THE BEGINNINGS OF LIBRARIES
[Illustration:
A COLLECTION OF QUIPUS
AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY, N. Y.
NOS. B 3453, 8704
]
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THE
BEGINNINGS OF LIBRARIES
BY
ERNEST CUSHING RICHARDSON
LIBRARIAN OF PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON
LONDON: HUMPHREY MILFORD
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
1914
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_Copyright, 1914, by
Ernest Cushing Richardson_
PUBLISHED FEBRUARY, 1914
[Illustration]
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PREFACE
A considerable mass of memoranda on the early history of libraries has
been gathered by the author of this essay during the last twenty-five
years, and out of this material various essays have been published from
time to time on Antediluvian Libraries, Medieval Libraries, Some Old
Egyptian Librarians, etc. The fact that the unworked mass of modern
information through excavations is so great as to put off for a long
time still a systematic treatise, has led to the plan of publishing
these essays and addresses from time to time as completed and in uniform
style. Although written for very different audiences and in various
methods, each is an attempt to gather information not generally
accessible and to be, so far as it goes, either a contribution to
knowledge or to the method of knowledge, a sort of preliminary report or
investigation in the field, pending full and systematic report. The
nucleus of this essay on the _Beginnings of Libraries_ was an address to
the Library School of the New York Public Library at the beginning of
the academic year 1912-13, and takes its color from this fact, but it
has been freely enlarged. The writer owes special thanks to the American
Museum of Natural History in New York.
ERNEST CUSHING RICHARDSON.
Princeton University Library,
October 12, 1913.
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CONTENTS
Preface v
Contents vii
List of illustrations ix
1. Introduction 1
2. The study of beginnings 5
3. Definition of the Library 14
4. Method 22
5. Antediluvian libraries. General 25
6. Libraries of the gods 27
7. Animal and plant libraries? 34
8. Preadamite libraries 39
9. Adamite and patriarchal libraries before the flood 42
10. Prehistoric and historic libraries 50
11. The evolution of record keeping 54
12. Memory libraries 65
13. Pictorial object libraries 76
14. Mnemonic object libraries 91
15. Picture book libraries 100
16. Ideographic records 114
17. Types of primitive libraries 116
18. Contents of primitive libraries 132
19. The administration of primitive libraries 142
20. The beginnings of library schools 151
21. The beginnings of library research 156
22. Bibliography 159
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
1. A collection of quipus Frontispiece.
2. A collection of message sticks 94
3. A collection of wampum 98
4. A record ornament of leopard teeth 102
5. Tupai Cupa’s Tattoo Marks 106
6. Picture writing, Lone Dog’s Winter Count 108
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THE BEGINNINGS OF LIBRARIES
§ 1. _Introduction_
This talk is addressed to those beginning library work as a life work.
This connects “library work” with two significant phrases, “those
beginning” and “as a life work”.
This phrase “as a life work” suggests what is perhaps the chief value of
a library school training. The distinction of and main justification for
all kinds of higher education is that such education aims to put the
student in position to view his work to be done as a whole, and life as
a thing to be wrought out as a whole, not to be lived from hand to
mouth. Presence at a library school means that the student has had
foresight enough to be willing to spend energy, money, and a good bit of
that most precious capital time, in sitting down to draw plans for his
life building as a whole instead of starting in to build by rule of
thumb.
There are however in this matter two factors—one’s self and the library.
In order to sketch out one’s life work as librarian and live it, one
must needs first know what libraries are, what they are capable of
becoming and how one can best apply such knowledge and energy as one may
have to making these libraries accomplish what they were intended to do
for human society. This involves looking at libraries as a whole as well
as at one’s life work as a whole, and the task of the library school is
to give this view of the situation. In the last analysis this is the
most important thing which any technical school does for one, this
giving the vision of the whole of experience in one’s chosen field in
order that one may draw his life plan in view of it. And for that
matter, the task of technical education does not differ in this regard
from the task of general education, which is simply the vision of the
whole of human experience, as a whole, with reference to one’s own life
among all kinds and conditions of men.
As therefore the field of science and general activities is the
Universe, so the field of library science and education is
libraries—libraries top and bottom, inside and out, beginning, middle
and end and looked on as a whole.
On the other hand the phrase “those beginning” suggests the facts that
you are yourselves at the beginning of a course of study, that the
school year is at its beginning, that this New York Public Library
school itself is still in its beginnings and that library schools in
general are only in their beginnings. This in turn suggests as the topic
of this talk three aspects of the matter of library beginnings: the
beginnings of libraries themselves, the beginnings of library science
and the beginnings of schools for library science. This talk will touch
briefly, towards the end, on the two latter topics, but will have
chiefly to do with the beginnings of libraries.
§ 2. _The study of beginnings_
At the outset it should be said that the importance of this study of
beginnings is in every science quite out of proportion to the importance
of the objects studied. Beginnings are by nature small. The highest and
best things are by nature the most complex and latest, but the study of
the earliest and simplest libraries, like the study of the simplest cell
life, is not only useful from several points of view but vital to a
right understanding of the more complex. The great vice of technical
education of all sorts is its tendency to fix attention on the latest
and best only. It is true of course that man’s ideas and methods are an
evolution—just as his body is. The fact of the accumulation of human
experience is the central significant fact of human civilization. It is
the glory of libraries that by reason of this fact they are an
indispensable tool of progress in civilization. On the whole, by and
large, the latest ideas are in fact best, for they tend to sum up in
themselves the total of the useful variations of all preceding ideas,
and the main time and attention of a course of education must of
necessity therefore be given to the latest and best experience, because
it does sum up all that has gone before. This does not, however, lessen
the value of the study of earlier ideas on any subject back to the very
beginnings, for at any given time and place, the latest idea or method
in any field is not necessarily the best. It might be the best: it is in
position to build on all previous experience and so become best. We all
know, however, that the latest book on a subject is not always the best
book. So it is, too, of individual ideas or methods.
This frequent failure of the latest to be best comes chiefly from lack
of knowledge of previous experience. Every year sees library methods put
in operation which were tried and found wholly wanting in the last
century or it may be, two, three or even five thousand years ago. On the
other hand again, every now and then we find that some method or idea,
discovered long ago but neglected meantime, is far better than those in
common use. This has often been true of great scientific ideas and we
have in Mendelism a striking recent example. One must needs therefore
study earlier ideas in any field, both in order to be sure that
so-called new ideas are not exploded old ones and in order to find
whether common practice in any field at a given time is not really the
development of an inferior line of evolution.
And, again, from the point of view of science, this study of earlier
stages is useful because the simple things are often the best
interpreters of more complex, the early of the late, and it is the
vision of the whole in perspective to the very beginning which gives the
clue to the real meaning of the latest. “Students have come to realize,”
says Professor Stewart Paton (in the Popular Science Magazine
8,1912,166), “that in the ... amoeba, jelly-fish, crab or fish, is to be
found the key that will eventually open the book ... (of) the most
complex psychic manifestations.” This is true also of libraries—the
oldest, smallest and rudest give a clue to the more complex, and it may
be added, parenthetically, the library is itself in fact the most
complex psychic manifestation in the objective Universe.
Beginnings thus, though small, are the roots of the matter. This is so
well recognized in the field of science as to have become an axiom, and
in the study of any class of things nowadays the aim is to trace each
kind of thing—plant, animal, idea or social institution back to its
beginning. Evolution has taught us to expect a genealogical series back
and back to very simple forms and the method of all science has become
what is called historical or genetic. Natural science is not satisfied
until the most complex animals and plants have been traced back through
all their complexities to single cell origins, and, if Browning may be
believed, the aim of humane and ethical science too does not rest short
of the same effort “to trace love’s faint beginnings in mankind”.
This study of the beginnings is, moreover, not only at the bottom of the
method of modern science but of the method of modern teaching. Every
man, it is said, in his life history retraces the history of his race,
and the race history of man is above all things a history of developing
ideas. This has two aspects significant for the method of teaching. As
investigating science must trace every complex idea back to its simplest
beginnings, so teaching traces the idea forward from those beginnings to
its latest form. The law by which man in his individual development of
ideas must retrace the history of the race applies to every idea or
group of ideas and it is doubtful therefore if any one ever learns
anything rightly in life unless he patiently follows the idea of it from
its simplest beginnings to its latest form—the path being sometimes a
steady growth in value, sometimes a rise and fall again towards
extinction. The historical method of teaching, therefore, is the only
method which can be called natural.
The other teaching aspect of this matter is the very significant fact in
child psychology that the general development of the child’s mind, like
the development of its body, does in fact repeat the history of its
ancestors as they passed from gestures and cries to articulate speech
and writing and through these from the simplest knowledge to the most
complex. The child must therefore, in short, be taken along “the paths
upon which in a very real sense every human being has come in person”
and the natural method of child teaching must consequently be deduced
particularly from a study of the beginnings of speech and writing, books
and book collections. In a sense, and in a very real sense, the key to
the scientific pedagogy of the future lies in the group of studies
summed up as library science, for the library is the late and complex
object which sums up in itself the sciences of the book, the word, and
all simpler elements of human expression and record, if there be any
such. A fourth reason for the study of beginnings is, therefore, that it
is the natural method of study and teaching.
Finally and closely connected with the preceding reasons is the fact
that the purpose of all science is prophecy. We learn not so much that
we may teach, as the motto says, but we learn that we may foretell. The
object of all science is to understand from what has been the relation
of cause and effect in the past, what is likely to be the result of any
given set of circumstances in the future. Physics, e.g. has proved a
very sure prophetic guide. An engineer can tell with precision that a
bridge constructed in a certain way will break if loaded beyond a
certain point. Load it to that point and his prophecy becomes true. In
the same way, with somewhat less precision perhaps, the biologist can
prophesy results in the breeding of plants and animals, the physician
can prophesy that quinine will help malaria, the farmer that planted
seed under certain conditions will or will not on the average produce
certain results, and so on through every branch of human activity. We
study in order that we may know the conditions which will be brought
about in the future by one or another set of circumstances and so that
we may be able to produce the circumstances if we wish the result. The
preparation for foretelling may, therefore, be labeled the fifth reason
for historical study.
§ 3. _Definition of the Library_
In approaching the actual study of primitive libraries it is necessary
to touch a little on definition and method. Both these matters,
essential to the approach of any topic scientifically, doubly need some
attention at this point, because library history has heretofore not
troubled itself much about primitive libraries at all or indeed about
libraries for the first two thousand years after they had left their
more primitive stages. The very method, therefore, lies chiefly outside
the experience of library history, being gathered mainly from primitive
art and anthropology, and definition must needs consider what the
essential nature of these primitive libraries is that links them with
the great libraries of modern times. Discussion of definition is the
more necessary in that the already contradictory usage has been still
farther confused in the matter of the earlier historical libraries by
those who, wishing to distinguish the collection of purely business
records, public or private, from the collection of purely literary works
by calling the former an archive, have yet applied the term archive,
incorrectly, under their own definition, to mixed collections of
business and other records.
Many answers have been given to this question: What is a library? All of
these imply a book or books, a place of keeping and somebody to do the
keeping—books, building and librarian—but some definitions emphasize the
books, some the place and some the keeping. Far the commonest words used
have been the Greek _bibliotheke_ and the Latin _libraria_ and their
derivatives. The one rather emphasizes the place and the other the books
but both were used sometimes for both library and bookshop. When modern
languages succeeded to the Latin the Romance languages kept
_bibliotheca_ for library and _libraria_ for bookshop. Germanic
languages on the other hand kept both words for library, although in the
course of time German has nearly dropped librerei for bibliothek, and
English has quite deserted bibliotheke for library. Both English and
German call “book shop”, or “book business”, what French, Italian and
Spanish call “library”.
Library is thus the common modern word in English for a certain
something which the German calls Bibliothek, the Frenchman bibliothèque
and the Italian, Spaniard, Scandinavian and Slav call by some similar
name. This something in its last analysis is a book or books kept for
use rather than kept for sale or for the paper mill. A library is thus a
book or books kept for use.
Among the many definitions of the library which do not recognize use as
the library’s chief distinction, the commonest are perhaps those which
adopt plurality or collection as the distinguishing factor. Many however
adopt the building as chief factor. Typically, of course, the modern
library does include many books, a whole separate building and a
librarian, but even if the books are few, the place only a room, a
chest, a bookcase, or a single shelf, and even if it is only the owner
who is at the same time the keeper, it is still recognized to be a
library if the books are kept for use and not for sale. Quantity does
not matter: the point which divides is the matter of use or sale. Even a
one book library is, in fact, a library just as much as a one cell plant
is plant or a one cell animal is animal. A one book library is a very
insignificant affair compared with the New York Public Library with its
many books and many branches, but it is just as truly a library—or else
you must find some other word. In point of fact “library” in English, or
some derivative of _bibliotheca_ in most other languages, is the word
which in practice stands to the book-for-use as the word animal or plant
does in biology for the living thing whether it is a single cell or a
cell complex.
Some definitions again try to limit the library to printed books or
bound books or literary works as distinguished from official or business
documents, and these definitions have, as before said, sometimes led to
a good deal of misunderstanding. Even if “archive” is assumed to be the
right name for a collection of business documents, still such a
collection is simply one kind of a library. Every one recognizes this
when the collection of business documents is one of printed and bound
public documents (U. S. public documents e.g.), and if the documents are
tablets, rolls or folded documents, the case does not differ. If books
are kept for use it makes no difference whether they are of wood, stone,
metal, clay, vellum, or paper, whether they are folded documents, rolls
or codexes, whether they are literary works, government or business
documents: if intended for use they form a something for which some word
must be found which will apply equally to all kinds of records for use
and to a one-book-for-use library as well as to the New York Public
Library. The right word in the English language seems to be this word
“library”. The “business documents” in active current use in the
registry or the counting house are perhaps the farthest away from the
“library” of common speech but they are equally far from “archives” in
the scientific sense, and curiously these have retained one of the very
simplest and oldest names of the true library, “the books”, and of
librarianship “book keeping”.
But the definition of a library as a book or books kept for use only
brings us up against the farther question, What is a book? To this it
may be answered that a book is any record of thought in words. Here
again neither size, form, nor material matters; even a one word record
may be a book and that book a library. This leads again however to still
another question: What is a word? Without stopping to elaborate or to
discuss definitions in detail, we may take the next step and define a
word as “any sign for any thing”, and again explain the sign as anything
which points to something other than itself. This is not an arbitrary
definition but one founded in modern psychology and philology and to be
found in sundry stout volumes by Marty, Leroy, Wundt, Dittrich, van
Ginneken, Gabelentz, and others. The sign may be a sound, a color, a
gesture, a mark or an object. In some stenographic systems a single dot
stands for a whole word.
The most insignificant object, therefore, kept to suggest something not
itself may be a library. A single word book is of course a very
insignificant book indeed, and the single letter, single word, single
book library a still more insignificant library, but, unless you invent
other words for them, they are truly book and library, and there is no
more reason to invent another word for book or library in this case,
than another word for animal when it is intended to include both the
amoeba and man. The very simplest library consists therefore of a single
recorded sign kept for use. It is the feeble faint beginning of a
library but just as much a library as the New York Public Library, the
Library of Congress, the British Museum, or the Bibliothèque
Nationale—and the beginning of library wisdom is to seek out diligently
the nature of these rudimentary libraries.
§ 4. _Method_
So far for definition. Now a word or two as to method. In this search
for the earliest history of the making and keeping of records, library
science, like all the human sciences, has at least three ways of
approach or sources. The first source is history. This includes the
evidence from written documents (which is direct and is history proper)
and the evidence from monuments (which is circumstantial and is
archaeology proper).
The second source is the custom of primitive or uncivilized nations of
recent times: this is comparative library science. The modern idea of
evolution implies that these primitive peoples are simply cases of
arrested or retarded development—they, having branched off from a common
stock at an early stage of development or else having only slowly
developed in parallel natural lines. Their customs therefore, it is
alleged, truly represent early mankind when it was at a like stage of
development. With this evidence belongs also the rich source of
survivals in popular customs among civilized peoples and folklore
generally; these are things which have kept on side by side with the
things which have outgrown them.
The third source is the acts of children while they are developing from
the speechless to the speaking stage and from the speaking to the
writing stage;—the modern theory being, as has been said, that the child
in developing repeats the experience of its ancestors, or, as it is
said, “recapitulates the history of the race” in this regard. This is in
the same sense perhaps that children’s games are supposed by some to
reflect the hunting, the wars and the domestic life of their savage
ancestors.
These three sources are supposed to cross-check one another and supply
gaps in one another, and each might be followed out separately in
detail, but for purposes of this talk it will be convenient rather to
treat as one historical progress, illustrated from the customs and
habits of modern savages, folk customs, and the psychology of children.
That part of methodology which has to do with the bibliography of the
subject in its various aspects will be reserved for the end of the talk.
§ 5. _Antediluvian libraries. General_
There are several classes of alleged libraries, which if they have real
existence must necessarily precede all others. These include the
libraries of the gods, animal or plant libraries, Preadamite and
Coadamite libraries and the alleged libraries of the antediluvian
patriarchs. All of these may be included under the term antediluvian and
the period subdivided chronologically into Adamite or Patriarchal,
Preadamite, Prehuman (plant and animal libraries) and Precosmic
(libraries of the gods)!
There is a considerable literature on the subject of antediluvian
libraries (cf. Schmidt, Bibliothekswissenschaft, 1840, p. 67; Richardson
in Library Journal, 15, 1890, pp. 40-44), but this term has been, until
recently, used to include mainly libraries which were alleged to have
existed from Adam to Noah. Modern explorations in comparative psychology
on the one hand and comparative mythology on the other have however now
brought to light many potential or alleged libraries from before
Adam—not forgetting that this first ancestor of ours has quite recently
been dated some sixty million years before the Christian era!
§ 6. _Libraries of the gods_
The oldest of all alleged libraries are the libraries of the gods.
Almost all the great god families, Indian, Egyptian, Babylonian,
Persian, Greek, and Scandinavian, had their own book-collections, so it
is said. According to several religions there were book-collections
before the creation of man; the Talmud has it that there was one before
the creation of the world, the Vedas say that collections existed before
even the Creator created himself, and the Koran maintains that such a
collection co-existed from eternity with the uncreated God. It is
obviously idle to try to trace libraries back farther than this.
Brahma, Odin, Thoth, and substantially all the creator gods who are
described in terms of knowledge or words, are each sometimes in effect
looked on by the mythologists as himself an incarnate library and
sometimes even the books of which he is composed are specified.
On the other hand, by many all creation was looked on as a library. To
the ancient Babylonians the stars of heaven were themselves books in
which could be read the secrets of heaven and earth and the destiny of
mankind. The whole firmament was thus a library of celestial
tablets—tablets of destiny or tablets of wisdom from the “house of
wisdom”, which was before creation, or carried upon the breast of the
world ruler. “The Zodiac forms the Book of Revelation proper ... the
fixed stars ... the commentary on the margin” (cf. Jeremias. Art. _Book
of Life_, in: Hastings ERE.)
This belief, developed into the so-called science of astrology, had a
prodigious influence even on the political history of mankind through
its effect on the decisions and acts of kings. The conviction that the
will of the gods as to future events was here written down, stored up
and might be read, was at times the controlling factor in the shaping of
human events.
Two of the most famous libraries of the gods are those of Brahma and of
Odin. The books of Thoth, equally or more famous, belong to a somewhat
different class. Brahma’s library contained or was the Vedas—themselves
in fact a large collection of various works. These were, it is alleged,
preserved in the memory of the omniscient Brahma and at the beginning of
this present age they were, in the modern language of an ancient
Sanskrit writer, Kalkuka Bhatta “drawn out”. Attention has been called
to the fact that this library was represented as a classified library
with notation founded on the points of the compass!
“From the eastern mouth of Brahma ... issued ... the rich verses....
From his southern mouth ... the yajash verses.... From the western mouth
... the saman verses and the metics.... From the northern mouth of Vedas
(Brahma) was manifested the entire Atharvana” (Muir. 3:12). This library
was, it should be noticed, quite up to date in having the special
collections kept in separate rooms with separate exits. It was also, it
appears, not a mere reference library but books were issued for outside
use.
Brahma’s library was represented in various other forms e.g., as the
milk of the cow goddess or the juice of the Soma plant, and in the same
way Odin’s collection of words or knowledge is represented in various
forms e.g., as the milk of the goat Heidrun, the water of the fountain
of memory, the apples of Iduna, which were the fruit of the tree of
knowledge and the blood of the wise Kvaser.
That which best identifies the mead, which is the source of the
immortality of the gods themselves and without which they languish and
die, with books, is the story of Kvaser. Kvaser was the wisest of all
the gods (Fooling of Gylfe 54). The dwarfs put him to death and gave out
that he had drowned himself in his own wisdom, but in fact they slew him
for this wisdom, which was his blood. This was drawn off into a kettle
called Odrörer (“that which moves the mind”) and mixed with honey was
most carefully kept in jars. Drinking out of these jars makes an
ordinary man “a poet and man of knowledge” but the mead is most
jealously kept to renew the life of gods and poets (Brage’s talk 3 sq.)
and grudged to mortals. Once Odin, hard pressed in flight, let fall a
few drops of this essence of knowledge, and this scanty supply eagerly
caught up by mortals produced the rabble of bad poets.
This collection of jar-fulls of knowledge was an obvious library and
recalls the fact that almost all the mythologers represent books or
knowledge as food or drink, kept in jars. It is not wholly excluded that
this great series of myths came from the earliest practice of keeping
clay tablets or papyrus rolls in clay jars, precisely similar to the
jars in which wine, oil and grain were kept in some treasure houses. But
however that may be the soma of India, the haoma of Persia, as well as
the Scandinavian mead and the ambrosia and nectar of classical times,
were all looked on as concrete knowledge and as such the food and drink
of the spiritual or immortal life—a very reasonable philosophy.
These libraries of the gods should not be confused with real collections
of books of alleged superhuman authorship like the books of the Old
Testament, which are not claimed by any to have been written before 1200
or 1500 B.C., or the collections of actual oracles delivered at Delphis,
Dodona or other shrines, or even with the forged oracles of Greece, or
the apocryphal Jewish and Christian books. All these were actual
historical book collections and the question whether authorship was
really superhuman or not is indifferent at this point which has to do
with the libraries which the gods are alleged to have had for themselves
before man was.
§ 7. _Animal and plant libraries?_
The modern psychologists, by the science which they call comparative
psychology, have gradually been robbing humanity of much that it used to
plume itself upon as its own unique possession. Among the last
strongholds to yield were reason and language, and the defenders of
these, although retreating, are hardly yet put to rout. Even if the
articulate speech of the parrot and the jackdaw is only “imitation”, and
the alleged language of the apes a delusion, still it is something of an
open question whether the sounds and gestures which animals use with one
another are not really of the nature of language. The fox who doubles on
his track in order to lead the dogs on a false scent is getting very
close to language in a rudimentary sense, and the dog who sits up or
barks for food or wags his tail to express good will, perhaps nearer
still.
It is a long step, however, from even developed oral and gesture
language to record, and it is still generally denied that among the
traits of our kinship with the beasts any evidence has been discovered
of what can be called record keeping. If this were true, then it would
seem to follow that the animal ceased to be animal and became man
precisely when he invented and began to practice record keeping—in short
that libraries mark the very beginning of the human race!
On the other hand, however, it cannot be ignored that the psychologists
are publishing monographs on the arithmetic of animals and the memory
for facts among animals, and scores of other monographs on the minds of
animals. There are those too who claim that the dog even marks the place
where he caches his surplus of bones, and certainly the bringing home of
a dead woodchuck, in order to show his master what he has done, comes
very close to that keeping and exhibiting of human trophies which is
recognized as among the beginnings of “handwriting”. If it is true that
the animals do make conscious marks to guide them back to hidden
objects, or even that they do have memory for facts, which is true
memory, then possibly the beginnings at least of memory libraries and
perhaps of external records must in the future be sought in the animal
world. The ancient Egyptians, of course, found it there when they made
the writing ape author, owner, and keeper of books. Perhaps after six
thousand years modern psychology is about to catch up with this idea!
Whether or not future psychology discovers anything like actual record
collections and memory libraries among the animals, it remains true that
the study of comparative psychology does lead into the beginnings of
memory and helps therefore to the study of the real nature of human
memory-books and memory libraries, while again it leads into the
question of the nature of gesture language, and gesture is the own
father of hand-written books. When true libraries have been discovered
among animals it will be time enough to take up the question of plant
libraries. Nevertheless it may be said that the question of “memory”
among plants is seriously discussed and plants may perhaps receive
impression as sensitively as animals. It is a little figurative to say
that a tree which carries in itself a hundred annual records of its
growth is a library in the sense of a public record office which keeps
the annals of a nation’s growth for a like period. There is however a
certain analogy which the discussions of natural records and object
writing suggests may even have some slight germ of scientific interest.
Of course where there is memory there may be groups of memorized records
which would be collections of very rudimentary “Books”, but so far the
weight of evidence seems to be against the existence even in animals,
let alone plants, of that kind of memory which retains permanently fixed
forms of expression. Sub-human libraries may therefore be for the
present left to the fabulists and put with apocryphal, legendary and
mythological libraries outside the pale of the real or historical
libraries.
§ 8. _Preadamite libraries_
Whatever psychologists and mythologists may have to say about libraries
before the existence of the human race, there seems to be a surprising
consensus of opinion that book collections must have started at latest
very soon after man himself. A great number of such libraries are
claimed by the ancients for the period between Adam and Noah, and if
there were human beings before Adam, as many say, it is likely that
there were at least memory libraries, for, as will be seen later in
discussing memory libraries, these are almost inseparable from human
nature. And further than this it appears from those very same sources,
which so fluently allege and describe the library of Adam, that the
books of Adam’s library represent such an advanced stage in the
evolution of handwritten records as to necessitate a long library
history previous to his time. These books included e.g., it is said,
inscriptions cut in stone, and such inscriptions imply centuries if not
tens of centuries of knot and other mnemonic forms of writing,
preceding. Therefore if Adam’s library was as described in its
literature, there must have been, for a long time before, Preadamite
libraries!
Moreover if those writers on the Preadamites are correct who hold that
Adam was the father of the Caucasian race only, (M’Causland. Adam p.
282), and that Mongols and negroes at least (M’Causland. Babel p. 277)
were already existing when Adam was created, then of course all negro or
Mongol libraries are Preadamite survivals! It is true that such writers
represent culture, and by implication libraries, to have been introduced
to the Mongols from the Adamite line and by Cain, but if premises are
granted, the inference is complete, that primitive libraries of all
kinds at least up to the time of phonetic records were Preadamite in
origin and were shared by Mongol and negro races as well as by the
Caucasian Adamites! For that matter some of these ancient, if not
veracious sources assert that Adam was the inventor of the alphabet,
which makes the matter even clearer, throwing even syllabic written
libraries, not to mention ideographic libraries, back into the
Preadamite period!
For those who care to follow up this fruitful but not profitable
subject, some guide to the extensive literature on the Preadamites will
be given farther along.
§ 9. _Adamite and Patriarchal libraries before the Flood_
The very considerable literature on Antediluvian libraries which has
been already mentioned is, in general, confined chiefly to the line of
the patriarchs, whom the various writers on the Preadamites often
describe as Adamites to distinguish thus the patriarchal or Caucasian
line from its Mongolian and negro contemporaries—Adam, Cain, Abel, Seth,
Noah, Ham, etc.
According to some of these veracious historians, on the seventh day of
the first month of the first year Jehovah wrote a work on the creation
in several volumes, primarily to teach Adam the alphabet, and
secondarily, to preserve the record of the creation. This seems to have
formed Adam’s entire library, until the fall. After this, however,
Jehovah published a new edition of this work in one volume on stone, and
added another work on another stone. These were placed by him in a
“Beth” or “House” on a mount east of the Garden of Eden, where were also
the Cherubim. This was according to them the first library building, and
by inference the Cherubim were the first librarians. This library was
bequeathed by Adam to Seth and by Seth to Enoch. It formed a part of the
library of Noah, and was consulted by Moses, who incorporated, it is
alleged, from it the Elohistic and Jehovistic documents into Genesis.
The libraries of Cain, Seth, Enoch and Ham were also famous among these
old chroniclers—Seth’s for its astrological and astronomical works, and
Ham’s for the heretical works, which he was not allowed to take into the
ark with him.
Far the most famous however of all these libraries is the library of
Noah. It contained that of Adam, with very many additions. At the time
of the flood Noah was commanded to bury his books—“the earliest, middle,
and recent”—in a pit dug at Sippara—and from this it appears that the
library must have been very large since there was room in the ark for
all kinds of animals, but not enough for the books.
After the flood this library was dug up by Noah, and preserved in his
Beth at Nisibis, or, according to Berosus, was dug up by the sons of
Noah, after their father had been translated, and formed the nucleus of
the Babylonian libraries. A legend of the digging up of the library
still exists, it is said, on the spot, where re-excavations are now
going on.
The Hindu account of this library (Sir William Jones’ works. I, 288) has
an interesting variation. It states that the flood came because, the
sacred books having been stolen away, men had become wicked. After the
deluge Vishnu slew the thief, and restored the books to Noah.
If Cassianus may be believed, however, these buried books were not all
of Noah’s library since he took with him into the Ark at least a select
collection, presumably for use on the voyage.
Nor were these the only libraries supposed to have been in existence
when the flood came, for the Egyptian priests told Solon of many
libraries which were destroyed by it. One rather wonders at this too,
for in those days of course they were apt to make their books fire and
water proof (rather than the buildings as now) and the flood should not
have hurt them, but if they were in fact destroyed it simply shows that
they were made of papyrus, leather or unbaked clay!
These writers not only tell us in detail about many of the books which
Noah must have had in his library, but even in some cases give us a list
of the books themselves. We find thus e.g. that the library must have
contained the following works at least by Adam (a) “De nominibus
animantium”, (b) a census report of the Garden of Eden, which included
all living things, (c) The 92d psalm, (d) A poem on the creation of Eve,
and various other works, all, it is to be presumed, written after the
fall; for the very same authentic chroniclers who ascribe these works to
Adam declare that he was born at three o’clock, sinned at eleven, was
“damnatus” at twelve of one day and driven out of Eden early next
morning—which left little time for literary work on his part, one may
suppose, while in Eden.
The library must have contained also, if our sources are correct, works
by Eve (“conversation with the serpent”), Cain, Seth, Enos, Enoch,
Methuselah and others, and various works by Noah himself, including his
history of the world to his own time, written before the flood and
published in two editions, one on wood and one on stone.
The surviving samples of these alleged works are not calculated to make
one regret anything about the deluge so much as its failure to be more
thorough. Take e.g. Adam’s poems on the creation of Eve. Imagine Noah’s
sons, “In the Springtime, when a young man’s fancy lightly turns to
thought of love”, drawing out a tablet or two of this poem for
inspiration and reading how calmly the new bride is invited by Adam to
“shake hands and kiss him”!
The efforts to date the library of Adam have been various. A _terminus
ad quem_ is offered by Berosus, who asserts that the capital of the
world before the Flood was named “The Library” or the “Book All”. He
puts this at 250,000 years B.C., but this of course implies considerable
development between Adam and the time when the world was populous enough
to need a capital at all. There is, therefore, no necessary conflict
between the veracious Berosus and the veracious modern historians of
science, who place the _terminus a quo_ at sixty million years ago.
There is, however, considerable discrepancy between even the later of
these two on the one hand and the very earliest of the one hundred and
forty different dates between 3483 and 6984 B.C. actually assigned by
more timid historians of the beginnings of Adamic civilization. As sober
historians are bound to confess that at best the historical evidence for
some 243,016 years on the one hand and 59,748,087 or so years on the
other of Berosus’ date is not wholly continuous and 6984 B.C. may be
regarded as about the earliest exact date known to have been ventured
for Adamite libraries.
It hardly needs to be added that all these alleged patriarchal books and
libraries are apocryphal although many of them have a respectable
antiquity of more than two thousand years and most of them belong either
to pre-Christian, early Christian or Mohammedan times. They have been by
no means without their influence on human thought and on the actions of
those who believed their statements to be historical truth. They are
therefore not to be ignored in reckoning the influences which have
shaped library development.
§ 10. _Prehistoric and historic libraries_
Leaving aside, however, all kinds of imaginary libraries, mythological,
fabulous, legendary or apocryphal, we still have for real human
libraries a very respectable historical and prehistorical antiquity.
This long period may be divided into prehistoric and historic or
beginnings and later history—the prehistoric period or period of
beginnings being understood to be the time before chronological record
by years, or before the time of abundant and decipherable hand-written
records.
On the whole, the term “beginnings”, is better for the early periods
than the term “prehistoric period”. “Beginnings” in this point of view
differs from “prehistoric period” simply in overlapping a very little
the shifting and uncertain borderland between the old prehistoric and
historic, carrying over just far enough onto the firm land of annual
chronological history to insure a safe footing in the field where
written records begin to abound.
In the case of books and libraries this line of division is most clearly
made at the invention of phonetic writing, and this seems to correspond
pretty well in time with the point of abundant written sources and of
definite chronological data in the general history of mankind.
In terms of relative chronology this line corresponds fairly with the
first dynasty of Egypt. No doubt in its real beginnings it shades back
far beyond its distinguishable first appearance at this time, but in
broad terms it begins for Egyptians and Sumerians about this time, and
even if this was not the earliest point of its appearance, it is the
point at which the earliest abundant well dated and understood phonetic
records are found. What time we shall count this to be in terms of
annual chronology depends altogether by about 1000 years on whether we
accept the views of the school of chronology illustrated by Breasted’s
History or that for which Flinders Petrie is champion and in the same
way with the Sumerian where King stands for the reduced chronology. When
doctors disagree, prudent conservatism suggests the acceptance of that
minimum amount on which both agree, in this case about 3400 years of the
pre-Christian era. Without prejudice, therefore, to the possibility that
Flinders Petrie may be right in putting the first dynasty a thousand
years or so earlier, and remembering that even Breasted accepts a
predynastic historic period extending to 4500 B.C. with a strictly
historic period from “the earliest fixed date in the history of the
world” in 4241 B.C., the division between phonetic records and earlier
forms of written documents may be taken as falling at about 3400 B.C. At
this time the invention of alphabetic writing was still perhaps two
thousand years in the future but writing of some kind, mnemonic and
picture writing, had already been practised for perhaps two thousand
years or even much more. The beginnings, or the prehistoric, prephonetic
and predynastic period of libraries, lie therefore back of the phonetic
writing of 3400 B.C.—in picture book libraries, mnemonic libraries,
object and memory libraries.
§ 11. _The evolution of record keeping_
These four classes of libraries, memory libraries, pictorial object
libraries, “mnemonic” libraries, and picture book libraries, form thus
the field. All of them existed before what may be called historical
libraries; all are found among uncivilized peoples of all times; all
have their faint remainders in popular custom among modern civilized
nations, and suggestions of all may be found in child-study. Three of
these classes, memory libraries, mnemonic libraries and picture book
libraries, correspond to well recognized book forms. The term
“mnemonic”, which is commonly used to include quipus, message sticks,
wampum, and similar records, is itself not a very exact term, since all
outward symbols, whether representative or conventional, are mnemonic.
Moreover, what is generally meant by the term is the use as symbols of
objects which do not represent or directly suggest their meaning—in
short, of object signs with conventional rather than pictured meaning
but as a matter of fact image signs with conventional meaning i.e. all
ideograms or phonograms are equally “mnemonic” with conventional
objects. A better distinction is therefore into the memory libraries,
object libraries (including both representative, or pictorial, object
sign collections and conventional object sign collections) and image
libraries (including also both representative or pictorial images and
arbitrary or conventional signs). For practical purposes, however, we
may perhaps use the terms, memory, object, mnemonic, and picture,
understanding by object, pictorial object, by mnemonic, mnemonic object
and by picture, pictorial image, as distinguished from the mnemonic or
conventionalized images known as ideograms and phonograms. To avoid
confusion in this matter it must be kept clearly in mind that writing is
not picture writing because its symbols are pictures, but because they
picture something. If an ox’s head or its image (aleph or alpha) stands
for an ox it is pictorial writing but if it stands for “divinity” it is
ideographic and if, as it usually does, it stands for the sound “a” it
is phonetic-alphabetic writing: It is pictorial writing only when it
suggests its own meaning.
Again it must be said that pictorial writing is not confined to image
writing as is usually implied by the phrase “picture writing” but
applies just as well to objects. A real ox’s head and horns may mean
“ox” or “divinity” or “a” just as well as a painting, drawing or
sculpture of it.