To begin with, a list of the objects found in the Hopi North American Indian shrines, as given by J. W. Fewkes, will illustrate the fact of the varied contents of aboriginal shrines: “The temporary offerings in shrines are prayer meal and pollen, sticks, clay effigies of small animals, miniature bowls and vases of water, small bows and arrows, small dolls, turquoise, shells, and other objects.” “Among the permanent objects not offerings ... human or animal images of wood and stone, concretionary or botryoidal stones, carved stone slabs, and fossil shells” (Hodge). The historical votive offering collections of Greece, Crete, Egypt, and Babylonia extend over long periods, and the objects recovered from them include hundreds of thousands of record objects. These include, as in the case of the Hopi shrines, a great many objects not intended as offerings at all. The temple treasuries, even in very early times, were used as a sort of general safety deposit vault, the protection consisting not only in the watchfulness of the priest but the tabu, or curse laid upon those who should even approach the objects, and the general belief that they were in fact under the protection of the god who would punish theft. Such objects might be taken again by the owner, as is shown in the case of the Greek temple treasuries, or they were things held in trust by the priests for the benefit of widows and orphans as was the case of the Jewish temple. Moreover, even the record objects were by no means confined to records of the fact, the nature, and the extent of the offerings made, although a great portion of them were precisely for this record purpose. Increasingly, and at last very extensively, they included records of events of war, hunting, and in later times of the public games. They were in the Greek temples very extensively biographical or genealogical and tended to be so progressively. Indeed vast quantities of tablets “laid up” in the temples had no connection with sacrifice at all but were merely records deposited as one might deposit family manuscripts or present a printed autobiography to a public library. The votive collection was simply a public reference library as distinguished from political archives or school libraries for instruction or learning.