ROMAN ORIENT AND FAR EAST — SELIGMAN 557 



covered in the Far East. 22 Some three centuries later are the half- 

 dozen specimens of "Arab" glass 23 preserved in Japan in the Shoso-in 

 at Nara. This houses the property of the Emperor Shomu, dedicated 

 after his death by his pious queen Komio (A. D. 755) to the Todaiji 

 monastery, to which in his lifetime he had been devoted. 



So much for glass vessels that were certainly imported, though 

 whether by the transcontinental land route or by sea we cannot say. 

 We can, however, affirm with confidence that glass beads made in the 

 Roman Orient (including Egypt) were traded eastward along the 

 land route. Our evidence for this is twofold: (1) The disco very by Stein 

 in Chinese Turkestan in the neighborhood of the trade route of beads 

 of western origin, as well as of other objects of glass or frit of western 

 origin; (2) the recognition by Mr. Beck and myself of ' 'Mediterranean" 

 eye-beads, of a type common in Egypt, among a large number of minor 

 glass objects collected by Bishop White at Lo-yang (the capital of 

 China during the later part of the Chow dynasty). These may 

 perhaps be dated to the middle of the third century B. C, though 

 Bishop White is inclined to place them two and a half centuries earlier. 



The Coptic (Egyptian) gilt beads discovered by Stein come from 

 the Loulan and Niya sites in the Tarim desert, which were abandoned 

 not later than the third and fourth centuries A. D. 24 On the other hand, 

 the Lo-yang beads recognized by Mr. Beck and myself as being Egyp- 

 tian in origin are of an earlier type, which may be put down to any time 

 within the last half of the last millennium B. C. The site where they 

 were found in China is generally dated to about 250 B. C, which agrees 

 well with their Mediterranean date. The body of these beads is of 

 pale green-blue glass — translucent rather than transparent — with 

 inlaid "eyes" having a deep blue center surrounded by concentric 

 white, brown, and white rings. Not only is there the strongest 

 resemblance, amounting almost to identity, but Dr. Ritchie reports as 

 the result of spectrographs analysis that the specimens "were qual- 

 itatively and quantitatively practically identical in composition." 



Beads of approximately the same date have also been found, which 

 are not of glass but which copy the Egyptian glass beads to which I 



" I have not included in my examples of early western glass a vase in the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, 

 covered with lacquer or some similar substance, and decorated with Amazon heads, as this has not yet been 

 adequately studied. Some account will be found in The Burlington Magazine, 1922, pp. 225-7. 



« Five of these specimens, figured in vol. 7 (pi. 1-5) of the Shoso-in Catalogue, may be considered to have 

 been made in Mesopotamia, Persia, or possibly Alexandria and be dated to about A. D. 700. I take this 

 opportunity of thanking Messrs. W. A. H. King and R. Hinks of the British Museum for information con- 

 cerning the provenance of these early pieces of western glass. 



Besides these there are numerous smaller pieces of glass in the Shoso-in. I have not seen them myself, 

 but owe my knowledge of them to Prof. Jiro Harada, whom I take this opportunity of thanking for his 

 assistance. So numerous are these specimens that it seems unlikely that any considerable number are of 

 western origin. They include 200 glass tips (blue, brown, yellow, and green) for the rods (jiku) on which are 

 rolled sutra scripts, and about 62,500 glass beads, while many glass beads of different colors help to compose 

 the headdresses worn by the Emperor Shomu and his consort. There are also pieces of bead work and 

 lumps of unworked glass. 



M It must not be thought that Stein's discoveries of Egyptian beads were limited to a particular type of 

 Coptic bead. His finds include many other specimens of Roman-Egyptian type. 



