526 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1937 



otherwise than as due to the iiifliience of the rehgion of the Western 

 Culture, definitely astral in character. As the texts repeatedly de- 

 clare, the greatest enemies of the Shangs were a people who dwelt just 

 to the west of them and who were known as the Chiangs. This name 

 was that later applied to the Tanguts and thus suggests that its orig- 

 inal bearers belonged to our Southwestern Culture. Today, thanks to 

 archeological excavations and the inscriptions which these have 

 yielded, we are able to state the approximate extent of the Shang king- 

 dom and its associated cidture. These occupied only a comparatively 

 small area, com]^rised in southern Ilopei, northern and eastern Honan, 

 and western Shantung. The Chiangs, though, as we have just seen, 

 they belonged to the Southwestern Culture, must at that time still 

 have extended eastward as far as portions of Ilonan. This conclusion 

 is by no means as absurd as might at first appear. 



4. Let us now glance at what had been going on in the meantime 

 in the west. There, after the disa])poarance of the Yang Shao Culture, 

 the Turldc stocks, bearers of the Western Culture, had been coming 

 more and more prominently into the foreground, probably because 

 they themselves were in turn being hard pressed by their northern 

 neighbors. The latter we can now confidently call Scythians. The 

 cultural changes which followed the disappearance of the Yang Shao 

 Culture are unfortunately hard to interpret in the light of such scanty 

 archeological evidence as we thus far have. We must, however, think 

 of a slow transition as going on during the bronze age, tlirough the con- 

 tinuous action of long-lasting and widely spreading western European 

 influences. The bringers of these new occidental culture elements 

 must have wandered eastward and there intermingled freely with the 

 possessors of the Southwestern Culture. As a result of such inter- 

 minglings (affected somewhat by even earlier but weakly felt intrusions 

 from the Southern Culture), there was formed a new Western Culture, 

 that of the Chous. The vocabulary of the latter, according to evidence 

 presented by recent Chinese investigations, contained a Turkic element. 

 The Chous it was who brought with them into China an astral type of 

 religion and the idea of strongly centralized chieftainships. Around 

 1000 B. C. they succeeded in subduing the Shang kingdom and its 

 culture. The latter, strongly agrarian in character and with a well- 

 marked development of handicrafts but which had already long been 

 urbanized, was in consequence deeply overlaid by the culture thus 

 brought with them by the Chous. These had a strong tradition of 

 pastoral nomadism, although before their conquest of the Shangs they 

 had become agriculturists themselves and only retained the memory 

 of having once been a pastoral people. They found themselves forced 

 to adopt much of the Shang civilization. For example, they took over 

 the Shang system of writing with but few modifications, and were in 

 consequence compelled slowly to abandon the very language that they 

 spoke They likewise took over the Shang bronze technique, to- 



