Anthropology

Taught as we are to read and write in early childhood, we hardly realize the place this wondrous double art fills in civilized life, till we see how it strikes the barbarian who has not even a notion that such a thing can be. John Williams, the South Sea Island missionary, tells how once being busy carpentering, and having forgotten his square, he wrote a message for it with a bit of charcoal on a chip, and sent this to his wife by a native chief, who, amazed to find that the chip could talk without a mouth, for long afterwards carried it hung by a string round his neck, and told his wondering countrymen what he saw it do. So in South Africa a black messenger carrying a letter has been known to hide it under a stone while he loitered by the way, lest it should tell tales of him, as it did of whatever was going on. Yet the art of writing, mysterious as it seemed to these rude men, was itself developed by a few steps of invention, which if not easy to make, are at any rate easy to understand when made. Even uncivilized races have made the first step, that of picture-writing. Had the missionary merely made a sketch of his L-square on the chip, it would have carried his message, and the native would have understood the whole business as a matter of course. Beginning at this primitive stage, it will be possible to follow thence through its whole course the history of writing and printing.

Fig. 47 shows a specimen of picture-writing as used by the hunting tribes of North America. It records an expedition across Lake Superior, led by a chief who is shown on horseback with his magical drumstick in his hand. There were in all fifty-one men in five canoes, the first of them being led by the chief’s ally, whose name, Kishkemunazee, that is, Kingfisher, is shown by the drawing of this bird. Their reaching the other side seems to be shown by the land-tortoise, the well-known emblem of land, while by the picture of three suns under the sky it is recorded that the crossing took three days. Now most of this, childlike in its simplicity, consists in making pictures of the very objects meant to be talked of. But there are devices which go beyond this mere imitation. Thus 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 kingfisher, 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 men 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 kingfisher. 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. This invention seems to have been made more than once, and in somewhat different ways. The old Mexicans, before the arrival of the Spaniards, had got so far as to spell their names of persons and places by pictures, rebus fashion. Even when they began to be Christianized, they contrived to use their picture-writing for the Latin words of their new religion. Thus they painted a flag (pan), a stone (te), a prickly-pear (noch) (Fig. 48), which were together pronounced pa-te-noch-te, and served to spell pater noster, in a way that was tolerably exact for Mexicans who had no r in their language. In the same way they ended the prayer with the picture of water (a), and aloe (me), to express amen.

This leads on to a more important system of writing. Looking at the ordinary Chinese characters on tea chests or vases, one would hardly think they ever had to do with pictures of things. But there are fortunately preserved certain early Chinese characters, known as the “ancient pictures,” which show how what were at first distinctly formed sketches of objects came to be dashed off in a few strokes of the rabbit’s-hair pencil, till they passed into the meaningless-looking cursive forms now in use, as is seen in Fig. 49.

The Chinese did not stop short at making such mere pictures of objects, which goes but little way toward writing. The inventors of the present mode of Chinese writing wanted to represent the spoken sounds, but here they were put in a difficulty by their language consisting of monosyllables, so that one word has many different meanings. To meet this they devised an ingenious plan of making compound characters, or “pictures and sounds,” in which one part gives the sound, while the other gives the sense. To give an idea of this, suppose it were agreed that a picture of a box should stand for the sound box. As, however, this sound has several meanings, some sign must be added to show which is intended. Thus a key might be drawn beside it to show it is a box to put things in, or a leaf if it is to mean the plant called box, or a hand if it is intended for a box on the ear, or a whip would show that it was to signify the box of a coach. This would be for us a clumsy proceeding, but it would be a great advance beyond mere picture-writing, as it would make sure at once of the sound and the meaning. Thus in Chinese, the sound chow has various meanings, as ship, fluff, flickering, basin, loquacity. Therefore the character which represents a ship, chow, which is placed first in Fig. 50, is repeated afterwards with additional characters to show which particular meaning of chow is intended. A recognisable pair of feathers is placed by it to mean chow = fluff; next, the sign of fire makes it chow = flickering; next, the sign of water makes it chow = basin; and lastly, the character for speech is joined to it to make chow = loquacity. These examples, though far from explaining the whole mystery of Chinese writing, give some idea of the principles of its sound-characters and keys or determinative signs, and show why a Chinese has to master such an immensely complicated set of characters in order to write his own language. To have introduced such a method of writing was an effort of inventive genius in the ancient Chinese, which their modern descendants show their respect for by refusing to improve upon it. At the same time it is not entirely through conservatism that they have not taken to phonetic writing like that of the western nations, for this would for instance confuse the various kinds of chow which their present characters enable them to keep separate. But the Japanese, whose language was better suited than the Chinese for being written phonetically, actually made themselves a phonetic system out of the Chinese characters. Selecting certain of these, they cut them down into signs to express sounds, one to stand for i, another for ro, another for fa, &c. Thus a set of forty-seven such characters (which they call accordingly the irofa), serve as the foundation of a system with which they write Japanese by sound more accurately than our writing conveys it.

Next, as to the cuneiform writing, such as is to be seen at the British Museum on the huge man-headed bulls of Nineveh, or on the flat baked bricks which were pages of books in the library of Sennacherib. The marks like wedges or arrow-heads arranged in groups and rows do not look much like pictures of objects. Yet there is evidence that they came at first from picture-writing; for instance, the sun was represented by a rude figure of it made by four strokes arranged round. Of the groups of characters in an inscription, some serve directly to represent objects, as man, woman, river, house, while other groups are read phonetically as standing for syllables. The inventors of this ancient system appear to have belonged to the Akkadian group of nations, the founders of early Babylonian civilization. In later ages the Assyrians and Persians learned to write their languages by cuneiform characters, in inscriptions which remain to this day as their oldest records. But the cuneiform writing was cumbrous in the extreme, and had to give way when it came into competition with the alphabet. To understand the origin of that invention, it is necessary to go back to a plan of writing which dates from antiquity probably even higher than the cuneiform of Babylonia, namely, the hieroglyphics of Egypt.

The earliest known hieroglyphic inscriptions of Egypt belong to a period approaching 3,000 B.C. Even at this ancient time the plan of writing was so far developed that the scribes had the means of spelling any word phonetically, when they chose. But though the Egyptians had thus come to writing by sound, they only trusted to it in part, combining it with signs which are evidently remains of earlier picture-writing. Thus the mere pictures of an ox, a star, a pair of sandals, may stand for ox, star, sandals. Even where they spelt words by their sounds, they had a remarkable way of adding what are called determinatives, which are pictures to confirm or explain the meaning of the spelt word. One short sentence given as an example from Renouf’s Egyptian Grammar, shows all these devices. The meaning is: “I (am) the Sun-god coming forth from the horizon against his enemies.” Here part of the pictures of animals and things are letters to be read into Egyptian words, as shown underneath. But others are still real pictures, intended to stand for what they represent. The sun is shown by his picture, with a one-mark below, and followed by the battle-axe which is the symbol of divinity, while further on comes a picture of the horizon with the sun on it. Beside these, some of the figures are determinative pictures to explain the words, the verb to walk being followed by an explanatory pair of legs, and the word enemy having the picture of an enemy after it, and then three strokes, the sign of plurality. It seems that the Egyptians began with mere picture-writing like that of the barbarous tribes of America, and though in after ages they came to use some figures as phonetic characters or letters, they never had the strength of mind to rely on them entirely, but went on using the old pictures as well. How they were led to make a picture stand for a sound is not hard to see. In the figure a character may be noticed which is read R. This is an outline of an open mouth, and indeed is often used to represent a mouth; but the Egyptian word for mouth being RO, the sign came to be used as a character or letter to spell the sound RO or R wherever it was wanted. So much of the history of the art of writing may thus be read in a single hieroglyphic sentence.

These carefully drawn hieroglyphic or “sacred-sculpture” pictures, used as they were for the solemn records of church and state, were kept up for sacred purposes into the time of the Greek dynasty, and even the Roman empire in Egypt. Indeed after the secret of deciphering them had been lost for many ages, the names of Ptolemy and Cleopatra were among the first identified by Dr. Thomas Young. But from very ancient times the Egyptian scribes, finding the elaborate pictures too troublesome for business writing on papyrus, brought them down (much as the Chinese did theirs) to a few quick strokes. These were the “hieratic” characters, a few of which are seen in the second column of Fig. 51 following their hieroglyphic originals. Yet even when they used these, the Egyptian scribes never freed themselves from the trammels of their early picture-writing, so as to do away with the unnecessary multitude of phonetic signs, and drop the determinative pictures as useless. This great move was made by foreigners.

Tacitus, in a passage of his Annals describing the origin of letters, says that the Egyptians first depicted thoughts of the mind by figures of animals, which oldest monuments of human memory are to be seen stamped on the rocks, so that they (the Egyptians) appear as the inventors of letters, which the Phœnician navigators brought thence to Greece, obtaining the glory as if they had discovered what they really borrowed. This account may be substantially true, but it does not give the Phœnicians credit for their practical good sense, which they were able to follow, being strangers and not bound by the sacred traditions of Egypt. No doubt the Phœnicians (or some other Semitic nation), when they learnt the Egyptian hieroglyphics, saw that the picture-signs mixed with the spelt words had become mere surplusage, and that all they really wanted was a small number of signs to write the sound of their words with. Thus was invented the earliest so-called Phœnician alphabet. Some of its letters may have been actually copied from the Egyptian characters, as is seen by Fig. 51, which shows a selection from the compared set drawn up by De Rougé, so arranged as to pass from the original Egyptian hieroglyphic to its hieratic form in the current writing, and thence to the corresponding letter of the Phœnician alphabet, with its value in our letters and examples of similar letters in other well known forms of the alphabet.

It seems to have been about the tenth century B.C., that the original alphabet was made, forms of which were used by the Moabites, Phœnicians, Israelites, and other nations of the Semitic family to write their languages. A curious proof that it was among these Semitic nations that the alphabet was first shaped, has come down to us in its name. To understand this, it has to be noticed that the letters were named, each by a word beginning with it. The Hebrew forms of these names are familiar to English readers from Psalm cxix., where they stand in their order aleph or “ox” for a, beth or “house” for b, gimel or “camel” for g, and so on. This is a natural way of naming letters; indeed our Anglo-Saxon ancestors had another such set of names belonging to the rune-letters they used in old times, calling their letter b, beorc or “birch,” their letter m, man, their letter th, thorn. Now what confirms the history that the Phœnicians had the alphabet first and the Greeks learnt the art of writing from them, is that the Greeks actually borrowed the Phœnician names for the letters, which were like the Hebrew ones just given, and which in Greek passed into the well-known forms alpha, beta, gamma, &c. Thence comes the word alphabet, which thus preserves the traces of the letters having been made and named by the Phœnicians, having passed from them to the Greeks and Latins, and at last came down to us. It is interesting to look through a book of alphabets, where not only may be traced the history of the Greek and Latin letters, and others plainly related to them, such as the Gothic and Slavonic, but it may even be made out that others at first sight so unlike as the Northmen’s runes and the Sanskrit characters, must all be descendants of the primitive alphabet. Thus the Brahman writes his Veda, the Moslem his Koran, the Jew his Old and the Christian his New Testament, in signs which had their origin in the pictures on temple walls in ancient Egypt.

Such changes, however, have taken place in writing, that it often requires most careful comparison to trace them. If one showed a Chinese an English note scribbled in modern handwriting, it would not be quite easy to prove to him that the characters were derived from old Phœnician ones such as those in Fig. 51. Our running-hand must be traced back through copybook-hand, and from small letters to Roman capitals, and so further back. Readers will find this worth doing as an exercise. They may also be recommended to look at old-fashioned English writing, such as a Parish Register of the 16th century, which will show how much more the writing of that period was like the crabbed hand in which it is still thought proper to write German. We English fortunately learnt a simpler and better style from the Italian writing-masters, who taught us the “Roman hand” which Malvolio recognizes in Twelfth Night. Alterations in letters were not only made for convenience, but also for decoration. Thus among the scribes of the middle ages there arose fanciful varieties such as what we call Old English and Black Letter, and still use for ornamental purposes. This style of manuscript being in fashion when printing was introduced in Europe, English books were at first printed in it, as many German books are still. One has only to read a page of a German book so printed to satisfy oneself how great a gain of clearness it was to discard these letters with forms broken by unmeaning lines, and return to the more distinct Latin letters we now use.

Beside these general changes of alphabet, the history of writing shows how from time to time alterations have been made as to particular letters. The original Phœnician alphabet was weak in vowels, in a way which the learner of Hebrew can understand when he tries to read it without the vowel points, which are more modern marks put on for the benefit of those who do not know the language well enough to tell how each word should be pronounced. The Phœnician alphabet did not altogether suit the writers of Greek and Latin, who altered some letters and made new ones in order to write their languages more perfectly, and thus other nations have made free in adding, dropping, and altering letters and their sounds, to get the means required for each to express its own tongue. To such causes may be traced letters not known to the primitive alphabet, such as Greek Ω and English W, which are explained by their names of Omega or “great-O,” and “double-U.” The digamma or Ϝ fell out of use in Greek, and the two valuable Anglo-Saxon th-letters, ð and Þ, are lost to modern English. The letters Η and Χ are examples of letters which in Greek served purposes other than those English uses them for. By arranging their alphabets to suit the sounds of their languages, nations contrive with more or fewer letters to spell with some accuracy, Italian managing this fairly with twenty-two letters, while Russian uses thirty-six. English has an alphabet of twenty-six letters, but works them without regular system, so that our spelling and pronunciation disagree at every turn. One cause of this state of things has been the attempt to keep up side by side two different spellings, English and French, as where g is used to spell both the English word get and the French word gentle. Another cause has been the attempt to keep up ancient sounds in writing, although they have been dropped in speaking; thus in throuGH, casTle, sCene, the now silent letters are relics of sounds which used to be really heard in Anglo-Saxon thurH, Latin casTellum, Greek sKēnē. What makes this the more perplexing is, that in many words English writing does simply try to spell what is actually spoken; English tail does not keep up the lost guttural of Anglo-Saxon tæ̂gel, nor does English palsy retain letters for the sounds that have vanished in its derivation from French paralysie. Our wrong spelling is the result not of rule but of want of rule, and among its most curious cases are those where the grammarians have managed to put both sound and etymology wrong at once, writing island, rhyme, scythe, where their forefathers rationally wrote iland, rime, sithe. It is reckoned that on an average, a year of an English child’s education is wasted in overcoming the defects of the present mode of spelling.

The invention of writing was the great movement by which mankind rose from barbarism to civilization. How vast its effect was, may be best measured by looking at the low condition of tribes still living without it, dependent on memory for their traditions and rules of life, and unable to amass knowledge as we do by keeping records of events, and storing up new observations for the use of future generations. Thus it is no doubt right to draw the line between barbarian and civilized where the art of writing comes in, for this gives permanence to history, law, and science. Such knowledge so goes with writing, that when a man is spoken of as learned, we at once take it to mean that he has read many books, which are the main source men learn from. Already in ancient times, as compositions of value came to be written, there sprang up a class of copyists or transcribers, whose business was to multiply books. In Alexandria or Rome one could go to the bibliopole or bookseller and buy a manuscript of Demosthenes or Livy, and in later ages the copying of religious books splendidly illuminated, became a common occupation, especially in monasteries. But manuscripts were costly, only the few scholars could read them, and so no doubt it would have remained had not a new art come in to multiply writing.

This was a process simple enough in itself, and indeed well known from remote ages. Every Egyptian or Babylonian who smeared some black on his signet-ring or engraved cylinder, and took off a copy, had made the first step towards printing. But easy as the further application now seems to us, no one in the Old World saw it. It appears to have been the Chinese who invented the plan of engraving a whole page of characters on a wood-block and printing off many copies. They may have begun as early as the sixth century, and at any rate in the tenth century they were busy printing books. The Chinese writing, from its enormous diversity of characters, is not well suited to printing by movable types, but there is a record that this plan was early devised among them, having been carried on with separate terra-cotta types in the eleventh century. Moslem writers early in the fourteenth century describe Chinese printing, so that it was probably through them that the art found its way to Europe, where not long afterwards the so-called “block-books,” printed from whole page wood-blocks after the Chinese manner, make their appearance, followed by books printed with movable types. Few questions have been more debated by antiquaries than the claims of Gutenberg, Faust, and the others to their share of honour as the inventors of printing. Great as was the service these worthies did to the world, it is only fair to remember that what they did was but to improve the practical application of a Chinese invention. Since their time progress has been made in cheapening types, making paper by machinery, improving the presses, and working them by steam-power, but the idea remains the same. Such is, in few words, the history of the art of printing, to which perhaps, more than to any other influence, is due the difference of our modern life from that of the middle ages.

In examining these methods of writing, we began with the rude hunter’s pictures, passing on to the Egyptian’s use of a picture to represent the sound of its name, then to the breaking down of the picture into a mere sound-sign, till in this last stage the connexion between figure and sound becomes so apparently arbitrary, that the child has to be taught, this sign stands for A, this for B. In curious contrast with this is the modern invention of the phonograph, where the actual sound spoken into the vibrating diaphragm marks indentations in the travelling strip of tinfoil, by which the diaphragm can be afterwards caused to repeat the vibrations and re-utter the sound. When one listens to the tones coming forth from the strip of foil, the South Sea Islander’s fancy of the talking chip seems hardly unreasonable.