376 | ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1944 
Bishop states that the conquering Chous had a culture much like that of 
the Aryans who invaded India about 1200 B. C. About this time, 
also, other outsurges of steppe peoples went into Europe, southwest 
Asia, and Egypt. 
Shang refugees fleeing before men from the grassland carried their 
culture eastward and southward to outlying regions hitherto bar- 
barous. This oft-repeated process of culture spreading is now being 
again repeated as the educated Chinese from the westernized east 
coast of China move their colleges and industries to the conservative 
western uplands to escape the Japanese destroyer. 
In the first millennium B. C. this process of grassland invasion and 
eastern culture dispersal was repeated several times. The unifica- 
tion of many kingdoms into one Chinese empire is commonly attri- 
buted to the fact that about 300 B. C. one of the western kings adopted 
a new technique of warfare from the barbarian enemies of the steppes. 
This was the mounted bowman with the two-piece bow (fig. 11)—an 
irresistible blitzkrieg much superior to the lumbering chariot, the 
preceding blitz. 
The Great Wall of China rose as a tribute to the marauding horse- 
men of the steppes. One might almost say it is a monument to the 
horse. This, the greatest structure in volume reared by man, was 
built steadily during the seventh, sixth, fifth, fourth, and third 
centuries B. C. and often thereafter even as late as the middle of the 
eighteenth century A. D. Although the wall was designed to keep 
the nomad of the steppes out of the farmlands, it was only a limited 
success as is Shown by the conquests of China by Tatars, Mongols, and 
Manchus. These cavalrymen from the steppes could conquer China. 
They spread terror and rapine and made periods of chaos. The con- 
querors established dynasties. The dynasties melted away. The 
Great Wall still remains, 1,400 miles of it, in varying degrees of decay 
or ruin. But the nomad conquerors that rode through the wall in 
shouting triumph have disappeared completely, having been absorbed 
by the great mass of the Chinese people. Meanwhile the Chinese 
peasant still keeps on with his not yet so greatly modified neolithic 
type of agriculture. 
ROME AND THE NOMADS FROM THE EAST 
The unfortunate experiences of the late Roman Empire with the 
seminomadic Germans and the Huns (Turanians, not Indo- 
Europeans) of Asia and Mongolia are a standard part of school his- — 
tory. Bands of marauding horsemen, recognizing no law but the 
power of conquest, came out of the land north of the Black Sea, 
crossed the Danube, harried without mercy the eastern empire and 
collected tribute from Byzantium itself. Eastern Goths, Western 
