IX.] THE NORTHERN MONGOLS. 335 



Not only so, but the eastern migrations themselves, as above 

 roughly outlined, appear to have taken place at 

 a relatively late epoch, long after the inhabitants Bronze 



of west Siberia had passed from the New Stone' 

 to the Metal Ages. J. R. Aspelin, " founder of 

 Finno-Ugrian archaeology," points out that the Finno-Ugrian 

 peoples originally occupied a geographical position between the 

 Indo-Germanic and the Mongolic races, and that their first Iron 

 Age was most probably a development, between the Yenisei and 

 the Kama, of the so-called Ural-Altai Bronze Age, the last echoes 

 of which may be traced westwards to Finland and north Scandi- 

 navia. In the Upper Yenisei districts iron objects had still the 

 forms of the Bronze Age, when that ancient civilisation, associated 

 with the name of the " Chudes," was interrupted by an invasion 

 which introduced the still persisting Turki Iron Age, expelled the 

 aboriginal inhabitants, and thus gave rise to the great migrations 

 first of the Finno-Ugrians, and then of the Turki peoples (Bashkirs, 

 Volga "Tatars" and others) to and across the Urals. It was here, 

 in the Permian territory between the Irtish and the Kama, that 

 the West Siberian (Chudish) Iron Age continued its normal and 

 unbroken evolution. The objects recovered from the old graves 

 and kurgans in the present governments of Tver and laroslav, 

 and especially at Ananyino on the Kama, centre of this culture, 

 show that here took place the transition from the Bronze to the 

 Iron Age some 300 years before the new era, and here was 

 developed a later Iron Age, whose forms are characteristic of the 

 northern Finno-Ugrian lands. The whole region would thus 

 appear to have been first occupied by these immigrants from 

 Asia after the irruption of the Turki hordes into Western Siberia 

 during the First Iron Age, at most some 500 or 600 years before 



M. Aspelin, O. Montelius, V. Thomsen and others, who have all, on various 

 grounds, arrived at the same conclusion. Even D. E. D. Europaeus, who has 

 advanced so many heterodox views on the Finnish cradleland, and on the 

 relations of the Finnic to the Mongolo-Turki languages, agrees that "vers 

 1'epoque de la naissance de J. C., c'est-a-dire bien longtemps avant que ces 

 tribus immigrassent en Finlande, elles [the western Finns] etaient etablies 

 imme'diatement au sud des lacs d'Onega et de Ladoga." (Travanx Geo- 

 graphiques executes en Finlande jusqtt en 1895, Helsingfors, 1895, p. 141.) 



