Savage tribes in general have not progressed beyond the image stage of writing or at most beyond a sort of syllabic stage which corresponds to what we know as the rebus. This picture writing is the known origin however of all the oldest historical writing systems. As we all know, children too read their picture books long before they read print or writing. Picture writing and picture books have always survived among cultured nations and have a great vogue to-day, especially through the introduction of pictures into newspapers and through moving pictures.

The earliest existing picture writing of the Stone Age includes many images of domestic animals in the caves of the Pyrenees with apparently conventional signs sometimes accompanying them. Prehistoric picture writing in the Mediterranean regions includes also pottery marks, figures of animals or parts of animals used to distinguish ships and having their modern counterpart in the ship’s figurehead, also the seals, milk-stones of Crete, the rock carvings of Liguria and the like.

The very first beginnings of picture writing are perhaps to be found in natural object images. The Chinese ascribed the origin of their written characters to bird tracks, and many primitive peoples used stones which accidentally resembled animals as images of them.

Perhaps the most natural and earliest reading of records is the reading of footprints of hunted birds and animals. From these tracks the expert woodsman may read the kind and number of individuals passing, the direction that they are taking, and many other details. This fact is familiar with all hunting, and it is famous in the trailing of both men and animals by American Indians and by primitive people generally. The method is still much used in the tracking of criminals by footprints, and more especially and scientifically in these days by finger-print records. These records are actual images of parts of individuals, and it is not incredible, even if not evidenced, that the earliest use of writing by the Chinese should have been the imitation of birds’ tracks in clay by some hunter in order to describe the kind of birds that he had seen.

It has been mentioned at various points in this paper that the record of number is near, if not at, the beginning of permanent records, and Gow, in his History of Greek mathematics, has a theory that the record of numbers above ten began by impressing the ten fingers in the moist earth.

Another very early form was the natural rock having some accidental resemblance to bird or beast, or else formed by very slight chipping of a natural image, as in some cases in the Pyrenean caves. Various American Indian tribes used natural fossils or accidental images in this way. The transition from a slight chipping to sculpture is, of course, an easy one.

Perhaps the simplest and most natural transition from pictorial object to image writing is suggested by the trophy records of an African chief as described by Frobenius. The actual record trophies of leopard hunting—the leopard’s teeth—are taken and worn in a necklace by the chief and form a tribal record. The individual making the killing has, however, a wooden model of the tooth which he wears as an individual trophy. This very simple and natural proceeding has in it the germ of picture writing,—is indeed picture writing.

Among the more primitive forms of picture writing are tattooing and body painting. Tattooing is used among many savage tribes to-day and all over the world. This was known in the most ancient times and is often practised to-day especially by sailors and boys, sometimes quite elaborately. Among the savage tribes it was used for religious, political, and economic purposes. One use was as identification mark. This might be a tribal mark or individual mark, and in either case is very closely connected with the totem idea. In either case it might also be used, and was used, as a property or ownership mark to which the tattoo mark corresponded. This is perhaps linked with the ancient Egyptian tattooing through the tribal mark of the modern Nubian.

The war paint of the American Indian is as old as the Stone Age in the Mediterranean and is made most curiously interesting by a considerable number of so called Pintadores still existent. These Pintadores form the earliest known step in the history of printing, for they consist of stamps with which the paint could be applied in various figures after the fashion of the modern rubber stamp. These figures, like the war paint of the American Indians, probably had various symbolic meanings according to the figures and the colors used, and it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that there were libraries of printed books in this Stone Age—if by any chance collections of sample impressions from these stamps were kept for any purpose. At any event, when applied they formed what some people would call a living library. Certain tablets possibly used for a similar purpose have been found also among the North American Indians.

Body and face painting naturally preceded tattooing—the latter being simply a method of making the record permanent. The methods may or may not have arisen from the marks made by the pressure of trophy necklaces, bracelets, etc., on the skin, or from being etched by the sun on the unprotected skin of light complexioned tribes. However they may have arisen, these two methods of skin marking are among the very early forms of record, were often used to record exploits or events, and sometimes to record an extraordinary number and variety of matters. It seems also to be established that these body pictures were sometimes intended as copies of trophy necklaces or other ornaments.

There are many ways beside skin marks in which the idea of image making might have suggested itself to primitive man, inheriting as he perhaps did from an animal ancestry a strong instinct for imitation—the shadow, reflection in water, actual fossils of animals, the etching of sunburn, the silhouette of a tree or animal against the horizon, natural stone forms, tracks in clay, etc.—but in skin marks, natural or artificial, we see the transition process in actual operation.

The fact that savages, when they took off their detachable ornaments to go to war or for ritual dances and the like, put on paint, suggests possibly that the painted forms are images of the things removed.

Primitive picture writing on other materials than human skin is found all over the world. It may be drawn, painted, engraved, chiseled, modeled, moulded, woven or inlaid. The petroglyphs or aboriginal rock carvings (more often engravings) and the paintings are the most typical kinds although perhaps not the most common. Both of these kinds are found all over the world; most famously perhaps among the Australians, the Bushmen and the North American Indians. The use by the North American Indians is said to have reached its highest development among the Kiowa and the Dakota tribes in their calendars. “These calendars are painted on deer, antelope, and buffalo hides, and constituted a chronology of past years. The Dakota calendars have a picture for each year ... while that of the Kiowa has a summer symbol and a winter symbol, with a picture or device representing some noteworthy event” (Hodge). It is said of the petroglyphs that they “record personal achievements and happenings more frequently than tribal histories ... are known often to be the records of the visits of individuals to certain places, signposts to indicate the presence of water or the direction of a trail, to give warning or to convey a message ... and many of them ... [are] connected with myths, rituals, and religious practices” (Hodge). “Sometimes a man painted his robe in accordance with a dream, or pictured upon it a yearly record of his own deeds or of the prominent events of the tribe.” “The horses of warriors were often painted to indicate the dreams of the war experiences of their riders.”

In the matter of abbreviation it was in image writing as in object writing. It begins with whole object images and passes through various stages of abbreviation until it goes over from the pictorial to the mnemonic stage.

In image writing this process has many illustrations running back to the cave drawings where the head or horns of an ox or goat are given instead of the whole animal. This convention was used over the whole Mediterranean region and apparently became the direct ancestor of the Hebrew aleph, the Greek alpha, and our modern English a. The letter a as now used in the alphabet appears to be the end of a long historical process of conventionalizing by which user after user has tried to simplify the strokes required more and more or, as the modern complacent “inventors” of the ancient principles which they now call “efficiency” would say, “reduce the motions required” until the present form has been reached.

In image writing too is more clearly seen the development of what may be called sample-and-number abbreviation.

The earliest way of representing several animals seems to have been the making several like symbols—one for each. Five oxen, e.g. are expressed by five pictures. It is entirely natural that when a man is writing the same picture several times, one after another, and knows that others will know it to be a repetition, the process of conventionalizing, which goes on so fast under ordinary circumstances, should go even faster, until pictures four and five become simple scrawls and in the course of time the whole is reduced to practically a single picture and four straight lines. Here we have the individual record and the sample record combined.

True picture writing is not very common on the ancient monuments and is chiefly to be studied in the primitive writings of uncivilized tribes such as the Bushmen and the North American Indians. There are, however, both in the Assyrian and Egyptian hieroglyphics many traces of the older pictures from which these are derived and the idea of the picture writing is seen in great fullness in the determinatives of the Egyptian writing, although it is likely that these are not so much remains as restorations. They consist, as is well known, of pictures which suggest something of the meaning of the word, e.g. all words related to writing are followed by the pictures of the scribe’s palette, with pen and ink moistener. This suggests at once that the word has something to do with writing. It is likely that the attaching of these to phonetic signs was the result of finding that there were so many words which had the same sounds.

A very simple example of picture writing is given in Hoffman (p. 95) with its explanation. A canoe with a torch in the bow, three bucks and a doe, the sign for a lake, and the picture of two wigwams tells the story of a hunting expedition by torchlight on the lake from which three bucks and a doe were brought back to the wigwam. A slightly more complex one is given in Figure 3, which is the record of a shaman’s curing of a sick man. A more complex one, given on page 26, with its explanation on pages 170-72, is the mnemonic song of an Ojibway medicine man.

One method of picture writing shows an action by several successive stages of the same act. This is most commonly a picture of corresponding gesture signs. The picture writing by successive pictures, showing successive stages of a story, is a favorite method in the modern German humorous illustrated papers, and has, of course, its perfect modern counterpart in the cinematograph.

Any collection of wampum belts, birch bark, calendar skins, blankets, or other picture writing records, is of course a picture library which has already begun to take on the distinct character of the modern library.