Ordos Daggers and Knives. New Material, Classification and Chronology. First Part: Daggers

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Artibus Asiae Publishers is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Artibus Asiae. ions, distinguished by advancedness, individuality, precision, and splendour. They are not primitive, and we do well, therefore, to remember that they by comparison are not very early either. Metal tools and weapons, decorated in Shang fashion and taking us back to 1300 B. C., at best, also exhibit no truly primitive features. Weapons of more primitive designs do occur in North-China, but they appear to belong in another sphere than that of the Shang bronzes as exemplified by the Anyang finds. Insufficiently known as yet, those weapons point rather to a more northerly provenance and contacts with Siberia. However, there being types not recorded from Siberia among that northern material, we have to assume that there possibly existed a metal-working center northwest of the (perhaps a little later) Shang domain in Northern Honan, in touch with but to some degree independent from the Siberian metal cultures.Geographically, that supposed center would probably not differ much from the Ordos and Suiyiian regions, from whence a multitude of small bronzes, particularly knives and daggers, came. Most of them, it is true, date from after the Shang, as their relationship with Scythian things, occasionally Chou, more often Warring States and Han styles, evinces, while none of them has ever been assigned a pre-Shang date.The dagger is a weapon absent or at any rate seldom seen in Anyangr, but almost ubiquitous in the North, the Ordos-Suiyiian province and in Minusinsk. Ordos quite generally 1 Two daggers with conventionalized animal-heads in the M. F. E. A., Stockholm, published by Karlgren in BMIFEA 17 (nos. 182, 183) as Yin weapons, are the only specimens claimed to be of Anyang provenance. Cp. the remarks under the description of our no. I o. 23 This content downloaded from 194.29.185.251 on Wed, 18 Jun 2014 20:02:57 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions appears more closely connected with Minusinsk than with Anyang. Moreover, there are some early daggers of Western Chou or perhaps even Shang age which-as tanged blades decorated in pure Shang-Chou fashion--are of a typological order never met with in the North.2 They certainly affirm what the discrepancy in the distribution of daggers at large seems to imply, namely, that in the North we have a facies distinct from that in Honan. This has, in general, not been denied, and a widely accepted term such as "Sino-Siberian" would not make sense if it did not mean that there coexisted those two facies. Applied to artifacts wherein Chinese and Siberian strains united or are believed to have done so, the term works well. But it l...

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“…708-710]. При обсуждении контактов культуры Иньсюй с карасукской культурой Гао Цюйсюнь в основном использовал все англоязычные археологические публикации по теме, которые были ему доступны (см., например: [Karlgren, 1945;Loehr, 1949;1951;1956a;1956b;Jettmar, 1950]. На основании этих статей он сопоставил бронзовые изделия Иньсюй и карасукской культур.…”

The Chinese Northern frontier: reassessment of the Bronze Age burials from Baifu

“…Recognition of stylistic and typological affinities of Northern knives and daggers with emerging specimens from Siberia and China dated to the 2nd millennium BC prompted Alfred Salmony's (1933) new designation 'Sino-Siberian'. The term generated a bipolar search for prototypes from the flanking cultures (Karlgren 1945;Loehr 1949;1951;1956), and inadvertently framed an international debate concerning primary influence by southern Siberia or China on the interlying zone. It was decades later that the area was given an active role in cross-pollination between the Bronze Age cultures in southern Siberia (Andronovo, 17th-12th centuries BC; Karasuk, lzth-gth centuries BC; Tagar cultures, from 800 BC) and dynastic China (Watson 1971;Prusek 1971), and only recently that analysis of Northern material by Chinese scholar Wu En (1985) and archeologists Tian and Guo (Tian 1983;Tian & Guo 1988) designated the area as a distinct cultural zone.…”