Bronze swords with trident-shaped guard have been found in Northwestern China, the Zone of Qin Culture and Southwestern China. Some scholars have pointed out that this kind of swords were introduced from the Northwest to the Southwest; this paper makes typological classification and chronological dating to the bronze swords with trident-shaped guard unearthed in Northwestern China and compares them with their counterparts found in Southwestern China in terms of typology and chronology, and draws the conclusion that the diffusion of bronze swords with trident-shaped guard was a constant progression from the Eastern Zhou Period to the Han Dynasty during which the Qin Culture played a significant role. This type of swords took different proportions of bronze swords in different regions of Southwestern China, and had different influences to these regions.
The Ancient Relations between the East and the West of the Eurasian Steppes is a collection of theses of the symposium “Exploitation of the Eurasian Steppes in Late Prehistoric times”held at Cambridge in 2000. The book researches into cultural relations in the Eurasian steppes in the light of their material culture and economic formation. The present paper makes an introduction to this work and other studies and a comparison of the economic formation in the Eurasian steppes with that in North China. The author points out that the two regions were very similar in ancient environment and economic formation, but the study of the transition from animal husbandry to nomadism in North China is weaker than that in the Eurasian steppes and should be strengthened to a great extent.
