Anthropology and the Classics - Andrew Lang

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prevalent among classical scholars, that, before the introduction of the Phoenician alphabet, there was no developed system of written communication in Ancient Greece, has now fairly broken down. In itself such an assumption shows not only a curious lack of imagination, but a deliberate shutting of the eyes on the evidence supplied by primitive races all over the world.

      Was it possible, in view of these analogies, to believe that a form of early culture which reached the stage revealed to us by Schliemann’s discoveries at Mycenae was, from the point of view of written communication, below that of the Red Indians? To myself, at least, it was clear that the apparent lacuna in our knowledge must eventually be supplied. It was with this instinctive assurance that I approached the field of Cretan investigation, and the results of the discoveries in the source and seminary of the Mycenaean culture of Greece have now placed the matter beyond the range of controversy. The clay archives found in the Palace of Knossos and elsewhere have proved that the prehistoric Cretan had already, a thousand years before the appearance of the first written record of Classical Greece, passed through every stage in the evolution of a highly developed system of script.

      There is evidence of a simple pictographic stage, and a conventionalized hieroglyphic system growing out of it. And there is evidence in them of the evolution out of these earlier elements of a singularly advanced type of linear script of which two inter-related forms are known.

      A detailed account of these fully equipped forms of writing that thus arose in the Minoan world will be given elsewhere.[1] For the moment I would rather have you regard these first-fruits of literary produce in European soil in their relation to the tree of very ancient growth and of spreading roots and branches that thus, in the fullness of time, put them forth. I refer to the primitive picture- and sign-writing that was diffused throughout the European area and the bordering Mediterranean region from immemorial antiquity.

      In attempting a general survey of the various provinces—if we may use the word—in which the remains of this ancient pictography are distributed, it is necessary in the first instance to direct attention to one so remote in time and circumstances that it may almost be legitimately regarded as belonging to an older world.

      I refer to the remarkable evidence of the employment of pictographic figures and signs, and even of some so worn by use that they can only be described as ‘alphabetiform’, among the wall-paintings and engravings of the ‘Reindeer Period’—to use the term in its widest general signification.

      Fig. 1. Stalking Aurochs.

      The whole cycle of designs by the cave-dwellers of the late Palaeolithic periods may, to a very large extent, be described as ‘picture-writing’ in the more general sense of the word. The drawings and carvings of reindeer and bisons, or more dangerous animals, such as the mammoth, the cave bear, and lion, doubtless commemorated personal experiences. In one case, at any rate, the naked man stalking an aurochs, engraved on a reindeer horn, we have an actual record of the chase.

      But over and above this more elaborate kind of picture story, the mass of new materials—due in a principal degree to the patient researches of Messieurs Cartailhac, Capitan, the Abbé Breuil, and the late M. Piette—have thrown quite a new light on the development of pictography among the late Palaeolithic peoples. Such a series of polychrome wall-paintings as have been discovered in the great Cave of Altamira near Santander, in Spain—paralleled by those found in the Grotte de Marsoulas and elsewhere on the French side of the Pyrenees, with their brilliant colouring and chiaroscuro, present this primaeval art under quite new aspects. Moreover the superposition of one painting or engraving over another on the walls of the caverns has supplied fresh and valuable evidence as to the succession of the various phases of this ‘parietal’ art. We have to deal with almost inexhaustible palimpsests.

      What is of special interest, however, in the present connexion, is that, side by side with the larger or more complete representations, there appear, in the lowest layer of these rock palimpsests, abbreviated figures and linear signs which already at times present a truly alphabetiform character.

      Here we have the evidence of a gradual advance from simpler to more elaborate forms. On the other hand, the converse process, the gradual degeneration of more pictorial forms into their shorthand, linearized equivalents, can often be traced in the series of these representations. The Abbé Breuil, for instance, has recently published a series of tables showing the progressive degeneration and stylization of the heads of horses, goats, deer and oxen.[2] Without subscribing to his views in all their details, it is evident that this derivative series, as a whole, can be clearly made out. The abbreviation of the oxheads in Fig. 2 is fairly clear up to No. 12, though whether the further procession is to be traced in the spiraliform signs that follow may be more open to doubt. It is worth noting that a curious parallel to these very ancient examples of the degeneration of the ox’s head is to be found among the Cretan and Cypriote signs of the Minoan and Mycenaean Age.

      Fig. 2.

      But the course followed by evolution of figured representations during the ‘Reindeer Period’ leads to another result, which also has parallels in the history of later art, but which does not seem to be so generally recognized. The degeneration, illustrated by Fig. 2, of more or less complete figures into mere linear reminiscences, is very familiar to us. It is well illustrated, for instance, in the relation of the demotic and hieratic Egyptian signs to the hieroglyphic. But what is sometimes forgotten is that the simple linear forms are sometimes the older, and that, even as, I think, can be shown in the case of some of the Egyptian hieroglyphs, the linearization of the pictorial form was merely a going back to what had really been the original form of the figure. I have also been struck with the same phenomenon in tracing the genesis of some of the hieroglyphic characters of Minoan Crete. We have only to look at the rude attempts of children to depict objects to see that simple linear forms of what may perhaps be called the ‘slate pencil’ style precedes the more elaborate stage of drawing. Art begins with skeletons, and it is only a gradual proficiency that clothes them with flesh and blood.

      Fig. 3.

      So it seems to have been with the Reindeer men. It has already been noticed that the stratigraphy of the paintings and engravings on the Cairoan walls, as investigated by the Abbé Breuil, shows that those of the earliest phase were line sketches of the simplest kind.[3] They are just such as a child might draw. They seem often to have been left incomplete from mere laziness, just so much of the figure being given as to enable its identification. No. 9, for instance, in the table given in Fig. 3, is a mere outline of the front of a mammoth’s head, even the tusks and eye being omitted. No. 2 shows only a little more of a bison’s head. The eye at the beginning of the table seems to be human, and may be the ideograph of the individual who drew it. Besides these recognizable sketches there are other linear representations of the slightest kind, but which, there can be little doubt, conveyed a definite meaning to those who drew them. Of these a certain number, moreover, are purely alphabetiform in character. There is an X, an L, a T upside down, and they have learned to dot their i’s.

      It is strange, indeed, that in the very infancy of its art mankind should have produced the elemental figures which the most perfected alphabetic systems have simply repeated. The elements of advanced writing were indeed there, but the time had not yet come when their real value could be recognized. It has only been after the lapse of whole aeons of time, through the gradual decay and conventionalization of a much more elaborate pictography, that civilized mankind reverted to these ‘beggarly elements’, and literature

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