ROMAN ORIENT AND FAR EAST — SELIGMAN 



549 



absent from Africa; no specimen has ever been recovered from an 

 Egyptian tomb, nor does it occur in Asia Minor, Persia, or India. 

 The socketed celt passed along no definite or organized trade route — 

 there is good historical evidence to show that the silk route was not 

 organized in its entirety until the second century B. C. — but we may 

 picture it as borne eastward from southern Russia on a wide front 

 across the Urals, specimens passing from hand to hand among the 

 pastoral nomads of Siberia, until here and there, as at Minusinsk, a 

 metallurgical center came into existence, the manufactured products 



Figure 2.— Socketed celts. 



being carried far and wide north and east of the great mountain ranges 

 of Central Asia. 3 



Figure 2 represents three socketed celts. The one on the left is 

 from Hungary and that in the center (both in the British Museum) 

 from China, as is that on the right. The first character on the central 

 specimen Professor Yetts informs me is clearly ho, "growing grain." 



From these early contacts with Siberia and the West, we turn to 

 that great track, nearly 5,000 miles long, which, crossing mountain, 

 steppe, and desert, constituted the highway along which Ariadne's 

 silken thread joined the farthest East with Antioch, the most im- 

 portant city of the Roman Orient. 



This route was first organized throughout its length in the second 

 century B. C, but long before this lapis lazuli was reaching Ur, and 



» When this lecture was given I held that the socketed celt did not reach China until the seventh or sixth 

 century B. C. We now know that the actual date was several hundred years earlier, i. e., in the twelfth 

 or eleventh century B. C, at the end of the Shang-Yin dynasty. There exist specimens from An-yang, the 

 capital of the later kings of that dynasty, which can only be dated to that period of bronze decoration to 

 which Professor Yetts has applied the term "First Phase," historically the latter part of the Shang-Yin and 

 early part of the Chou dynasties (Antiquity, vol. 12, 1938) . 



For a general discussion of the passage of the socketed celt from Europe to China see The Journal of the 

 Royal Anthropological Institute, vol. 50, 1920. 



