinese, or English’.[13] In each of these
linguistic families, again, there are several--sometimes as many as
twenty--separate languages, which differ again from each other as much
as do the various divisions of the ‘Aryan’ group.
But if the original forefathers of these tribes had brought with them a
fully developed articulate speech, is it conceivable that the languages
of their descendants should be so radically different? This phenomenon,
moreover, is thrown into further relief by the fact that when we turn
to the signs and gestures current among the Red Indian tribes we find a
large common element.
It may be that the very deficiencies in articulate speech which we may
justly assume to have existed during the Reindeer Period gave a spur to
other means of personal intercommunication. Not only would the infancy
of speech promote the use of gestures, but it may have powerfully
contributed towards diffusing the practice of making pictorial
records.[14] The possibility, therefore, does not seem to be excluded
that men drew before they talked.
Nothing in itself is more baseless than the idea that oral language
is necessary for the expression of abstract ideas. The case of
deaf-mutes, who without the aid of speech can give expression to the
most complicated ideas, affords an example of this in the midst of a
civilized society. The study of gesture-language enables us to see how
easy and natural is the process by which the expression of abstract
ideas grows out of the imitation of concrete objects. Take the very
word to ‘grow’. An Indian expresses the notion of a tree by holding
the right hand before his body, back forwards, with the fingers spread
out--the fingers, as it were, representing branches, and his wrist the
trunk; to show that it is high he pushes it slightly upwards. For grass
he holds his hand with the fingers upwards in the sense of blades, near
the ground. In order to express the general idea ‘to grow’ he begins as
in the sign for grass, but instead of keeping his hand near the ground,
pushes it upward in an uninterrupted manner.[15] So, too, to express
falsehood he places his index and second fingers so that they separate
in front of his mouth, in order to indicate a double tongue. For truth
he places his index finger only in front, to show, if we may use the
expression, that he is ‘single-tongued’.
Root elements of gesture language, which as a means of communication
preceded the development of articulate language as opposed to
mere emotional cries, seem themselves to be almost universal. And
picture-writing--the sister mode of expression--has also, as we see
from the example of the American Continent, even in some of its more
conventional developments, an immeasurably wider currency than the
comparatively recent growths of oral communication. In China, amongst
a great variety of mutually unintelligible languages and dialects, the
ideographic characters, which are really conventionalized pictures, and
independent of oral equivalents, supply to a great extent the place
both of gesture and spoken language. The Red Indian world, as we have
seen, is a Babel of disconnected languages, but the old sign-language
is the same, and the picture-language of one tribe is generally
intelligible to another.
The great uniformity of simple gestures in all countries of the world
is thus a cause predisposing to a considerable amount of uniformity
among the pictorial signs into which this element enters. If we take,
for instance, that pathetic monument of picture writing, the well-known
rock-painting of the Tule River in California, we see a series of
human figures with outstretched hands, signifying, in the American
gesture-language, ‘Nothing here.’ Two outstretched arms, by
themselves, appear in the sense of negation among the conventionalized
Maya pictographs of Yucatan,[16] and the sign reappears in the
same abbreviated form, and with the same meaning, among Egyptian
hieroglyphs. So, too, the ideograph of a child or son--an infant
sucking its thumb--is found alike in ancient Egypt, China, and North
America.
Gesture language, in fact, is constantly reacting on the pictographic
method of expression, and may be said to supply it with moods and
tenses even without the aid of words.
It must, nevertheless, be borne in mind that simple pictography,
whether or not aided by gesture language, is one thing. The evolution
of a regular script is quite another matter.
[Illustration: FIG. 8.]
A conventionalized system of writing can only be thought of in
connexion with a highly developed articulate speech. And this was
certainly the achievement of a later world than that of these old
Palaeolithic hunters. The physical condition now changes. The
characteristic fauna of the Reindeer Period disappears, and with it
the remarkable race to whom were due the first known products of high
art. The close of the Pleistocene Age and the beginning of the New Era
is marked in France by a curious deposit in the Cave of Mas d’Azil, on
the left bank of the Arize, in which its explorer, M. Piette, found
a number of flat oblong pebbles marked with red stripes and simple
figures by means of peroxide of iron.[17] M. Piette has endeavoured
to trace in some of these a definite system of numeration by means
of lines and circles, and even particular signs for a thousand, ten
thousand, and a million. That some of these represent simple numerical
markings is possible, but beyond this point it is impossible to follow
M. Piette. Among the other markings are several, sometimes repeated
on the same pebble, of curiously alphabetiform aspect. Among these
are signs resembling our E, F, and L, a Gothic M, the Greek _Theta_,
_Gamma_, _Epsilon_, _Xi_ and _Sigma_, the Phoenician _Cheth_, and some
terms that occur in the Minoan and Cypriote series.
The occurrence of this series of geometrical marks must be regarded as
another proof of how early such alphabetic prototypes originated. The
Mas d’Azil series has no particular connexion with the linear signs
associated with the handiwork of the Reindeer Period. Their meaning is
obscure. Some may be degraded pictographs, often perhaps of animals
or their parts, with a traditional meaning attached to them. Some may
be of purely individual and arbitrary invention. The numbers on the
pebbles have suggested the view that they may have served for games.
On the other hand, it is by no means improbable that the figures had a
magic value, and Mr. A. B. Cook[18] has called attention to the parallel
presented by the Australian deposits of pebbles called _Churingas_,
connected with the departed spirits of a tribe, and having designs of
a totemic character. It is certain that the people who produced these
coloured pebbles were in a rude state of barbarism far below the gifted
race who had preceded them in the same sheltering cavern. Few will
probably be able to follow M. Piette in discerning in these rudely
executed marks actual letters--at any rate with a syllabic value--and
the true ancestors of the Greek and Phoenician alphabets, or in
regarding the Cave of Mas d’Azil ‘as one vast school where the scholars
learnt to read, to reckon, to write, and to know the religious symbols
of the solar god’.
The deposit of Mas d’Azil containing the coloured pebbles belongs
already to the modern world, the fauna associated with it all belonging
to existing species inhabiting the temperate regions. The rude culture
then exhibited heralds the beginning of the Neolithic Period. This
later Stone Age is not characterized by any of the artistic genius
displayed by the men of the Reindeer Period. Figured representations
are now rare. The caves, moreover, which preserved the earlier records,
were now used more for sepulture than habitation. Yet the analogy of
all primitive races at the present day shows that it would be a mistake
to suppose that, though the act may have been rude, the practice of
picture-writing was not still universally in vogue throughout the
European area. We have to bear in mind how many of such records are
consigned to perishable materials--such as bark or hides, or in the
case of tattooing the human body itself.
During the later prehistoric times, and notably during the Early Metal
Age, many abiding records, in the shape of rock-sculptures, paintings,
and engravings, and at times graffiti on pottery, are found diffused
throughout the whole of our Continent and the adjoining Mediterranean
area; and in outlying regions, such as Lapland, the practice of
picture-writing can be traced down to modern times.
Though a large amount of isolated materials exists on this subject,
the evidence, so far as I am aware, has never been put together in
a systematic manner. Yet it seems possible that, by means of a due
co-ordination of the materials and the application of the comparative
method, the European area may eventually be divided into distinct zones
or provinces, each characterized by its certain typical pictographic
feature. Primitive lines of intercommunication may with great
probability be made out, and evidences of early racial extension come
to light by this method of investigation.
[Illustration: FIG. 9.]
It is interesting to observe that it is in the extreme north of Europe,
where the conditions most approach those of the Reindeer Period,
that purely pictographic methods have remained the longest. The Lapp
troll drums, used as a means of divination by the native shamans,
show a variety of linear figures and symbols which had a traditional
interpretation. Thus in the simple example given in Fig. 9, taken from
Scheffer’s _Lapponia_,[19] we see, in the upper compartment, according
to the interpretation preserved by Scheffer, four Lapp gods, with rayed
heads, one of them identified with the Norsk Thor, above which are the
crescent moon, twelve stars, indicated by crossed lines, and seven
flying birds--resembling the simplification of the same figures seen in
the Cretan linear script.
On another base are three more sacred figures with rayed heads,
signifying Christ and two apostles, taken into the Lapp Pantheon at a
somewhat lower level. The centre of this compartment is occupied by the
sun, and about the field are depicted a reindeer, wolf, bear, ox, fox,
squirrel, and snake. To the right are three wavy lines representing a
lake and exactly reproducing the Egyptian hieroglyph of ‘water’.
Fig. 10 shows a more elaborate example,[20] of which the interpretation
has not been supplied. The variation of gesture displayed, somewhat
rudely it is true, by the various figures on this drum illustrates
the intimate and ever-recurring connexion between pictography and
gesture-language.
These Lapp troll drums must have been generally in use till the end
of the seventeenth century. It was not, indeed, till the middle
of the succeeding century that Christianity took a real hold on
the population. That there has been a considerable survival of
surreptitious heathenism among the Lapps, I myself was able to
ascertain during two journeys undertaken with that object through
Finnish and Russian Lapland in 1874, and again in 1876. It was
specially interesting to observe that some of the traditional figures
seen on the old troll drums are still engraved on the reindeer-horn
spoons of that region.
[Illustration: FIG. 10.]
[Illustration: FIG. 11.]
The troll drums of the Lapps find their analogy in those of the
kindred Samojed tribes to the East, which present figures of the
same class. But the pictographs on these will be found to fit on
to the rock-carvings or petroglyphs of Siberia, first described by
Strahlenberg, of which a specimen is given in Fig. 12.[21] Similar rock
carvings may be traced through a vast Finno-Ugrian or Mongolian region
to the borders of China, and the Chinese characters themselves must
have arisen from a branch of the same great Northern family.
This Finno-Tataric province of primitive pictography touches the
Atlantic in Northern Norway. In the south of the Scandinavian
Peninsula we have numerous examples of picture-writing in the shape of
carving,[22] mainly belonging to the Bronze Age, either on rocks or on
the slabs of sepulchral barrows. Of the latter class are the well-known
examples from the Cairn of Kivik, on the east coast of Scania, and the
rock-carvings extend through Southern Norway and Denmark. The most
remarkable of all are probably those of Bohuslan, of which an example,
in which ships figure largely, is shown in Fig. 13.[23]
[Illustration: FIG. 12.]
In our own islands there is also evidence during the Bronze Age of
the practice of engraving signs and pictographic figures on rocks and
the slabs of sepulchral cists and chambers. Those found in England
and Scotland consist for the most part of mere geometrical figures,
such as concentric circles with connecting lines, the more elaborate
figures found in the Fife Caves,[24] for example, certainly belonging to
the Late Celtic Period. But in Ireland, then raised, by its abundant
output of gold, to the position of a Western Eldorado, the field of
primitive pictography is richer. The slabs of the chambered tumuli
of Sleive-na-Calligha present groups of elaborate figures;[25] but a
special interest attaches to those discernible in the great chambered
barrow of New Grange. As was pointed out by Mr. Coffey,[26] one of the
principal figures here carved represents in a degraded form a ship with
its crew analogous to those so constantly repeated in the Scandinavian
group (Fig. 14). This coincidence becomes the more suggestive when we
recall the existence of a whole series of finds showing a connexion
between Ireland and Denmark and its neighbour-lands during the
Bronze Age.
These parallels extend to Brittany. The rocks and sepulchral slabs of
the old Armoric region also present, as is well known, a considerable
pictographic material, dating from Neolithic and Early Metal Ages.
Among recently discovered remains of this class may be mentioned a
group of curious inscribed rocks near Saint-Aubin in Vendée,[27] the
carvings on which seem to show some analogy with the menhirs of the
Aveyron, the dolmens of the Gard, and the caves of the Marne. On
these, besides conventionalized linear figures of men and animals,
occur a variety of unexplained signs, some of them of a remarkably
alphabetiform character.
[Illustration: FIG. 13.]
[Illustration: FIG. 14.]
[Illustration: FIG. 15.]
It is among the sculptured slabs of the Morbihan dolmens that we find
the immediate pendant to the ship signs of Ireland and Scandinavia.
On slabs of the chambered barrow of Manné Lud, near Locmariaker,
there appears--beside stone axes, hafted and unhafted, and other
figures--what is evidently the same ship sign as that of New Grange, in
various stages of degeneration, finally resulting in simple crescents
with recurved ends (Fig. 16).[28] It is true that the associations of
these Breton dolmens end with the close of the Neolithic period, but
the archaeological evidence shows that this was overlapped by the Early
Metal Age of Ireland.
[Illustration: FIG. 16.]
South of the Pyrenees similar records of primitive pictography
largely associated again in this case with the builders of dolmens
and chambered barrows extend through a large part of the Iberian
Peninsula. Some stir was recently made by the reported discovery of
characters on the slabs and content of certain Portuguese dolmens
of Traz-os-Montes,[29] which were supposed to constitute a kind of
alphabet or syllabary. The accounts of these discoveries, however,
lack scientific precision, and though many of the characters found
are certainly of alphabetiform type, there can be no doubt that
these, together with the rude zoomorphic figures with which they are
associated, belong to a much simpler stage of graphic expression.
[Illustration: FIG. 17.]
In the south of Spain the chain of evidence is continued by the
‘Written Stones’ of Andalusia. The signs here are often painted in red,
in a rude manner, on the slabs of megalithic structures, such as the
Piedra Escrita near Fuencaliente,[30] (Figs. 17, 18). The signs include
a variety of men and animals, symbols of the heavenly bodies, trees,
arms, and implements, and other objects. Amongst some curious analogies
that they present with the contemporary pictographs of Northern and
North-Western Europe, may be noticed certain figures that resemble
linear degenerations of the Ship and Crew sign (see Fig. 17).
The Andalusian pictographs find their continuation beyond the straits
in another widely diffused group of ‘Written Stones’, the _Hadjrat
Mektoubat_[31] of the Arabs, extending through Algeria and Morocco into
the Saharan region and along the Atlantic littoral to the Canaries.[32]
[Illustration: FIG. 18.]
[Illustration: FIG. 19.]
To return to the European shores of the Mediterranean, a remarkable
group of prehistoric rock-carvings already known in mediaeval times as
the Maraviglie, or ‘Marivels’,[33] is found near the Col di Tenda in the
Maritime Alps--in the neighbourhood, that is, of a very old line of
communication between Provence and the Po Valley. The earliest known
groups of these figures lay at an elevation of between 7,000 and 8,000
feet about the Laghi delle Maraviglie, in the heart of Monte Bego.[34]
More recently a still more extensive series has been discovered by
Mr. Clarence Bicknell, cut like the others in the glaciated schist
rocks and at a similar lofty elevation in the neighbouring Val di
Fontanalba.[35] I have myself visited a more outlying group at Orco
Feglino[36] in the Finalese, only a few miles from the Ligurian coast.
These figures, of which examples are given in Figs. 19 and 20,
represent oxen, often engaged in ploughing, and men in various
positions, sometimes brandishing weapons and apparently signalling, and
a variety of arms, implements, and other objects. Among the weapons,
the halberds and daggers are characteristic of the earlier part of the
Bronze Age,[37] and it is noteworthy that the sword which characterized
the later phase of that culture is entirely absent. The figures of
the oxen ploughing are depicted as if seen from above--a circumstance
explained by the way in which these rock terraces look down on the
cultivated lands below.[38] Many of these oxen are conventionalized to
such an extent that they have rather the appearance of rude figures of
scorpions or beetles with tails.
The same figures are often repeated in the schist slopes, and we
have not here such connected groups as we see, for instance, on the
sculptured slabs of Scandinavia. The picture-signs of the Maraviglie
had perhaps a votive intention. It seems to me that some of the figures
may represent packs, and that merchants as well as warriors and tillers
of the soil took part in their representations.
The records of primitive pictography extend to the Vosges and Jura,
and reappear east of the Adriatic. In a fiord of the Bocche di
Cattaro, not far from the site of Rhisinium, the capital of the old
Illyrian kingdom, my own explorations were rewarded by the discovery
of a curious group of painted signs on a rock-face above a sacred
grotto, and in a somewhat inaccessible position. They consisted
mainly of animals and varieties of the swastika sign. That they
were of pre-Christian date may be regarded as certain, but a fuller
investigation of them at my own hands was cut short by _force majeure_.
Up to the present the old pictography of the lands between the Adriatic
and the Black Sea and the lower Danubian basin is best illustrated
by the linear incised figures found on the primitive pottery of that
region. The best collection of such signs is due to the researches of
Fräulein Torma, at Broos, in Transylvania. In view of the ethnic and
archaeological connexions which are shown to have existed between the
lower Danubian regions and the western part of Asia, it is specially
interesting to note the analogies that these Transylvanian graffiti
present with those noted by Schliemann on the whorls and pottery of
Hissarlik (Fig. 21).[39] Both groups, moreover, belong approximately
to the same epoch, marked by the transition from the Neolithic to the
Early Metal Age.
[Illustration: FIG. 20.]
[Illustration: FIG. 21.]
That many of these signs are linearistic degenerations of animal and
other figures is clear, and such figures may be reasonably considered
to have an ideographic sense. But from this to investing the marks on a
primitive whorl or pot with a definite phonetic value, and proceeding
to read them off by the aid of the Cypriote syllabary of the Greek
language as it existed some two thousand years later, can only be
described as a far cry. Linearized signs of altogether alphabetic
appearance belong, as already shown, to the very beginnings of human
culture. In the case of the whorls, moreover, many of the linear
figures are really repetitions of similar marks due to the decay of
a border pattern--a phenomenon already paralleled by some of the
engraved groups of the Reindeer Period. A recurring decorative fragment
of this kind somewhat resembles, according to the progressive stages
of its decadence, the Cypriote _go_, _ti_, or _re_--a circumstance
productive of readings by eminent scholars[40] containing vain
repetitions of _go go_, _ti ti_, and _re re_.
If we turn to Crete, the source of the developed pre-Phoenician scripts
of Greece and the Aegean world, we find evidence of the same primitive
stratum of linearized pictography. But the true hieroglyphic script, in
which the phonetic element is apparently already present, in addition
to the ideographic, displays other features which lie beyond the scope
of our present theme. In the advanced linear scripts which grow out
of this, and which certainly have a largely phonetic basis, we mark a
regularity of arrangement and a definite setting forth of word-groups
altogether different from the phenomena presented by the elemental
figures of primitive pictography. The Phoenician and later Greek
alphabet carries us a step further.
But the conventionalized pictography of Crete, if it does not give us
the actual source of the later Phoenician letters, at least supplies
the best illustration of the elements out of which it was evolved.
And it will be seen, from what has been already said, that the more
primitive field of pictography, out of which this conventionalized
Cretan system arose, is itself only a branch of a widely diffused
European family of picture-writing, of which the records can be traced
from Lapland to the Straits of Gibraltar, and from the Atlantic to the
Aegean, and which finds again its continuation on the African and the
Asiatic side.
There seems to be a kind of hazy notion that though an elaborate system
of pictography may have been current among the American Indians, for
example, the alphabet, or for that matter the Cretan script, came
to Greece as a kind of gift of the gods, and was taken over by a
population that had no graphic means of communication. It is true that
the earlier records of such, owing to their having been largely on
perishable materials, such as bark or hides, may in many cases be
irrecoverable. But we may be sure that they existed throughout the
Aegean lands, as elsewhere. Nay, it was because they not only existed,
but had already reached a comparatively advanced stage, that the
acceptation of such a highly developed system of writing as that of
the Phoenician alphabet was rendered possible. Even the forms of the
letters must themselves have been largely familiar, since, as we have
seen, the use of the linearized signs of the purest alphabetiform
character goes back to what in many respects must be regarded as
another world, and to a time, it may be, when articulate language was
itself but imperfectly developed.