Note 26 — Chapter XII · How Copper-culture reached China

Dealing with the bronzes of Russia and Siberia, Sir Hercules Read writes: “At both extremities of the vast area stretching from Lake Baikal through the Southern Siberian Steppes across the Ural Mountains to the basin of the Volga, and even beyond to the valleys of the Don and Dnieper, there have been found, generally in tombs, but occasionally on the surface of the ground, implements and weapons marked by the same peculiarities of form, and by a single style of decoration. These objects exhibit an undoubted affinity with those discovered in China; but some of the distinctive features have been traced in the bronze industry of Hungary and the Caucasus; for example, pierced axes and sickles have a close resemblance to Hungarian and Caucasian forms. The Siberian bronzes have this relationship both in the East and West, but their kinship with Chinese antiquities being the more obvious, it is natural to assume that the culture which they represent is of East Asiatic origin.” Read notes, however, that “most of the Chinese bronze implements are of developed, and therefore not of primitive forms.… Such forms can only have been reached after a long period of evolution, but their prototypes are found neither in the Ural-Altaic region itself, where some objects may indeed be simpler in design than others, but cannot be described as quite primitive; nor as yet within the limits of China.”26