The troll drums of the Lapps find their analogy in those of the
kindred Samojed tribes to the East, which present figures of the
same class. But the pictographs on these will be found to fit on
to the rock-carvings or petroglyphs of Siberia, first described by
Strahlenberg, of which a specimen is given in Fig. 12.[21] Similar rock
carvings may be traced through a vast Finno-Ugrian or Mongolian region
to the borders of China, and the Chinese characters themselves must
have arisen from a branch of the same great Northern family.
This Finno-Tataric province of primitive pictography touches the
Atlantic in Northern Norway. In the south of the Scandinavian
Peninsula we have numerous examples of picture-writing in the shape of
carving,[22] mainly belonging to the Bronze Age, either on rocks or on
the slabs of sepulchral barrows. Of the latter class are the well-known
examples from the Cairn of Kivik, on the east coast of Scania, and the
rock-carvings extend through Southern Norway and Denmark. The most
remarkable of all are probably those of Bohuslan, of which an example,
in which ships figure largely, is shown in Fig. 13.[23]
[Illustration: FIG. 12.]
In our own islands there is also evidence during the Bronze Age of
the practice of engraving signs and pictographic figures on rocks and
the slabs of sepulchral cists and chambers. Those found in England
and Scotland consist for the most part of mere geometrical figures,
such as concentric circles with connecting lines, the more elaborate
figures found in the Fife Caves,[24] for example, certainly belonging to
the Late Celtic Period. But in Ireland, then raised, by its abundant
output of gold, to the position of a Western Eldorado, the field of
primitive pictography is richer. The slabs of the chambered tumuli
of Sleive-na-Calligha present groups of elaborate figures;[25] but a
special interest attaches to those discernible in the great chambered
barrow of New Grange. As was pointed out by Mr. Coffey,[26] one of the
principal figures here carved represents in a degraded form a ship with
its crew analogous to those so constantly repeated in the Scandinavian
group (Fig. 14). This coincidence becomes the more suggestive when we
recall the existence of a whole series of finds showing a connexion
between Ireland and Denmark and its neighbour-lands during the
Bronze Age.
These parallels extend to Brittany. The rocks and sepulchral slabs of
the old Armoric region also present, as is well known, a considerable
pictographic material, dating from Neolithic and Early Metal Ages.
Among recently discovered remains of this class may be mentioned a
group of curious inscribed rocks near Saint-Aubin in Vendée,[27] the
carvings on which seem to show some analogy with the menhirs of the
Aveyron, the dolmens of the Gard, and the caves of the Marne. On
these, besides conventionalized linear figures of men and animals,
occur a variety of unexplained signs, some of them of a remarkably
alphabetiform character.
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