Of this last kind of mnemonic was the bow, too heavy for an ordinary man to bend, which the long-lived Ethiopians sent to Cambyses; and the twelve memorial stones which Joshua was directed to place in the river Jordan, in order that the sons might ask the fathers, and the fathers tell the sons what had happened in that place; and, again, such were the yokes and bonds which Jeremiah put round his neck when he testified against the alliance with Egypt before Zedekiah, and the earthen pot that he broke in the presence of the elders of the people. Signs joined with words and actions to convey a fuller or more exact meaning than words alone could convey. Perhaps we ought hardly to call these last examples helps to memory; they partake more of the nature of pictures, and were used to heighten the effect of words. But we may regard them as a connecting link between the merely mechanical tally, wampum and quipus, and the effort to record ideas we must now consider--picturing. It must, however, always be borne in mind that, though we shall speak of these various methods of making records as stages of progress and development, it is not to be supposed that the later ones immediately, or indeed ever wholly, superseded the first any more than the introduction of bronze and iron did away with the use of flint weapons. The one method subsisted side by side with the other, and survived to quite late times, as we see in such usages as the bearing forth of the fiery cross to summon clansmen to the banner of their chieftain, and the casting down of the knight’s glove as a gage of battle, or, to come down to homely modern instances, the tallies and knots on handkerchiefs that unready writers carry to help their memories even now.
Helps to memory of the kinds which we have been speaking of never get beyond being _helps_. They cannot carry thought from one to another without the intervention of an interpreter, in whose memory they keep fast the words that have to be said; they strengthen tradition, but they cannot change tradition into history, and are always liable to become useless by the death of the man, or order of men, to whom they have been intrusted.
A more independent and lasting method of recording events was sure to be aimed at sooner or later; and we may conjecture that it usually took its rise among a people at the period when their national pride was so developed as to make them anxious that the deeds of some conspicuous hero should be made known, not only to those interested in telling and hearing of them, but to strangers visiting their country, and to remote descendants. Their first effort to record an event, so as to make it widely known, would naturally be to draw a picture of it, such that all seeing the picture would understand it; and accordingly we find that the earliest step beyond artificial helps to memory is the making of rude pictures which aim at showing a deed or event as it occurred without suggesting the words of a narrative; this is called ‘picturing’ as distinguished from picture-writing. That this, too, was a very early art we may guess from the fact that rude pictures of animals have been found among the relics of the earliest stone age. Whether or no we are justified in conjecturing that the pictures actually found are rough memorials of real hunting scenes, at least we learn from them that the thought of depicting objects had come, and the skill to produce a likeness been attained; and the idea of using this power to transmit events lies so near to its possession, that we can hardly believe one to have been long present without the other. To enable ourselves to imagine the sort of picture-records with which the stone-age men may have ornamented some of their knives, spears, and hammers, we must examine the doings of people who have continued in a primitive stage of civilization down to historic times.