Purchased as Silver in Youthful Folly; 2 Asian Zodiac Bars

These 2 are part of a large tranche of similar cast or embossed scroll weights(?). I eagerly laid down good money for them based on gram weight about 30 years ago. Youthful is relative here; I was in my early 50's...but obviously deeply ignorant of Asian silver, an' much too trusting of the seller. Mea Culpa.

They are ~7 13/16" long by ~1 5/16" wide, ~3/16" thick at their ends; weight is ~212 grams each. One seems to have a dragon at the RH end, the other looks to have a mythical beast resembling a stag...I'm assuming zodiac creatures.

Their faces have an apparently similar theme which at first glance is reminiscent of a SE Asian script...but on closer examination, the lower bar (pic 1) has been mirrored along a vertical central line. The upper one shows fewer 'characters', but may be similarly distorted without mirroring...I simply cannot say it's meant to be meaningful text, it's so ornately foreign.

To add to the anomalous details, their backs are not remotely the same; the dragon shows two apparent landscapes, both with water background, a bridge, buildings an' various people, all female; it seems to be divided by the central tree. The stag shows mountains, water, geometric representations of an apparent stockade or compound within a fence an' beneath 2 lines of characters a grid adjacent more geometric structures. None of these make any coherent sense to me, an' given that they're both fairly heavy plate on a brass core, sold to this gullible person as solid silver, they are quite probably 100% fraudulent in every representation.

I'll be glad to hear your candid opinions of them, as well as comments about my assumptions of their reality.
Thanks for lookin'!

 

Yes, they are scroll weights.

They are very nice though.

Not yours, the seller's.

It looks like a kylin or qilin:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qilin

Those sides look inspired by the decorative friezes on Archaic Chinese bronzes.

 

YES! I should have recognized that; I have a bronze censer of a qilin...Thank you!