an object as truly as the head itself. The two kinds of objects might be
called real or original objects and image objects but for short
“objects” (originals) and “images” serve well enough. Again it should be
remembered that an object is not a real object because it is in three
dimensions or pictures necessarily drawings or paintings. A petroglyph
is as suitable for “picture” writing as a painting (indeed most
hieroglyphics are sculptured not drawn or painted). On the other hand a
petroglyph is no more an “object” than a painting or drawing is.
With these distinctions in mind the following table of the kinds of
symbols used in ancient records will make clear the kinds of primitive
libraries.
(A) Objects
(1) Pictorial
(2) Conventional (Mnemonic)
(a) Ideographic (eye images)
(b) Phonetic (ear images)
(aa) verbal
(bb) syllabic
(cc) (consonantal)
(dd) alphabetic
(B) Images
(1) Pictorial
(2) Conventional (Mnemonic)
(a) Ideographic
(b) Phonetic
(aa) verbal
(bb) syllabic
(cc) (consonantal)
(dd) alphabetic
For each of these kinds of “written” records there is a corresponding
kind of library or record collection.
The question of the order of evolution among these various kinds of
record collections is closely bound up with that of the evolution of
language and handwriting, the very invention of handwriting probably
implying a feeling of need for kept records.
The commonly recognized ways of human utterance are gesture and oral
speech—the one appealing to the eye, the other to the ear, and each
leaving its record probably at different points and in different
molecular form in the brain. Hand gesture came in course of time to be
the highest type of gesture language, evolving as it did into a highly
complex and adaptable type of language, and modern hand writing is
simply a form of hand gesture which, by means of ink or lead or chisel,
or some other material or instrument, leaves a trail of the hand
movement in permanent record.
The question whether gesture language preceded sound language may
perhaps be settled by the answer to the question whether in the
evolution of living beings the eye preceded the ear. If in the age of
reptiles one saw the other glide or the grass move before he heard a
swish or hiss, and if he himself first stayed still in order to escape
being seen rather than heard, then doubtless gesture language began
before sound language, and doubtless again also language began among men
with simple gestures rather than simple cries. The biologists say in
fact that reaction to light came earlier than reaction to sound, eye
before ear, and if this is true, gesture language doubtless preceded
oral speech. But, however it may be about simple utterance, when it
comes to the matter of permanent external documentary record of
utterance, it is clear enough that the records of gesture preceded the
records of sound, and for some six thousand or eight thousand years,
more or less up to yesterday, the only permanent records, or records in
external material, were gesture records. Even phonetic writing, so
called, is not sound record but a record of sounds translated into
gestures; writing is a gesture sign which stands for a sound, not a
record of sound. It is only within our own generation that, through the
invention of the phonograph, oral or other sound utterance has been
recorded in permanent material and libraries of sound records made
possible.
The written recording of even signs for sounds did, however, in the
evolution of record keeping mark a very decided advance over all
previous methods. It was as great an advance perhaps as articulate
speech itself is over gesture language or pantomime, and even greater
than the next great step in human evolution, the invention of alphabetic
writing. It was certainly a longer step in time from the very first
beginnings up to this point than from here to the alphabet, perhaps
longer than from 3400 B.C. to 1913 A.D., and the period of premnemonic
record collections, therefore, it may be said in all seriousness, is
perhaps longer than all later periods of library history put together.
The very first rudiments of record keeping were doubtless developed in
the animal mind long before it learned expression to other animals and
are to be found in the results recorded in its very structure, of its
reactions to its environment. Certainly they began at the point where
any experience, say of contact with an obstacle, left such record that
on the next occasion action was taken in view of the previous
experience.
The first attempt at expression or the effort of one individual to
communicate an idea to another by signs may have been a mere movement to
attract the attention of the other to the simple fact of its existence,
and the first record of expression may have been the simple memory of
this movement in the other’s mind.
However this may be, in the course of time and among human beings memory
was the first record and as long as life was so simple that a man’s
memory was sufficient for his own record uses and he felt no need of
communicating to a distance, whether in space or time, the necessity of
external records was not felt. As soon, however, as the number of a
man’s cattle or cocoanut trees, or the contents of his hunting bag got
beyond his count (perhaps beyond the number of his fingers and toes) or
he felt the need of sending a message of defiance, peace, or ransom to a
neighboring tribe, or from a hunting party back to the cave or wigwam,
he began to make visible records—objects, specimens, images, and
conventional signs of one sort or another. As the art progressed and
became more and more complex, pictures of objects and pictures of
gestures became the usual form of record until finally these pictures
were recognized as standing for certain groups of sounds and phonetic
writing had been invented.
Very soon after the introduction of phonetic writing documents began to
abound and the chances of survival, therefore, to multiply. The Palermo
stone seems to show that actual records by reign and by year of reign
began in Egypt as early as the first king of the first dynasty. However
that may be, within a few centuries of this time records and collections
of records in Egypt had become abundant and varied, and these contained
economic records, records of political and religious events, laws,
censuses, etc., at least. In Babylonia too, long before 3200 B.C., there
had been collections of laws, and a great variety of economic and
religious documents.
In brief it may be said therefore that about 3400, or at least 3200
B.C., the vast number of documents, the firm establishment of phonetic
record, the pains taken to insure permanence and the suggestions of
methodical arrangement and custody point to the beginning of a strictly
historic period.
§ 12. _Memory libraries_
The earliest form of library was, it is to be supposed, the memory
library. This term is not fanciful and does not in any sense attempt
figuratively to identify the human memory as such with the library. A
few years ago this could have been done in an interesting way because a
favorite analogy for conceiving the human brain was the system of
pigeon-holes with different sorts of ideas classified and put away in
their respective compartments furnishing a very exact analogy to a
classified library. This analogy is now found less useful than terms of
brain paths or other figures, although the actual geometrical location
of each word in brain tissue in the case of memory is still not excluded
and this possibility must have its bearing on the psychological study of
memory libraries.
What is meant here by the memory library refers to the modern
psychological study of inward speech and inward handwriting. This
accounts for the existence of inward books and collections of books, and
a collection of inward books is obviously a real library. It makes
little difference where or how these are kept in the brain. They
doubtless imply a library economy at least as different from that of
printed and bound books as the books themselves are different from
papyrus rolls, clay tablets, or phonographic records, but it is a real
collection of books and the psychological study of the place and manner
of their housing and the method of their arrangement and prompt service
to the owner for his use is not a matter of analogy or figure of speech.
The essence of the book is a fixed form of words. The point is that a
certain form of words worked into a unity is preserved in exactly that
form. The author looks at it as a whole, prunes, corrects, substitutes
better words for inferior ones, and generally works over it as a man
works over a painting or statue. At the end of the process when the book
is finished it is a fixed form of words, a new creation, an
individuality. The ordinary habit of thought and conversation does not
reach this point of fixed forms of words although in the case of very
retentive memories, where the complete verbal form of conversation is
remembered, it approaches it. In general men seldom remember the exact
phraseology when they listen to a sermon or a story. On the other hand,
however, the actor or the professional story teller can summon at will
the exact verbal form of a great number of works and each of these works
is properly a book. This permanent fixing of form undoubtedly implies
some substance in which the words are recorded, but if that substance is
the human brain the result is no less a book, a real record in the real
substance, than if recorded in outward substance such as stone or ink.
The practice of keeping such inward records of exact fixed forms of
words is not only the oldest form of record keeping and one extensively
practised in illiterate periods, but it is commonly practised in modern
life by orators who speak without notes, and as a method for the
teaching of children before they learn to read (“memorizing”) as well as
afterwards in the schools.
Among savage peoples the medicine man is often a library of tribal
tradition although the modern ethnologists agree that he was by no means
the only professional repository of tribal records. The ancient
Mexicans, for example, seem to have had special secular chroniclers
whose business it was to memorize public events, and to be a sort of
walking public records office, memorizing public accounts of all sorts
as well as the story of events. According to many critics of the Old
Testament this primitive method continued the chief or only method of
transmitting records in Palestine for 2000 years after it had given
place to writing in Egypt and Babylonia. They hold that the Pentateuch
was formed and transmitted by such oral verbal tradition. The Vedic
books were, it used to be alleged, gathered and handed down by a
rigorous organized system of memorizing, and this has a certain
counterpart in modern times in that memorizing of the Confucian books
and of the Koran which forms a chief part of the system of education in
the respective cases. The strictness with which this method of
transmission of memory books has been carried out to the point of fixing
every word and even letter is perhaps best illustrated from the Jewish
oral tradition as to the sounds of the vowels which apparently continued
oral for centuries before they were represented by the vowel point
signs.
Whether blind Homer composed his songs and recited them throughout
Greece without reducing to writing or not, he might have done so and
would have done as many another before him in doing so. As a matter of
fact the excavations of the last dozen years show pretty clearly a
pre-Homeric Greek writing, and Homer himself indeed once refers to the
written tablet. But however that may be, the race of minstrels began
long before Homer and still exists. In the Middle Ages they were each a
walking library, often with a very large repertory, and the same is
often true to-day among their successors the actors, reciters and the
lecturers. The learning of poems and declamations by school children
often results in an inward collection of definite verbal forms in
considerable numbers. A more complex form of memory library is that of
certain ancients who are alleged to have organized their slaves into a
system, each of the slaves being assigned a certain number of works in a
certain class to learn by heart and kept ready on call to recite when
any one of these should be desired.
These inward or memory libraries may be distinguished into two chief
kinds. As a matter of fact there are almost as many different kinds of
inward books as there are outward books, but as the two chief ways of
expression are voice and gesture, so the records of oral speech and
gesture language, received by eye, ear, or touch, and inwardly recorded,
are the chief kinds of memory books. These are quite distinct as to
their processes of reception and record, and very possibly occupy
different areas of the brain. These differences may in part be realized
from common observation, but one must take pains to guard against the
assumption that the inward record is a photograph. It is entirely
possible that the brain record of the sound “man” differs as much from a
picture of a man as the thread of a phonographic record does. The same
is true as to the inward record of a picture word or alphabetical
handwritten word. The inward record may no more be a microscopic picture
than the stenographic sign is. Nevertheless it is not hard to realize
that there is somehow within a series of recorded impressions which may
be called images, some of which recall sounds and others objects or
gestures. The inward language may or may not have to do with sounds.
Modern pantomime and the sign language of deaf-mutes and Indians are
languages, and it is entirely possible to store in one’s mind an exact
series of signs telling a story in gesture language, just as it is
possible to store the symbols for sounds or oral speech.
One of the most interesting chapters in the antiquities of ancient
nations and of modern savage tribes is the story of liturgical rites,
sacred dances, symbolic processions, and the like. Savage dances e.g.
sometimes rehearse events of the hunt or war or domestic scenes. In many
of these cases what may be called historic events are represented and
the whole ceremony is a rehearsal of these events, although wholly in
gesture expression, with gesture or object symbols and without speech.
It is the recital of visually memorized records in visual symbols, but
the records are just as truly definite accounts of events, or records,
or books if you like, as if they were oral words remembered and
expressed by voice or in writing. In religious dances and dramatic
religious ceremonies, the traditional representations were of ideas
rather than events—the nature of the world and man, the future world and
the means of attaining this,—and these formed groups and sequences of
transmitted ideas quite as definite to the initiated as if expressed
orally or in writing.
In the ceremonial processions of the Egyptians and in the Greek
mysteries, these representations often become very elaborate and were,
apparently, in the secret mysteries, often accompanied by oral
explanations by the exegete. It is possible that in the case of both
Greek and Egyptian mysteries the transmission had even ceased to be
exclusive memory transmission, and that written records, or at least
mnemonic tokens of some elaborateness, were preserved in the various
chests or baskets carried in the ceremonies. However that may be, these
were at least the more elaborate historical successors of symbolic
dances and other ceremonies, transmitted among primitive men through
visual and muscular sense memory, just as poems were preserved in
auditory images and transmitted by oral utterance.
The significant point is that whether the ritual used in the mysteries
was transmitted in auditory or visual images, and whether these symbols
were external and kept in the basket or chest, which was carried about
in the procession, or merely kept in memory, they were, so far as they
were separate, complete and stable image-forms, real words, books, and
libraries.
§ 13. _Pictorial object libraries_
The simplest and presumably earliest form of outward record is the
pictorial object record i.e. an object “in which a picture of the thing
is given, whereby at a glance it tells its own story” as Clodd (p. 35)
says of the corresponding image signs which form what is commonly
thought of as “picture writing”. These pictorial objects are
distinguished from mnemonic objects (quipu, abacus, etc.) as
pictographic image writing is from ideographic and phonetic writing, by
the fact that in themselves they suggest somehow the things meant while
mnemonic objects or images require previous agreement or explanation.
The pictorial objects used for writing may be whole objects or parts of
objects and they may stand for individuals or for classes of things,
e.g. a goat’s head may stand for a certain wild goat killed on a certain
hunting trip or, with numbers attached, it may stand for a herd of
domestic goats.
The earliest records were no doubt whole object records of individuals.
When the hunter first brought home his quarry this had in it most of the
essential elements of handwriting (those left behind could read in it
the record of the trip) and when he brought useless quarry, simply to
show his prowess, it had in it all the elements of the record, as has in
fact the bringing by a dog of a woodchuck to his master or the bringing
home by a modern boy of a uneatable string of fish to “show”. The
bringing home from war of living captives to be slain, or dead bodies to
be hung from the ship’s prow or nailed on the city gates, has the same
motive and the same record character. So too the hanging of criminals on
gibbets has the character both of the record-book and the instruction
book. In these cases the very object itself is kept and exhibited—the
whole object (though without life). Perhaps the nearest approach to the
whole object library, in the sense of a permanent collection of records,
was when all the permanent spoils of a campaign were “devoted” or “laid
up” and kept together for memorial rather than economic purposes in the
treasury of the temple.
A strict modern illustration of this case is a collection of battle
flags taken or carried in a certain war, campaign or battle. Or again if
a modern hunter should have all the spoils of a certain hunt stuffed and
mounted as a record of the hunt, this would be of the same nature—a
whole object record collection with an object to stand for every
individual.
The sample or specimen whole object record as distinguished from the
individual record is in modern times extensively known and used in the
sale of goods by travelling salesmen. In its rudiments as a means of
visible communication of ideas it was doubtless as old and perhaps older
even than the keeping of trophies for record. If e.g. man was
herbivorous before he was carnivorous then doubtless primitive man
scouting for food would bring back specimens for his family just as a
modern boy may bring in specimens of the wild grapes or berries that he
has found for information of the folks at home. The best modern
illustration of the sample or specimen whole object is in museums,
menageries, zoological and botanical gardens, and the like, where
specimens of various kinds of objects are gathered to stand for classes,
without any special regard to the number in the class.
Museums in general illustrate object record. The historical museums
generally and collections of historical relics large and small, together
with mineral, plant or animal collections of rare objects, otherwise
unknown, or species otherwise extinct (e.g. the American bison) are of
the nature of individual whole object records, while all museums come so
close to the idea of the library, either in the matter of record or in
the purpose of message or information, that one is tempted to describe
museums as rudimentary libraries, and libraries as more complex museums.
Art museums are in this aspect a sort of transition between the museum
proper or whole object library and the library proper or the
image-symbol-record collection.
Whole object record is, however, evidently cumbersome, and man,
observing this, early learned a fact very significant for the history of
handwriting i.e. that for record, reminder, or information, a part of an
object may serve just as well as a whole object. This principle of the
abbreviation of signs for the sake of economy is perhaps the most
striking and consistent principle in the whole history of handwriting.
It is the principle which led not only from the whole to the part and
sample but from the part object to the mnemonic object, from object to
image, from image to ideogram, and which prevails throughout the whole
farther development of phonetic handwriting, during which picture
phonetic signs became more and more conventionalized, through syllabic
writing into alphabetic, and it is the law which has produced the
numerous variations in the numberless historical alphabets, issuing also
finally in numberless systems of stenography. This abbreviation is very
early found in war trophies and in hunting trophies. In war it was found
that the heads, hands, ears or scalps of enemies or even the left hand
or right hand or ear, as conventionally agreed upon, was just as good an
evidence of prowess and much more transportable than whole bodies—and
Borneo and Filipino head hunters and American Indian scalpers have
practised this discovery in very recent times.
In the case of hunting trophies the history was the same. Actual bodies
brought back from a hunting trip were not altogether a permanent record,
but after the tribal feast or sacrifice (commonly perhaps in earliest
times both in one) the head and skin remained and formed a potentially
more permanent record. Even in modern times such skins may be kept as
wholes—stuffed for museum purposes or as hunting trophies, and they are,
indeed, often mounted as rugs with both head and tail attached. In this
stage they form what may be still counted as whole object records but
from this stage object abbreviation followed as rapidly as in war
trophies. If the skin was separated from head and horns for economic
reasons, either was found to serve the purposes of record. A man’s
collection of pelts e.g. is obviously a collection of hunting records as
well as a collection of wealth. The Egyptian determinative for quadruped
is, as a matter of fact, the picture not of a whole animal but of a skin
with tail and without head. On the other hand, head and horns served
equally as well for record as skin and tail, whether the purpose was a
mere record of exploits or a record of sacrifices. This precise stage is
amply represented in the modern hunting lodge with its heads of moose or
other animals, and it is possible that the expression so many “head of
cattle” is a relic of this stage.
In each of these cases the principle of the characteristic part obtains
i.e. the abbreviation is not beyond the point where the object can be
recognized at sight as standing for a certain animal.
The principle of the characteristic part once established, the tendency
to abbreviation for the sake of economy in transportation, storage, or
exhibition, led rapidly to the use of the very simplest unmistakable
part showing the individual and then to the simplest unmistakable part
showing kind. In the case of war-trophies head was reduced to scalp, and
this was conventionalized again so that the trophy scalp consisted of a
very small portion from a particular point on the head. In the case of
hunting trophies, the head was reduced to perhaps ears or horns, tusks
or teeth. The process is found definitely illustrated in the Cretan
history in the reduction of the ox’s head to simple horns in ritual use,
and vestiges of this are probably also to be found in the symbolic use
of horns on altars, horns on men as a symbol of power, and the like. On
the other hand the skin and tail separated from the horns followed the
same law of progressive economy and was reduced perhaps to the tail only
(the fox’s brush) or the claws (the primitive claw necklaces).