436 



ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1940 



fairly mature civilization of Bronze Age type. How or where this 

 came into being, we cannot yet say ; but we first find it in the basin 

 of the Yellow Kiver during the former half of the second millen- 

 nium B. C." 



A number of traits, all of them previously long known in the 

 Near East, now occur for the first time in eastern Asia also. Among 

 these was, of course, the extensive use of bronze itself for the pur- 

 poses of war, ritual, and luxury (though little if at all for domestic 

 tools and implements). Especially notable were the magnificent 

 sacrificial vessels, used then, as long afterward, in connection with the 

 worship of the spirits of deceased ancestors. 



EQUATOO 



WHEAT CULTURE 



-rN- 



ANTIQUITY 



FiGUBB 2. 



There likewise now appears the growing of wheat, already long 

 practiced in the Near East (where that plant is native). The area 

 ultimately embraced by wheat culture in antiquity coincides almost 

 exactly with that in which bronze came to be used. Further, with 

 two exceptions (both of them Mediterranean varieties believed to have 

 been introduced by European missionaries in the sixteenth or seven- 

 teenth century),^' the wheats grown in China are precisely those 

 cultivated along the steppe corridor and in the Near East. 



We also now find in China the use of the chariot, drawn, just as 

 in the Occident, by two horses yoked — not harnessed — abreast. There 



" On this dating, now generally accepted, see my paper. The chronology of ancient 

 China. Journ. Amer. Orient. Soc, vol. 52, pp. 232-247, 1932; ref. to p. 246. 



"For this Information I am Indebted to a personal letter, of January 4, 1934, from 

 Dr, T. H. Shen, of Nanking University. 



