Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 7.djvu/93

RV 71 through which Europe passed after the destruction of the Roman Empire. While Occidental nations now in the van of civilisation were still awaiting the impulse from Byzantium which in the middle of the tenth century inspired their earliest achievements in artistic metal work, the Japanese were busily producing many masterpieces of sculpture and metallurgy. The continuity of her artistic capacity thus becomes a notable feature of Japan's story. Her record is practically unbroken, and the progress of her art motives and methods can be studied in uninterrupted series during some fifteen centuries.

Throughout a period of four or five hundred years after the advent of the immigrants mentioned above, bronze apparently continued to be the sole metal used in the country, and the only purposes it served were the manufacture of sword-blades and arrow-tips. Many bronze swords have been found in the barrows which formed the resting-places of the dead in those early ages. They are straight, two-edged weapons, some having a hilt of more or less elaborate workmanship cast in one piece with the blade; others having hafts, or tangs, presumably for passing into wooden hilts. These castings were made in stone moulds, a few of which still survive in Japan, though their antiquity is, of course, a matter of conjecture. Arrow-heads are found associated with the swords, but no ornamental castings of any kind have been discovered, and it may reasonably be conjectured that none such existed.

From about the second century before the Christian era, iron began to be applied to purposes hitherto served by bronze, and, at the same time, evidences