The various kinds of documents in the several sorts of primitive writing found in the different species of collections have been indicated under the various headings. It is worth while however to gather these up together a little and especially in view of the question of actual origin.

It has been noted that collections of quipu, message sticks, fetishes, personal ornaments, skin calendars, totems, votive objects and other pictorial or mnemonic records in temples, graves, medicine tents, private wigwams, etc., include, in pre-phonetic times, records of personal exploits and events in personal history, family histories, and tribal histories, hymns, prayers, amulets, financial accounts, and economic records of various sorts, annual registers, contracts, astronomical observations, etc.

All this has its bearing on the actual origin of libraries. Messrs. Tedder and Brown in their excellent article in the latest edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica say that “the earliest use to which the invention of inscribed or written signs was put was probably to record important religious and political transactions”. Now as a matter of fact, the conscious record of events and transactions selected as important for the knowledge of posterity, or even, what was probably a much earlier matter, for evidence of contract or practical memorandum, represents a rather late stage in the evolution of record. It is likely that there were many record collections before this stage was reached, trophy, votive, etc., object records and economic records of various sorts.

In point of fact as King remarks of the earliest Sumerian records, a large quantity of the earliest records are land deeds, and any one who looks over the cuneiform documents will be impressed with the fact that an enormously large proportion of the existing documents of the early historical period are contracts or lists of cattle or, as in the Cretan excavation, labels, or lists of arrows and other materials laid up in storehouses. Among Egyptian documents too, the annals of the Palermo stone, the earliest systematic annals of Egypt, which incorporate earlier documents from its own time (say 2700 B.C.) to six or seven centuries farther back, are to a considerable extent filled with memoranda of census lists of cattle taken and other lists of possessions. It has already been noticed that among the commonest earliest uses of notch, knot and pebble systems was use for the record of cattle or other numerical lists of possessions.

It would be jumping at conclusions to say that the conventional sign attached to or accompanying the pre-historic animal paintings of the caves were numbers. They may quite likely be ownership marks. It is a curious fact, which has recently been commented on, that these animal paintings are of domestic animals and if so the ownership marks themselves would be pictures of the marks actually branded upon the animals just as such marks are still branded on cattle on the plains and by New England farmers on their sheep. The fact that the tendency seems to be to regard the contents of these caves as religious, and the use of the caves as for religious purposes, suggests an analogy with votive offerings. If the marks are in fact numbers, the combination of figure and number suggests at once the innumerable lists of animals in the Babylonian temple records. Ownership marks themselves are, of course, not records of events but economic records and are very common before the use of phonetic writing. One very large class of these is the pottery mark which was first applied apparently by the man who made them for himself as an ownership mark and then, as one became more skilled in one thing and another and barter began, it passed into the trade-mark of manufacturers which has survived in the modern trade-mark system.

It does not, of course, follow that the earliest documents were not also religious as well as business and political, or even religious as distinguished from the political. Actual evidence, so far as it goes, seems to point to trophy records and votive records,—and votive records of first fruits or other useful or valuable objects “laid up” are economic records, but the parallel evidence as to priest king, the evidence as to religious sanction for the protection of objects, the hypothesis of priestly guidance in the tribal meal for fair apportionment of spoils, etc., point to religious supervision of economic matters. In the savage state the rule is that when food is scanty the strong eat what they want and the weak starve—the rule of the wolf pack. The germ of all social order is perhaps the rule that the weak also shall share in limited food. Founded possibly in selfishness—the will to keep the weak alive for selfish reasons, it involves at least power of individual self-control, the considering of remoter ends and a certain social-consciousness. The right sharing of food supply requires a strong hand under savage conditions and every possible sanction of authority. It was quite natural therefore that the common meal “before God” which plays such a large part in primitive custom should grow up—and equally natural that it should be the symbol of peace. The priest, standing for God, divided the offering—no doubt in the beginning the whole food supply—and perhaps “kept” the natural relics of the feast in the way of skins and bones.

Provisionally therefore one may venture the hypothesis that the actual beginnings of record collections were economic under religious direction,—and are to be found in the remains of tribal feasts “before God” although it may be fair to say that the rudiments of the matter already existed when the strong hand of the head of the family or tribe insisted on a fair distribution of food. Specht (p. 11) speaks of the bones of sacrifices as “the oldest approaches to a sort of writing”, and of course, the bones on the family plates, so to speak, were as truly records of the parts assigned to them, so far as they went (and if their portions had bones) as the bones of sacrifices! But then there is of course the farther question: Did the first savage who denied himself for the sake of one of the weak not have the religious motive, and did not the first man who forced a tribe of his fellows to do the same, need to use the religious sanction and invoke the fear of God as well as of his own right arm? And then, equally of course, there is the farther question whether the first man was a savage at all.

In the golden age before the mild and carnivorous Abel, before even his fruitiverous and murderous older brother, before the Fall when all were still fruit eaters and fruit eaters only, the tabu was—religious prohibition and religious sanction. And that tabu was on the apples of Iduna, the fruit of the tree of knowledge between good and evil, which springs from the fountains of memory and reflection,—the golden apples of strife which some say give immortality, some death. What is this tree whose fruit is tangible knowledge, the food of the gods and which was in the beginning with the first man, but a library, and what did those old philosophizers mean by what they set down about the first man and the way they put it? Did they mean that what is food for one is poison for another or simply that to break tabu spells death whether it is body food tabu or mind food tabu? Truth to tell the germ of the library is as early as man’s mind—at least.

Back to this point, the beginning of man, we have actual literary “authority” in the person of Specht at least, and nearly back to this point we have good archaeological sources for our collections of written records. There is, however, no authority in literature or in the sources, so far as this lecturer knows, for carrying conjecture back into the territory of the pithecanthropos, who, however, must have made and left similar involuntary records of his gastronomic activities, but who presumably never observed them or appointed them for memorial purposes.