THE ROMAN ORIENT AND THE FAR EAST 



By C. G. Seligman 



[With four plates] 



Compared with the civilizations of Egypt and the Near East, 

 Chinese civilization as we know it is not of great age. Authentic 

 history does not begin until about the ninth century B. C. (a com- 

 monly accepted date is 841 B. C), nor have we archeological finds 

 that we can reasonably date prior to the thirteenth or fourteenth 

 century B. C, though the beauty and mature style of the earliest 

 known bronzes indicates a history of at least hundreds of years before 

 this. 



Figure 1 illustrates the time-relations of China and the Near East. 

 In spite of its magnificent bronzes and graved bones, we know little 

 of the Shang-Yin dynasty, which in date comes near to coinciding with 

 the 18th dynasty of Egypt, while the Shang-Yin script is still some- 

 what primitive, indicating perhaps a period of no more than a few 

 hundred years from an unknown pictographic origin. 



The above chronology applies only to northern China, where Chi- 

 nese civilization arose; indeed it did not reach south of the Yangtze 

 until a few centuries B.C. The civilization of Japan is even younger, 

 and is now generally accepted as not more than some 2,000 years old. 

 Thus the earliest contacts between West and East were between the 

 Roman Orient and China. 



In order to have more space to discuss historic contacts — extending 

 over something more than 1,000 years (between 200 B. C. and A. D. 

 900) — I shall deal very briefly with prehistoric contacts and refer only 

 to the socketed celt. This highly specialized form of axe is one of the 

 most characteristic implements of the Late Bronze Age (c. 1300-900 

 B. C.) of central and eastern Europe. 2 Using geological terminology, 

 we may look upon it as the type-fossil of its age and zone of distribu- 

 tion. It is found over the whole of northwestern, central, and espe- 

 cially northeastern Europe; it occurs in Italy, but not in Greece, and is 



i The Lloyd-Roberts lecture for the year 1935, delivered before the Royal College of Physicians. Re- 

 printed by permission, with slight revision, from Antiquity, vol. 11, No. 41, March 1937. 



» Dechelette, Manuel d'Archeologie, vol. 2, p. 106, Paris, 1910. In eastern Russia the date given by Q. 

 von Merhart, Bronzezeit am Yenissei, p. 16, Vienna, 1926, Is from 1000 to 400 B. O. 



547 

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