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.
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.
[Illustration: FIG. 1. Stalking Aurochs.]
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.