The Ancestors of Goguryeo and Baekje on the Korean Peninsula

Because East Asia's farming and nomadic cultures had already spread across the whole temperate zone of Southeast Asia while Europe and the North American continent were going through the ice age, we can easily imagine that culture and civilization developed there tens of thousands of years ahead of any part of the other continents.

Intellect grew quickly; people had more and more to say and many questions to ask, so conversation with neighbors grew lively, which helped human village societies grow quickly into city-states. A city-state had sovereignty centered on the throne, citizens each engaged in their specialized fields, and the territory they owned. Between city-states there was cooperation and competition, and at times friction. Just as children easily adapt to their surroundings as need arises, cooperation and conflict alternated all the more often. It was a time when several city-states, joined in cooperative relations to avoid friction, elected a king and founded a small kingdom.

The phenomenon of Central Asian nomads migrating into the whole of northern India by way of the Ganges basin in the east of India and the Indus basin in the west, conquering and assimilating the native Dravidians or driving them south, began more than 4,000 years ago. It is the phenomenon of the advanced culture and civilization of the temperate zone migrating into the regions of less developed peoples in the tropics; in Africa's Nile basin, too, East Asians moved in and conquered Arabs and Black Africans. At this time in East Asia, too, while inland nomads were invading the coastal farming states, these coastal states dispersed to the coastal regions of the world's many continents, and East Asian culture and civilization were distributed worldwide as well. The metal civilization that came into eastern India from East Asia developed into a culture of cave-temple sculpture. East Asia's metal culture, its religion of the dragon, India's sculptural culture and so on seem to have carried on afterward into the Phoenician culture of Southwest Asia. Later, Babylonian culture, under East Asian influence, seems to have become the foundation of European culture.

Coming to more recent history, this leads to a time when small kingdoms made war on one another and unified, or feudal lords elected an emperor and founded an empire. As for the empires that appeared in East Asia, it is supposed that even before the Xia dynasty there were for a long time states possessing the conditions of empire. The empires revealed so far by historical documents are known as the Xia, Shang, Zhou, Qin, Han, Sui, Tang and so on; but it is supposed that a great Baekje state, which ruled the Korean Peninsula and the land of Wa, and the Liaodong and Shandong Peninsulas, existed before the Baekje of our country's Three Kingdoms period, and that there were coastal empires even before that. The empires of East Asia had already made the Great Wall — a military highway linked over thousands of kilometers, dividing the grasslands from the farmlands — into a great road connecting the Korean Peninsula with Mongolia; they were raising pyramids around Manchuria and Xi'an; and the Grand Canal linking the Yellow River and the Yangtze was nearing completion. Masterpieces of human civilization, dozens of times greater than the pyramids of Egypt in scale and technique, were already nearing completion.

The culture of the Yangtze and Yellow River, where the Xia and Shang dynasties stood, brought about the cultures of Mesopotamia and the Nile; and the cultures of the Minoans, Mycenaeans, Jews, Palestinians and Phoenicians who appeared in the Mediterranean are also a branch of the culture and civilization extending from Southeast Asia to Southwest Asia and the Mediterranean. We can see that the nomadic culture of East Asia, passing through Central Asia, connected to the Scythian culture of Eastern Europe and made great tombs. Before the cultures of Persia and Greece there were the cultures of many East Asian nations, including the Shang dynasty; and even the capacity of Alexander the Great of Greece to conquer Southwest Asia is part of the civilization passed on to Greece from the capacity of East Asia's nomadic states, including the Zhou dynasty, which already ruled what are now Soviet and Chinese territories stretching from East Asia to Eastern Europe.

As for Buddhist culture: under King Dongseong, Baekje occupied the Northern Wei in Shanxi Province, and the Northern Wei halted work on the Buddhist Yungang Grottoes and moved to the Longmen Grottoes at Luoyang, south of the Yellow River. Around this time (494), the Buddhist culture of the Northern Wei was passed on to Baekje at the southern tip of the Korean Peninsula, and later to Silla and Japan.

The Development of Dwellings and the Formation of Cities

Based on the sites excavated so far, the Neolithic age is said to have begun around 8000 BC. Neolithic sites are spread evenly across the whole Korean Peninsula and are found mainly in the basins of large rivers or in coastal areas. The earliest in date is the Gosan-ri site on Jeju Island. The artifacts excavated from Neolithic sites include polished stone tools and bone tools such as fishhooks and needles. And comb-pattern pottery was widely used.

Neolithic inhabitants settled and lived along large rivers or by the sea, where food resources were abundant. Neolithic houses sometimes used caves or were made by laying stones on the floor, but the common form was the pit house, built on coastal hills or flat ground. A pit house was made by digging a round or square pit 4–6 m in diameter to a depth of about 50–60 cm to form the floor, installing the necessary interior features such as a hearth on the floor, and then covering it with a roof — a house with no separate walls, whose rafters were stuck directly into the ground.

Judging from the fact that the floor was either spread with clay or left without any treatment, it was probably covered with grass or animal hides; the roof was made by resting rafters around the pit, burying the other end of each rafter at the center to form the height, and then covering it with dry grasses such as branches or reeds, making it conical or pyramidal. Steps or slopes were made so that water would not flow in even when it rained. There were also storage facilities made by burying pottery.

Neolithic people used the interior of the house appropriately, for many purposes. They seem to have built houses usually 18 ㎡ in size and lived together in family units of four to five people on average. (The picture below was taken from Google.)

Paleolithic people caught and ate animals and fish, and also gathered and ate the fruits and roots of plants. Moving with the seasons, they built simple huts in caves or by rivers; living by rivers or the sea, people caught fish or gathered shellfish with bone fishhooks and nets, and hunted with stone spears, stone arrows and so on. Meanwhile, living by gathering and eating the fruits and roots of plants, they gradually came to farm and raise livestock, and settled life grew ever longer.

The Neolithic people who began agricultural life broke the ground with stone hoes, grew foxtail millet, barnyard millet and the like, harvested with stone sickles and bone sickles, and ground grain on stone querns to make food. They also spun thread with spindle whorls and made clothes with bone needles. Clans gathered to form villages, and further, several clans gathered to form a tribe. That is, unlike Paleolithic people, they began to lead a settled life.

At the Neolithic wetland and shell-mound site at Bibong-ri, Bugok-myeon, Changnyeong County, South Gyeongsang Province, an 8,000-year-old dugout boat — the oldest found on the Korean Peninsula — was unearthed. It is estimated to have been over 4 m long, and it was said that, considering the circumstances of the time when metal tools such as iron or bronze had not yet been invented, it bears clear traces of very meticulous working. It was revealed that to make the boat, people of the time burned the log here and there, carved it out with sharp stone tools such as stone adzes, and then smoothed the surface with tools such as grinding stones. As if to prove this, charring marks (焦痕), traces of working by fire, were found all over the boat.

People tied bamboo or logs together, floated them on the water to make boats, and went fishing. In the fishing on the Li River at Guilin in China, the fisherman unties the cord tied to the cormorant's leg and sends it into the water. The released cormorant dives into the water in an instant, and a moment later bursts up out of the water, rushes to the fisherman, thrusts out its beak and bows its head, and the fisherman pulls out of the cormorant's mouth a big fish that looks more than a hand-span long.

It is said they fish this way: they starve the cormorant for several days to make it hungry, tie its neck with a cord so it cannot swallow large fish, and release it on the river; the hungry cormorant dives frantically into the water and in an instant catches a fish and tries to swallow it, but because of the cord around its neck it cannot get it down into its stomach, so it rushes to its master begging to have it taken out, and the master pulls the fish out. This is the traditional cormorant fishing method of the Guilin region. Because such bamboo boats and fishing methods can also be seen in Japan, I suppose they are a glimpse of a way of life from high antiquity that existed in Korea too but has now disappeared. (Photo below, as shown on Google)

Clan society growing into a village and piling up stone walls around it to protect the village was the first form of a small city. In these societies an experienced tribal chief directed productive activities such as farming and hunting. As the village grew larger, it grew into a feudal state, and the city-state and the status of king took shape. The stone walls became fortress walls, and the king's residence grew into a palace-city. There, free people other than slaves conducted politics, and the nobles' general assemblies, politics, social life, trade and so on unfolded. This was the political form that appeared in the transition from primitive society to the ancient state.

Into the vast regions of conquered peoples, the king sent sons of the royal house, members of the clan and people from allied tribes, enfeoffing and stationing them as feudal lords, to watch over the commoners and to guard against rebellions by surrounding foreign peoples. In such a feudal system of granting fiefs to feudal lords, the idea of royal land — that the emperor owns all the land and people under heaven — was naturally the premise. The relationship of the feudal lords was based on a lineage system in which clan organization within the original tribal society had developed and changed into an organized system, founded on the blood relationship of the feudal lords as the lesser lineage (小宗) to the royal house as the great lineage (大宗). The growth of this system led to the birth in East Asia of the first empire in world history, and it was the driving force of urban growth, applied consistently throughout.