Early South Indian Palaeography c8: Chapter I: Introductory
Early South Indian Palaeography c8
- Language
- English
Contents
- c8.s1 Section I — 46 parts
- c8.s2 Section II: Pictographs — 61 parts
Chapter I: Introductory
Section I
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Sign Language
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Writing is one of the finest fruits of human endeavour; as well as speech it is the instrument of culture and civilization. "The invention of *printing* though ingenious, compared with the invention of *letters* is no great matter," observes Thomas Hobbes, the English philosopher, in the *Leviathan*.¹ Indeed the letters and numerals have played such a vital role in human history that with Lewis Morgan, the late Prof. Gordon Childe regards them as part of the technological revolution.² It is not a matter of surprise, therefore, that anthropologists, prehistorians and archaeologists have laboured hard for years to know and interpret the origin and development of writing. It is evident that through writing man has sought to get over the shortcomings of speech; and history bears testimony that he has largely succeeded in it. Writing, thus, is an extension of speech; and it arose out of severe social necessity. "In the more primitive life, as man advanced in the scale of civilization and tribal life became more complex, and as tribes came into contact with each other, enlarging their horizon of life and action, verbal speech proved inadequate as a means of communication."³ With the newer phases of the broadening life, the dealings among men grew in number and complexity subjecting the memory to heavy strains and there was the need to record them.
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¹ *Leviathan*, (Oxford Edn.) Ch. IV, 'of speech', p. 23.
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² *Social Evolution*, p. 23; also Kenneth Oakley, 'A Definition of man,' *Science News*, No. 20, p. 75.
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³ William A. Mason, *A History of Writing*, p. 20.
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Life had to be made smooth; for society to hold together matters among men had to be definite. With oral transactions and agreements depending primarily on memory and conscience for their fulfilment, there was no standard, concrete, universally agreed and readily verifiable evidence to be invoked whenever necessary.⁴ There was then the need to preserve knowledge and pass on the traditional lore to posterity. But above all, laws had to be codified or the ever present danger of social disintegration would stare us in the face. There can be no doubt that verbal means were unequal to meet the tough problems of an expanding social life. It is true that our ancestors had a strong memory, deep in its roots and colossal in its dimensions. Yet, there was limit to its load; for every man's memory has its own degrees and peculiarities of fading. Consider our own scriptures; great as our oral tradition is, the textual problems would have been much less refractory had writing been employed in India to a definite degree very early.
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⁴ We are told, for instance. that in Sumer, a Temple could dispose of vast estates, flocks and herds, huge revenues, and issue advances and loans. Writing became essential there to record these transactions as well as maintain accounts satisfactorily and in a manner understandable to all. (Gordon Childe, *Man Makes Himself*, p. 180).
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Memory is fallible; and communication needs both parties to be at the same time and place, unless messengers are employed. Surely no community with any signs of progress would submit to such limitations. Speech, therefore, requires a ghost to represent it and strangely enough a ghost which should not by any chance be ethereal. Given this situation writing is a corollary of social life. And it should be a surprise only if man had not developed it. But obviously writing as we have it now was not the invention of a single day nor of a single man. It has existed longer within the womb of society than out of it.⁵ Years ago Sir Edward Tylor wrote: "the art of writing......was developed......by a few steps of invention, which, if not easy to make, are at any rate easy to understand when made."'⁶ But those few steps have accelerated social life as fast as they required a long time to materialise; and as they are at least as easy to comprehend now, we happen to know a good deal of the history of writing.
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⁵ "Still it may safely be claimed that the final chapter is practically completed and that the long historical development of written characters for ever is a closed book." Mason, *op. cit.*, p. 14.
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⁶ *Anthropology*, Vol. I (Watts 1946), p. 132.
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The earliest form of writing was the pictograph. But we must examine how the pictographs themselves evolved, though we do not have the evidence of material records to help us. However, here anthropology should borrow from geology its classical principle of *uniformitarianism*. We can interpret events of the past by considering processes currently at work and accessible to our observation. Adopting this method it should be remembered that the evolution of writing is best studied together with the cognate process of speech. And it may be safely concluded that the earliest 'languages' must have been a combination of gesture and onomatopaeia. Mason writes: "It is more than an idle metaphor to liken this sign-language to actual writing in the air with the hands......it was not so much the movements of the hands as the picture of the movements that prefigured in many cases the subsequent written signs of which they were prototypes".⁷ In a profoundly instructive article Sir Richard Paget cites De Kempelen's finding that (a) the various sounds of speech are simply the ordinary results of the *positions of the articulating organs* and further concludes, what De Kempelen failed to realise, that (b) the organs of articulation were themselves influenced by pantomimic hand-signs. In the same article Sir Richard has summarised Dr. J. Rae's conclusions that (a) the primitive form of spoken 'word' would express simply the completed action, (b) the lips, tongue and mouth as a whole have resemblances to external objects and actions and (c) the primitive significant sounds were all monosyllables and expressed force, form and movement.⁸
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⁷ *op. cit.*, p. 20. "For instance, if an Indian desired to say that you were not truthful, he would touch his tongue with one finger and hold up two fingers towards you signifying that you were double-tongued, that is untruthful. If he wished to say that a given place was distant two, three or more days' journey, he would twirl the fingers of both hands one over the other like a wheel rolling, inclining his head as if asleep and hold up as many fingers as there were 'sleeps', meaning nights; thus indicating the number of days of travel necessary to reach the place in question. If he desired to refer to the past, he would extend the hand in front with the index finger pointed, drawing his arm back with a screw motion, meaning a long time back. If he intended to refer to the future, he would put his hand with the index finger at his back pushing it forward with a screw motion, thus indicating a distant time in the future." J. Lee Humfreville, *Twenty Years Among Our Hostile Indians*, quoted by Mason, in his book, *op. cit.*, p. 21.
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⁸ 'The Origin of Language', *Science News*, No. 20. "It will be noted that Dr. Rae assumed that the human mouths pantomimed, as it were on its own account and not as understudy to the human hands. He was evidently unaware of the Sam Weller effect" (p. 86).
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In the *Pickwick Papers* Charles Dickens describes Sam Weller laboriously writing his valentine to Mary and at the same time *forming with his tongue imaginary characters to correspond*.⁹ Later on the same concord of hand and mouth was observed by Charles Darwin; children learning to write move their tongues in a ridiculous fashion and persons cutting with scissors often move their jaws in unison with their hands.¹⁰ Here is "direct evidence to explain how in the beginning, primitive man's attempts to explain himself, by natural hand pantomime must have resulted in *unconscious* mouth movements accompanying the hand pantomime.¹¹ This evidence is confirmed by the "natural pantomimic language of the uneducated born-deaf" and "anthropologically speaking, the uneducated born-deaf are living fossils indicating the mental condition of early man before the discovery of verbal symbolism."¹²
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⁹ *Ibid.*, p. 84.
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¹⁰ *Science News*, No. 20, p. 84.
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¹¹ *Ibid.*, p. 85. "And if these unconscious mouth movements were themselves accompanied by emotional sounds, expressing the pantomimist's anxiety to be noticed and understood, then speech like sound would inevitably result." See *ibid.*, p. 90 for Paget's account as to how in the English language, the tongue deals with actions in which *both* hands are normally involved. T. H. Huxley wrote: "Although the tongue is credited with the responsibility of speech as the 'unruly member' and undoubtedly takes a very important share in its production, it is not absolutely indispensable." (*Elementary Physiology*, p. 338.) (Macmillan, 1929). Attention is drawn to the actual instance cited in the book of a man whose "conversation was perfectly intelligible" after his "tongue had been removed as completely as a skilful surgeon could perform the operation." In such a case pronunciation of some letters may not be clear. A similar handicap (though to a lesser extent) will be experienced by a person who has lost his teeth and yet the "speech function" of teeth is generally not quite well appreciated.
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¹² *Science News*, 20, pp. 87 and 91.
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After all speech is but one form of expression and there are many things spontaneously expressed by gestures to this day.¹³ And even speech is usually accompanied by gesticulation Among many tribes inter-tribal communication is carried on only by means of gestures. The earliest pieces of writing, the pictographs, as we have seen, are only recorded gestures. It is, therefore, certain that speech and writing had common, though not necessarily coeval origin in imitative gestures.¹⁴ They must then, be integrally viewed and interpreted ; and physiologically too there is some basis for this approach in that speaking and writing are but two forms of *one* process.14a It is probable that in the frontal lobe of the cerebral cortex is an *area for writing*. This must be in tact for one to remember how to make the highly co-ordinated movements involved in writing language and in drawing.¹⁵ Nevertheless to some extent speech and writing entail cortical and subcortical dynamics in their entirety.¹⁶ As against a too rigid assignment of exclusive functions to the different regions of the cortex, Dr. Marie stresses that speech functions must be considered as a whole, “both for spoken and written speech.”¹⁷ Pavlov regarded speech as the external manifestation of the second signalling system; speech, according to him was the ‘signal of signals.’¹⁸ Writing too, then would come under the second signalling system.¹⁹
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¹³ In Dr. Starling's *Principles of Human Psychology* (p. 357), expressive gestures have been anatomically classified into facial, manual, corporal and pedal. The tongue 'plays its part in the language of gesture such as biting the tongue in uncertainty or anguish, licking the lips in anticipation and protruding it in rudeness' (R. J. Harrison, *Man the Peculiar Animal*, p. 80).
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¹⁴ Speech must have been collaterally influenced by onomatopaeia, but that too is one kind of imitation.
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14a “In the past insufficient emphasis has been laid on the fact that stuttering and writer’s cramp belong to the same group of disabilities. Writing and speaking are motor forms of expression in language. Writer’s cramp and stuttering are muscular spasms which interrupt the normal flow of writing and speaking…….Exactly the same kind of treatment is required in both…….” (L. S. P. Davidson and Col. D. M. Dunlop and J. M. McNee—*Text Book of Medical Treatment*, (V Edn. 1950), pp. 887-88.)
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¹⁵ Clifford T. Morgan, *Introduction to Psychology*, (McGraw Hill, 1956).
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¹⁶ “The power of speech, which belongs only to man, is a result of the brain. The fact that a child commences to speak *only after it has learned to handle objects and to walk*, is an indication of the complexity of this function”. (Henry Dryere, *Aids to Psychology* (4th Edn.), Bailiere Tindall & Cox, London, 1957 p. 212.), *Italics mine*.
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¹⁷ Samson Wright, *Applied Physiology*, (1956) p. 674. By “speech function” Dr. Marie seems to imply speaking and reading only. But if these two are part of the same process, and to read what is *written* is a ‘speech function’ writing itself should not be in any way different.
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¹⁸ *Selected Works*, (Moscow, 1955), p. 262.
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¹⁹ Best and Taylor observe: “As a child which is taught to read auditory speech is associated with visual symbols of speech, and finally through an association between these, and the motor area for the hand, the child learns to express his auditory and visual impressions by the written word”. (*Physiological Basis of Medical Practice*, 1940).
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Anybody who investigates intensively the physiology of writing²⁰ and determines the precise role of the brain and the central nervous system would be rendering a great service. Incidentally that would give us a clearer understanding of the evolution of writing also. For, while the stimulus of social environment is undeniable, nevertheless there may have been another complementary factor; perhaps man has an "inborn propensity for graphic expression". And it is no flight of the imagination to think that this potential instinct to write or draw is man's biological inheritance which he shares with the members of the *pongidae*.²¹ Dr. Julian Huxley once observed a young gorilla in the zoo trace the outline of his shadow on the wall with his finger²². Leonard Bowen happened to see rhesus monkeys trace the outline of their hands in the dust using a twig held like a pencil.²³
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²⁰ John Gray McKendrick's remarks deserve reproduction here: "Nature knows nothing of letters and syllables; words are simple phones or combinations of phones, and each phone is formed of vibrations. This is nature's longhand method of recording speech: written or printed letters are a species of shorthand invented by man" (*Principles of Physiology*, Williams and Nargate, London).
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²¹ Paget writes: "It is interesting to note that the dawning as it were, of hand and mouth sympathy is to be seen in the chimpanzees; but with this difference, that the sympathy appears to be limited to hand with lips and jaw, and not to hand and tongue" (*Science News*, No. 20, p. 85.) Kenneth Oakley writes: "It is sometimes assumed that the difference in mental capacity between apes and man is accurately reflected in their brain-sizes. Unfortunately the facts do not justify the use of this simple criterion because mental capacity depends rather more on the quality of the cortical association areas of the brain than on its size. It is true that the comparative psychology of primates shows that the rating of mental capacity is broadly parallelled by the order of magnitude of the brain. The recorded range of adult brain-size in normal man is from 830 cc. to 2,100 cc., whereas the brains of gorillas range from 340 to 685 cc. But as Dr. E. I. White has lately pointed out to me a child of our own species is usually beginning to talk at the age of two years; yet at that age a brain capacity of 650 cc. is probably well within the proper range. Thus one cannot assume that an adult *Australopithecus* with a brain of that size was incapable of speech. In any case Dr. Broom's latest discoveries in South Africa suggest that some austrolopithecines may have had brains approaching 850 cc." ('A Definition of Man', *Science News*, No. 20.)
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²² Cited in Sonia Cole, *Pre-history of East Africa*, p. 250. *fn*.
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²³ *Ibid*.
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Now to the different stages in the evolution of the alphabet. The rationale behind writing has been examined earlier. Speech is perishable and yet when translated into writing it gains permanance defying the corroding hand of time. But space, how to conquer that? How to communicate over a wide area in a short time? Herein comes the ‘tom-tom’. One may wonder whether clapping of hands was its fore-runner. Writing is the result of evolving visual symbols, to correspond to conventional auditory symbols; in tom-tom, on the contrary, a secondary system of auditory symbols is built up to be equivalent to the primary system *i.e.* speech. And the hand, instead of the letters or figures of writing, produces sounds. One should not, however, imagine, that the use of the voice had no place in tom-tom. In the initial stages, before the development of drums and wind-pipes, the human “cry”²⁴ must have been an important means of communication. Even now in upper India the “Coo-ee” is an oft-used method of transmitting news from village to village.²⁵ The acoustic method of communication is generally used by any community living in a compact area, while the optical method obtains among tribes living in the vast open spaces.²⁶ To this day, the acoustic means are common even among advanced people: the temple-bell, the town-crier, the bugle-call are a few instances.26a But with the primitive people tom-tom is highly developed, requiring good skill, and a great variety of subtle and intricate things can be dexterously conveyed. Their system of telecommunication too has multitudes of local ‘stations’, and messages would be transmitted, picked up and relayed by one another. The drum is the most important instrument used and the drummers perch themselves on tall trees, to command a good view over a wide range; or they may call each other from hill-top to hill-top with intermediate stations relaying the news. With this system in operation nothing can escape the notice of the tribe; the movement of anything, an animal to be hunted, or an enemy sneaking deftly, or a stranger wandering aimlessly is observed with remarkable agility and the news transmitted in the tribe’s own “Morse Code”. In a trice the incorrigible jungle reverberates with gyrating drumbeats and the tribesmen are rushed to the trouble spot with the necessary equipment for immediate action.
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²⁴ “Language does not function by the spoken word alone, but may assume all forms of expression, which the physical structure of the organs of speech allow.” (Julius E. Lips, *The Origin of Things*, p. 218.)
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²⁵ “Standing on a commanding point, may be a big rock or the roof of a house, a man coo-ees to attract the attention of the people in a high pitch voice. From village to village the message is tossed and is broadcast throughout large areas in an incredibly short space of time” (Jim Corbett, *Man Eaters of Kumaon*, (Oxford, 1947), p. 34).
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²⁶ Julius E. Lips, *op. cit.*, p. 217.
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26a It is said that Tirumalai Nāyaka of Madura (1623-’59) got within a short while information in this way of the midday worship in the temple at S’rīvilliputtūr about fifty miles away and it was only after he heard the news that he took his food.
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But tom-tom is a by-lane in the evolution of writing; and there were others too. One stage of writing is marked by the use of totem-signs by primitive peoples; this was definitely an effective system of record which could solve problems of personal identification and constituted really “a primitive genealogy”.²⁷ Of all primitive attempts the nearest approach to writing is made by the use of totems as autographs. A similar “but somewhat adventitious” influence in the evolution of writing was the use of private ownership marks.²⁸ Apart from identification, the vital problem in all early recording was the need for memory jogs; it has been indicated earlier that even pictographs had essentially a muemonic origin. There are varieties of these ingenious muemonic devices, though perhaps the knotted cord is the most common. The Peruvian *quipus* (*quipos*, *kipus*) usually consisted of various threads or cords differing in length, thickness and colour, hanging from a top band or cross-bar. (See Fig. 1). Though mainly intended for purposes of enumeration, there are instances of historical events or edicts being conveyed through these means.²⁹ Some tribes used notched sticks, others shells and beads as aids to memory, "much the same as the modern rosary or abacus". A staggering instance of muemonic record was the "revenue book" of Hawaii, "which consisted of a rope four hundred fathoms long, divided into sections, corresponding to the various districts of the country. Each section of the rope was the complete record of the tax collector, who by means of loops, knots and tufts of different shapes and colours kept a correct account of the personal property of the people."³⁰ In the middle ages when learning was confined to the priests and to a lesser extent to the courtiers, in some parts of England, people in the rural areas, remote from the churches, employed notched sticks called 'clogs' or 'almanacs' to remember holy days.³¹ (See Fig. 2). The North American Indians employed some unique devices such as the *Wampum* and the *Calumet* or the reed "peace-pipe". In the *Wampum* we have a close approach to picture-writing. It was a broad belt made of shell or beads set in patterns portraying objectively or by metaphor or in a quite conventional manner the matter to be recorded. (See Figs. 3, 4 and 5). The patterns were meant to be "memory jogs" so that in a way the *Wampum* served as a muemonic pictograph; and as it was commonly employed, a man with a sound memory would be appointed to keep such records. Once a year they were to be produced before the entire tribe and the precise import of each was to be publicly narrated. Yet despite all this elaborate precaution, misinterpretations, consequent conflicts and wars were too common to let this system have any lasting value.³²
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²⁷ A totem is a character, generally pictorial, employed by savage peoples to indicate the clan, gens or family to which an individual belongs. “The custom is almost universal among savage tribes to select the form of some animal, fish or bird, as a totem to distinguish between the different clans and families. These totems are tattooed on the body in brilliant colours or painted upon the possessions of the family clan.” (Julius E. Lips, *op. cit.*, p. 23.)
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²⁸ The most interesting symbol for private ownership is the Baby-lonian figure of an arrow or spear with four crossed lines cut on the shaft [Figure:] (Mason, *op. cit.*, p. 255) which meant first possession and then name (proper), ‘a reminiscent picture of a most archaic custom.’
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²⁹ Some other ancient peoples (in China and Tibet) and some primitive tribes of the present day, such as the Li of Hainan, the Santals of Bengal, some tribes of the Japanese Riukiu islands, the Polynesian islands of Central and Western Africa, California and Southern Peru, have also employed knotted cords and similar muemonic devices. In the Solomon Islands, in the Carolines, in the Pelew and the Marquesan islands, strings with knots and loops are still used for the exchange of news. (Diringer, *The Alphabet*, p. 26.) Marco Polo wrote of the inhabitants of the Zardandan-Yunnan, China: "They have no letters, but make their contracts and obligations by tallies of wood, one-half whereof one keepeth, and the other which being afterwards paid, the tally is destroyed." (See Mason, *op. cit.*, p. 31.)
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³⁰ "The weak point in the system was that each division collector had to "go along" with the record to explain and interpret it!" (*Ibid*, p. 35.)
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³¹ "They were square blocks of wood notched on the four edges with the days of the week, the seventh notch being a long one. On one side of each edge, which included three months, lines from the notches bore dots or geometric marks indicating cycles of the moon. On the adjacent side, lines drawn from notches corresponding to church festivals, fasts and saints' days, bore characters symbolical of these holy days". (*Ibid*., p. 36.)
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³² Worn sometimes as an ornament or girdle, it was also used as money. (Diringer, *op. cit.* p. 28.)
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Fig. 1. Peruvian Quipus
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Fig. 2. 1. Notched Stick from Laos (Indo-China). 2. "Geographical Map" from Greenland. 3. Makonde knot-record (Tanganyika Territory) 4.5. Notched sticks from North America, 6. Australian Notched sticks.
Section II: Pictographs
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We have so far, attempted a brief survey of the nascent attempts of primitive men to get over the difficulties of speech so that communication could be less perishable. But all these varied devices invented by them have been rightly grouped under ‘embryo-writing’ to be distinguished from true writing. Obviously, therefore, our main concern should be the study of the latter ; and to begin with, that is, pictography. In a way pictography is the boundary between writing and art, so that to view it in a wider perspective we should consider some of the theories put forward by historians of art. Many scholars tend to believe that the theory of sympathetic magic has largely explained the purpose of all primitive art. Yet, what was at the back of the minds of these artists would seem to defy mangling by preconceived theories. In her book *Paintings and Engravings*, (Tr. by Eleanore Frances Armstrong)³³, Mille Annate Laming-Las Caux “ has thought out along her own lines the reasons which may have prompted cave artists to acquire and develop their skill in order to be able to devote their time to decorating almost inaccessible areas of rock space. She joins issue, indeed, with Abbe Breuil, for she is not prepared to accept hunting, ritual and the practice of sympathetic magic as being sufficient explanations either of the choice or the number of the animals represented, or of the surfaces chosen for decoration, or of the seemingly casual superimposed drawings. Mille Laming draws attention to what she considers intelligibly obvious group compositions and argues that such groups are incompatible with the theory of sympathetic magic which depends on the supposition that each animal or figure was painted separately according to the needs of the hunt. More over, she rules out the alternative theory of these cave paintings being products of an anecdotal animal art on grounds of unnatural animal associations between certain animals within these groups .........'' ³⁴ It is therefore idle to conclude that these drawings and paintings represent one definite trend to the exclusion of all others or that all primitive art, irrespective of the factors of time and place, could be explained in terms of any single theory, however cogent it may seem to be. There is, indeed, no logical or historical necessity for any exclusive motive. Thus it is not improbable that primitive art has been permeated by many complementary factors. It may commemorate actual events or record instructions and directives to be carried out and essay as well dreamy visions of unfulfilled yearnings.
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³³ “The ideas of writing and drawing were identical in prehistoric Egypt and in early Greece, as it is shown by the Egyptian word *s-sh* and by Greek *graphein*, which mean both ‘writing’ and ‘drawing’”. (Diringer, *ibid.*, p. 25). “As far as history reaches, in every direction, the beginnings of writing seem to have been laid in pictorial art”. (W.A. Mason, *op. cit.*, p. 40.) The remarkable drawing and paintings of cave men of central Europe (who lived at the close of the last glacial period in Europe) which abound in artistic excellence, are frankly regarded as picture-writing by Dr. Arther J. Evans who interprets them as records of events.
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³⁴ See *The Times Literary Supplement*, May, 29. 1959, p. 316. See also review of the same book in *The Listener*, May, 7, 1959, p. 812.
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Fig. 3. The Penn Treaty Belt. Given by the Indians to William Penn
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Fig. 4. Wampum belt belonging to the Onondaga Indians.
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Fig. 5. Wampum Missionary belt.
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" However, picture-writing even in its elementary stage is more than a picture. It differs from picturing, which is the beginning of pure pictorial representation or art, from the fact that it is the utilitarian beginning of written language, aiming to convey to the mind not the pure representation of an event, but a narrative of the event, each notion, or idea being expressed by a little picture or sketch, which we term *pictograph*. The distinction is important, for the change from embryo-writing to picture writing implies an immense progress in the art of perpetuating or transmitting thought ''.³⁵ The change must have come about very early considering the pace of development from the Aurignasian cave drawings (of 20,000 to 30,000 years ago) which clearly show that people had acquired the mental trick of isolating the element of shape, and later those of colour, number etc. from their general impressions of animals.³⁶
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³⁵ Diringer, *op. cit.*, pp. 32-33.
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³⁶ R. A. S. Paget, 'The Origin of Language' in *Science News*, No. 20, p. 91.
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But it is doubtful whether in the evolution of writing we can distinguish between two distinct phases as the aesthetic and the utilitarian, for they seem to be inextricably fused together. Gordon Childe particularly stresses that the fact of the priestly origination of writing far from disproving the utilitarian theory only confirms it further for "the Sumerian priests invented writing not in their capacity of ministers of superstition but in that of administrators of a wordly estate. They, like Egyptian and Minoan scribes, used the invention not for magical or liturgical purposes but for practical business and administration".³⁷ While this is true, it does not take into cognizance the possibility of the prior existence of *pictures*, as such,³⁸ whose *raison d'etre* may not have been narration of events, and yet may have inspired the subsequent utilitarian picture writing. In the ultimate analysis, therefore, the birth of writing may not be wholly attributable to practical needs, though such needs may have been the immediate forces engendering it. There is at least one strong ground for this belief: the evolution of writing shows an unmistakable direction, viz., *from the decorative to the plain*, and throughout, the more thoroughly utilitarian writing is meant to be, the plainer it becomes.³⁹ When all evidence definitely establishes this uniform course in the development of writing, it should not be futile to study this evolution in the reverse and infer an original stage of pictures as such, pure and simple, the main concern behind which may not have been plain practical communication. If this stage can be considered a historical fact, then, writing has had an aesthetic and not an utilitarian origin.39a
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³⁷ *Man Makes Himself*, p. 185. "It is no accident that the oldest written documents of the world are accounts and dictionaries. They disclose the severely practical needs that prompted the invention of Sumerian Script". (*Ibid.*, p. 184).
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³⁸ See, *ante*, p. 11 for the quotation from Diringer.
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³⁹ Haddon, *Evolution in Art*, p. 215.
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39a We have incidentally emphasised it here so that advocates of utilitarianism supported by substantial *but later* evidence may not wholly miss it.
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The subsequent development of writing presents no great difficultly; according to A. C. Haddon,⁴⁰ the stages through which alphabet writing has passed are:
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⁴⁰ *Evolution in Art*, pp. 216-7.
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(a) *Pictographs*–Pictures or actual representation of objects.
(b) *Ideograms*–Pictorial symbols⁴¹ which are used to suggest objects or abstract ideas. *Phonograms*–Graphic symbols⁴² of sounds. They have usually arisen out of conventionalised ideograms, which have been taken to represent sounds instead of things.⁴³
(c) Verbal signs, representing entire words.
(d) Syllabic signs which stand for articulations of which words are composed.
(e) Alphabetic signs or letters, which represent the elementary sounds into which the syllable can be resolved.
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⁴¹ *Ibid.*, p. 212. "Symbols are less obvious and more artificial than signs, they are usually conventional, and are not only abstract, but metaphysical, and often need explanation from history, religion and customs. They do not depict but suggest objects: do not speak directly through the eye to the intelligence, but presuppose in the mind knowledge of an event or fact which the sign calls. The symbols of the ark, dove, olive-branch and rainbow would be the cross and the crescent to those ignorant of history". (quoted from Garrick Mallery, '*Sign Language* among North American Indians', *First American Report of the Bureau of Ethnology*, 1879-80 (1881).
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⁴² See preceding footnote.
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⁴³ See *Supra fn*. 80 from the *Encyclopaedia Americana*, (quotation.)
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Since pictography is the most natural and direct means of written communication it must have originated independently among different peoples and thus, as Haddon observes, there is no single system of pictography.⁴⁴ "In the vast majority of cases a native interpreter is required to explain the exact significance of the figures, or of the events which they commemorate. Once explained, the representations are found to be sufficiently appropriate."⁴⁵
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⁴⁴ *Op. cit.*, p. 215.
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⁴⁵ *Ibid.*
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Quite often, particularly in the earliest days of pictography, "the pictures simply recalled the objects to the mind; the special and particular meaning of the record had to be devised through a process of mental equation".⁴⁶ Even later a good number of signs, occurring, as for instance, along with hieroglyphic words, graphically picture human or animal forms or their parts Thus, beside the word spelt fully with the proper phonetic hieroglyphs there is a pictorial index sign "more fully to define its meaning".⁴⁷ Thus while in simple pictography, any figure stands for the object it represents, and its real meaning may be easily guessed, in complex representations, as they go beyond mere imitation there is great difficulty to discriminate their true import. A good knowledge of the signs, symbols and determinatives used is necessary for any correct interpretation.⁴⁸ E.B. Tylor illustrates this problem well:—"When the tortoise is put to represent land, it is no longer a mere imitation but has become an emblem or symbol. And where the bird is drawn to mean not a real king-fisher, but a man of that name, we see the first step toward phonetic writing or sound writing, the principle of which is to make a picture stand for the sound of a spoken word. How man may have made the next move toward writing may be learnt from the common child's game of *rebus*, that is writing words 'by things'. Like many other games, this one keeps up in child's sport what in earlier ages was man's earnest. Thus if one writes the word 'waterman' by a picture of a water-jug and a man, this is drawing the meaning of the word in a way hardly beyond the American Indian's picture of the king-fisher. But it is very different when in a child's book of puzzles one finds the drawing of a water-can, a man being shot, and a date-fruit, this representing in *rebus* the word 'can-di-date'. For now what the pictures have come to stand for is no longer their meaning, but their mere sound. This is true phonetic writing, though of a rude kind, and shows how the practical art of writing really came to be invented".⁴⁹
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⁴⁶ T. N. Subrahmanyan, *South Indian Temple Inscriptions*, Vol. III, pt. ii, p. 1570.
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⁴⁷ For instance: 'to dance' by a girl dancing; 'to rest' by a recumbent figure; 'to ascend' by a person walking upstairs; 'judgment' by an eye; 'wonder' by a man with his hands upstretched. (See Mason, *op. cit.*, p. 22).
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⁴⁸ *Ibid.*, pp. 215—16. "In attempting to decipher pictographs not only is it necessary to have a thorough knowledge of the people who made them, but it must be borne in mind that characters substantially the same, or 'homomorphs' (to use Colonel Mallery's term) made by one set of people have, a different signification among others. Further, differing forms ('symmorphs') for the same general conception or idea may occur. It is usually comparatively easy for any one to get a meaning out of a pictograph; but it is quite a different matter whether that was the meaning which the inscriber intended to convey."
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⁴⁹ *Anthropology*, Vol. I, pp. 133-34.
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Fig. 6. Bison and Men. Hunting scene. Obverse and reverse. From Laugerie Basse, Dordogne, France.
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Fig. 7. Reindeer carved on a piece of antler. From a cave near Thayngon, Switzerland.
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Amidst the best instances of pictograph are the drawings and paintings of the palaeolithic cave drockers of Central Europe. "Contemporaneous with Arctic and Semi Arctic animals long since extinct" they could still have such artistic excellence that nothing can compare with "the rare fidelity to nature of the drawings to which these rude men cut with flints or painted with coloured earths or vegetable dyes upon the rocky walls of their caves, or carved upon their crude stone implements or with better skill etched with delightful naivette upon the bones of now extinct animals, ages before metals were used or ever known".⁵⁰ Their numerous drawings portray the mammoth (see Fig. 6), bison, ox, reindeer, hyena, cave bear and the horse, "which with its erect mane and zebra-like characteristics gives further evidence, were it needed, of the vast prehistoric antiquity of their art".⁵¹ The incomparable drawing of the reindeer, reproduced here, is carving on a piece of reindeer antler found in a cave near Thayngen, Switzerland. (See Fig. 7). All these drawings are "replete with realism and for spirit and dash are well nigh unexcelled".²⁵ Dr. Arthur J. Evans straightaway calls them picture-writing looking upon them as records of events, primarily of the chase, their principal occupation.⁵⁸
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⁵⁰ Mason, *op. cit.*, p. 41.
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⁵¹ *Ibid.*, p. 42.
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At Lascaux, the cave paintings of the Aurignacian period show principally a giant aurochs; the entire animal is painted in "admirably vigorous strokes, but the head is the greatest masterpiece". There are a number of horses, with prominent manes and short legs, similar to those of other caves. One scene depicts a wild mare and foal hunted by bowmen, a scene full of life and movement.⁵⁴
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⁵⁴ Leouhard Adams, *Primitive Art*, p. 79.
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There are naturalistic representations by palaeolithic men, in Eastern Spain, giving us a good idea of their way of life with its principal occupation of hunting. "A large number of their pictures are full of excitement and animation". The fighting scene from Galeria del Roble as well as the galloping horse shows, as Leouhard Adams says, "one characteristic feature of Stone Age Painting at its highest development : concentration on what is absolutely essential and omission of all unnecessary detail ”.⁵⁵ And as he believes the original purpose of this and other similar pictures may not have been aesthetic, but rather pictographic.⁵⁶
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⁵² *Ibid.*
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⁵³ *Ibid.*, cited on p. 43.
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⁵⁵ Leouhard Adams, *op. cit.*, pp. 79—80. He observes earlier: “ I think it will be generally agreed that we are completely unconscious of the lack of perspective. Is there indeed a lack of perspective at all ? Does it not appear as if the artist had looked down from a high rock on this handful of men attacking each other from bows and arrows ? And in that case would not the representation meet even our demands in the matter of perspective”. p. 79.
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⁵⁶ *Ibid.*, pp. 80—81.
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Many of the drawings in the Atlas Mountains may well belong to a period earlier than the Neolithic, as is shown, for instance, by the figures of the giant buffalo (*Bubalus antiqus*) which by then, it is believed, had become extinct. Adams holds that the drawings of elephants, rhinoceroses, giraffes and ostriches, which are no longer in the northern areas, must belong to the time when there was a considerably warmer climate in the Atlas region.⁵⁷ In Central Sahara paintings happen to be more common. “ The style is naturalistic, animated ” and “ of particular interest are several polychrome paintings in the Tasili mountains representing graceful human figures dappled cattle close by ”.⁵⁸ The French Ahaggar expedition discovered in 1935 another site to the South-West of this region “ with the same kind of polychrome wall paintings, showing various animals, but chiefly cattle. A few human figures are distinguished by extraordinarily animated and often graceful movements ”.⁵⁹
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⁵⁷ *Ibid.*, p. 82.
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⁵⁸ *Ibid.*, p. 84.
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⁵⁹ *Ibid.*, p. 85. Count de Chasoeloup recognises a striking similarity between Ahaggar paintings on one hand and Bushman art and the art of Ancient Egypt on the other and suggests the Ahaggar plateau as the original home of this art. Commenting on this Leouhard Adams observes : “ We can trace the development of Egyptian paintings in Egypt itself from very primitive beginnings. As far as we know strong influences have spread in exactly the opposite direction - that is from Egypt to the West and South-west, but even this took place in the dynastic period, and not in pre-historic times. In the Atlas region the engraved figures of bulls and rams with sun discs between their horns show an obvious influence, but they are not older than the New Stone Age, and may be even more recent. The paintings of Ahaggar plateau, then, appear to be only a link - though probably the most beautiful one - in the chain of Saharan art centres parallel in age to pre-dynastic and dynastic Egypt ”. *Ibid.*, p. 85.
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The paintings of the Bushmen of South Africa depict hunting scenes in which elephants, long haired bovines, lions, antelopes and other wild animals are found. One fine instance of Bushman painting shows a herd of ostriches of different colours. "A close inspection, however, reveals that one of the birds has 'human' legs, and peeping out from among the feathers a bow and arrow can be seen". This 'bird' is a bushman, out on a hunt, and to be able to get to the proximity of the birds, has disguised himself, putting on an ostrich skin. When George W. Stow showed a copy of this picture to a modern bushman he could readily explain: "Ostriches, three black males two blue females. The 'Nusy Bushmen' not the 'Kham Bushmen are said to hunt in Ostrich skins".⁶⁰ The Bushman paintings show attempts at perspective through fore-shortening, though some exhibit difficulties therein; they further depict the profile, the front view and, above all, the back view. One of the finer specimens shows both the animals, and the hunters are drawn with appreciable care for form and perspective.⁶¹
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⁶⁰ Cited in Leouhard Adams, *op. cit.*, pp. 88-9.
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⁶¹ *Ibid.*, p. 93.
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We have no doubt that these drawings were made for the purpose of record, "the only kind known to these savages in their backward stage". Mason observes, that they exhibit "a high degree of proficiency in the elemental art of drawing".⁶²
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⁶² See *A History of the Art of Writing*, p. 44.
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In Siberia too, rock art is common, consisting of engravings or pecked drawings and paintings. One rock drawing shows⁶³ hunters with bows and arrows and two naked men, one with a spear. The antiquity of these pictures is not above controversy, and while a very early date may be held quite reasonable, some of them definitely belong to a much later period, about the first millennium A.D. But many recent finds have been made by Soviet archaeologists and there is no doubt that palaeolithic art existed in the Asian countries of the Soviet Union, especially in Siberia. Female statuettes similar to those of the Auringnasian period of Europe have occurred in the Russian plains, Malta, Yakutsk in Eastern Siberia and in Uzbekistan.⁶⁴ As regards the Yakutsk rock pictures, Prof. Okladnikor's team (which investigated about eighty prehistoric sites and groups of rock pictures) believes that they belong to the Bronze and Iron Ages and partly to the Neolithic and Palaeolithic periods too.⁶⁵ Miss Tatyana Passek, Secretary of the Institute of History of Material Culture of the Academy of Sciences in Moscow, hails the cliffs near the village of Shiskino, on the Lena river as a museum of primitive art; she observes that "in many places, over a stretch of a kilometer and a half the cliffs are completely covered with drawings".⁶⁶ The most interesting piece, according to her, is a life size drawing of a wild horse in red paint, resembling similar drawings in palaeolithic caves in Western Europe.⁶⁷ Another instance of rock art is the Surukhtaakh Khaya cliff which is covered with drawings representing 'witch doctors, reindeer, cupolo-like structures and various symbols'.⁶⁸ The piece of the rock art from this region according to Leouhard Adams may be only a rough sketch, perhaps not quite accurate. He holds that it is not palaeolithic or neolithic art, but apparently belongs to the Bronze Age. "However incomplete the section illustrated here may be, at least one typically primitive feature is quite distinct, viz., 'X-ray' vision; that is to say, the representation of the inner parts of a body. This is one of the several characteristics which ancient Siberian art has in common with North-west American art and other American art styles."⁶⁹ What has been called 'X-ray' vision may have played a vital role in the development of pictography and ideography; Leouhard Adams rightly regards it as the highest development of 'intellectual' as opposed to optical vision. His further remarks are quite apposite to the evolution of writing also: "The accentuation of certain features in a figure often leads to the disregard of others, so that realistic representation is gradually abandoned. It is eventually replaced by symbolism where a few characteristic traits suffice to convey the idea of an object, and may be stylized and transformed into conventional signs. In an extreme stage of development an isolated claw and a single wing may symbolize a raven".⁷⁰
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⁶³ Discovered near Abansk in the Minusinsk district.
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⁶⁴ I have followed the account of prehistoric art in Siberia and Central Asia given in Leouhard Adams, *Primitive Art*, (1954).
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⁶⁵ According to Leouhard Adams if the latter date is correct it must be the upper palaeolithic as far as the rock art is concerned. (*Ibid.*, p. 112).
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⁶⁶ *Ibid.*, cited on p. 112.
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⁶⁷ *Ibid.*
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⁶⁸ *Ibid.*, p. 113. The Surukhtaakh Khaya cliff is on the river Markha, a northern tributary of the river Vilyni, which is itself a tributary of the Lena. The site lies between 110° and 120° E. Long. and in about 65° N. Lat.
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⁶⁹ *Ibid.*, p. 114.
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⁷⁰ *Primitive Art*, pp. 37—38.
Hieroglyphs
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It cannot be decided, with the evidence at our command whether hieroglyphic or cuneiform writing is older. The consensus of opinion among scholars is that the development of the hieroglyph was parallel with the cuneiform, the Chinese, Mayan and other transitional scripts. Nevertheless some are of opinion that the entire script was artificially created at the time of the unification of Egypt under the First Dynasty.⁷¹ It is true that the Egyptians had their fully developed system of writing even in the time of Menes, the first king of the First Dynasty, whose date according to Flinders Petrie is 4777 B.C. The words by then had a purely phonetic value and were regularly spelt out instead of being indicated by ideograms alone.⁷² The purely pictographic stage had been passed and "remains a matter of inference."⁷³ But scholars who dispute the pictorial origin of the hieroglyphs hold "that the ancient names of the characters became obsolete so early that explanation for their phonetic value is discoverable even in the oldest inscriptions."⁷⁴ It is too much to believe that the hieroglyphs suddenly dawned on the people out of a vacuum, as it were. The primitive Egyptian ideograms are remarkably similar to the Ojibwa and Chinese symbols;⁷⁵ and the analogy of the evolution of other scripts can, by no means, be neglected. The theory of 'idea-diffusion' or 'stimulus-diffusion' according to which the script did not evolve gradually, but was invented by someone "who knew already of the existence of writing" is an attractive speculation. Holding that this suggestion is perhaps right, Diringer still admits that it is very difficult of proof.⁷⁶ In the absence of earlier records unfolding the evolution of the hieroglyphs, the only legitimate thing to do is to suspend our judgment, waiting to learn more.
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⁷¹ Diringer, *op. cit.*, p. 58.
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⁷² Gordon Childe, *Man Makes Himself*, (Watts, 1948), p. 184.
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⁷³ *Ibid.*
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⁷⁴ *Primitive Art*, p. 211.
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⁷⁵ *Ibid.*
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⁷⁶ Diringer, *op. cit.*, p. 58.
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However Egyptian writing may have originated, there is little doubt that in its final stage it antedated the Pyramids "by many centuries of advanced culture".⁷⁷ "The earliest attempts at uniting must have preceded the Pyramids by a tremendous length of time if, as the evolutionary theory holds, the hieroglyphs had passed through the usual stages of primitive pictographs, ideographic characters and rebus writing, parallel to the stages of cuneiform writing. The hieroglyphic inscriptions represent the same mode of writing as those of 3000 years later. "Nevertheless, the cautious scholars consider the few ancient documents extant .........as a pure pictorial representation, namely as a picture only, and not as crude pictography, that is as picture-writing or as transition from pictography to ideographic script, while the majority regard the documents as important evidence of the various initial stages in the development of hieroglyphic writing."⁷⁸
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⁷⁷ "The greater part of existing edifices upon the ancient soil appear to be not first essays, but the renaissance of the art of a civilization that had been interrupted by an invasion of barbarians anterior to the year 2000 before the Christian era. The inscriptions which decorate these monuments show us, in effect, the hieroglyphic writing already as complete in form as the last sculptured writings of the Egyptians of the second and third centuries after Christ" (Champollion quoted in Mason, *op. cit.*, pp. 186-7.)
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⁷⁸ Diringer, *op. cit.*, pp. 58-9.
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In the Rosetta stone inscription, the earliest to be deciphered by Champollion, the characters are quite pictorial. The translation of the inscription here shows that the characters are largely phonetic signs, though purely ideographic signs are also found. The defect with phonograms is that they cannot precisely represent homonyms, especially monosyllabic words which have significations, though pronounced alike. In order exactly to indicate which particular word is intended, it is necessary to add a determinative or explanatory ideogram.⁷⁹ However, this mixture of ideographs and phonographs in this and other Egyptian inscriptions as well as in Mexican picture writing according to the *Encyclopaedia Americana* does not prove the absolute precedence of ideographs.
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