Note 10 — Chapter XII · How Copper-culture reached China

Whence did the Babylonians receive, after the discovery was made how to manufacture bronze, the necessary supplies of tin? Armenia and the Caucasus “appear”, as Read says, “to be devoid of stanniferous ores”. Apparently the early metal-searchers had gone as far as Khorassan in Persia before their fellows had ceased to wage battles with Egyptians in the Sinaitic “Mine-Land”. Tin has been located at Khorassan and “in other parts of Persia, near Asterabad and Tabriz.10… From such areas as these”, Reid says, “the tin used in casting the earliest bronze may have been derived.” We are now fairly on our way along the highway leading to China. “In Eastern Asia, beyond the radius of the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia”, Read continues, “there would seem to be no region likely to have witnessed the discovery (of how to work bronze) nearer than Southern China; for India, which has copper implements of a very primitive type, is poor in tin … while the Malay peninsula, an extremely rich stanniferous region, does not appear to have been mined in very ancient times”.11 It is unlikely that bronze was first manufactured in China, considering the period of its introduction into Babylonia, which antedates by several centuries the earliest traces of civilization in the Far East.