Pyramid Building Grew Out of Dolmen Culture

Dolmen Culture

In his book The Prehistory of the Indo-Malaysian Archipelago (1985), Peter Bellwood explains that these people beat tree bark into fiber, wove it into clothing, and made paper; that they hunted with blowguns, blowing poison darts through lengths of bamboo to strike animals; that they raised huge boulders and held rites before them; and that the dolmen — a tomb made by standing up three huge rocks hauled from afar and laying a flat rock on top — spread from there to the island of Taiwan, the Yellow Sea coast, the whole Korean Peninsula, and even Japan. William Solheim says these people were a seafaring people (Oceanian) who built wooden boats and sailed the seas 7,000 years ago.

Hauling giant rocks from far away and setting them up at sacred sites was their form of religion, a custom that began between 60,000 and 10,000 years ago in the densely populated areas of Southeast Asia, where there was leadership and labor to be had. I believe that these seafaring megalith builders, before the great thaw, followed the coastlines through southern India, Southwest Asia, and the Mediterranean to reach the coasts of Spain and Britain, leaving megalithic remains along the way. Britain's Stonehenge is said to have been raised between 3,000 and 6,000 years ago by a foreign people who had migrated there 10,000 years ago. They brought 30 megaliths from a great distance by land and by sea and stood them up, laid 30 flat stones on top, and within the circle placed five pairs of megaliths facing the sun.

In Korea, Lee Young-mun published The Story of Dolmens (고인돌 이야기), and the KNN broadcasting network produced a documentary titled The Dolmen Route. Bringing together these "footprints of the dolmen," I describe the history of the dolmen as follows. The photos below were taken from Google.

After the Paleolithic age of sun worship, ancestor religion and celestial religion appeared, and in the late Neolithic — from about 8,000 years ago until the Iron Age of 3,000 years ago — people lived a Bronze Age life using plain (undecorated) pottery. The early southern-style custom was to drag natural megaliths from far away, lay them flat as a cover over an ancestor's grave, and hold rites there; later the stones were stood upright, developing into standing-stone tombs. Finally the northern style appeared, in which a flat roof stone was laid across two standing stones to make a dolmen. This whole evolutionary process of the dolmen can be seen only on the Korean Peninsula.

According to the commentary of Yun Bok-hyeon, an editorial writer for the Kukmin Ilbo, when the sun-worshipping, farming seafaring people spread dolmen culture to every part of the world along the sea routes, they seem to have thought of the rock as a boat floating on water. Before there was a compass, they would have found east and west by watching where the sun rose and set, and at night found their direction by the North Star and the Big Dipper. By day they seem to have told the time from the position of shadows, and by night from the position of the Big Dipper around the North Star.

The ancients thought that just as there was a royal palace on earth, there was a Dragon Palace under the sea and a Heavenly Palace in the sky; in the Heavenly Palace, the North Star was the king and the seven stars of the Big Dipper were his seven ministers. So they began to regard "7" as the holiest of numbers. The meaning of "7" came to be applied in many ways in the celestial religion of East Asia. That East Asian custom was carried into the Buddhism of the Ganges in India, passed beyond the Indus to Southwest Asia, and was later applied to Christian doctrine as well, appearing some 430 times in the Bible. Today the sacred number "7" is used in every religion. (The photo below shows a rock preserving cup-marks carved in the pattern of the Big Dipper.)

As the chart below shows, dividing the year into twelve parts gives twelve months, and dividing the day into twelve parts and then doubling them gives 24 hours. The East Asian Twelve Earthly Branches (十二支) are the twelve characters that come second in the sexagenary cycle used in the calendar system. The Ten Stems that come first are said to signify heaven and are called the Heavenly Stems, while the twelve branches are said to signify earth and are called the Earthly Branches (地支). The twelve branches are 子 (ja), 丑 (chuk), 寅 (in), 卯 (myo), 辰 (jin), 巳 (sa), 午 (o), 未 (mi), 申 (sin), 酉 (yu), 戌 (sul), and 亥 (hae). Divided into zodiac animals, they are the rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, sheep, monkey, rooster, dog, and pig. Thus a twelve-part cycle was established. Every sign of the East Asian zodiac is an animal. The Western zodiac, even though the word "zodiac" itself carries the meaning of animals, includes several signs that are not animals. It seems the East Asian zodiac was altered on its way to Europe.

The Evolution and Distribution of Pyramids

Just as humanity's past is hidden in a mother's womb, the evolution of the pyramid seems to be hidden in East Asian culture. Since the pyramid is a building, I will try to explain it from an architect's point of view. The people who began building pyramids were a people with the custom of raising mounds and setting up dolmens. These Neolithic people lived at the southern tip of the Korean Peninsula in East Asia, and from 50,000 years ago they were the first modern humans to begin a disciplined life of surviving the winter. Pyramids require religious labor resting on the science, technology, and organizing power that could hardly arise in the tropics. They are the result of a long history of growth, not something that could appear suddenly. The stone-cist burial chambers placed inside pyramids resemble the structure of dolmens, which shows that the pyramid is a child born of the dolmen.

In 1982, dozens of jade objects, including jade earrings, were excavated at Xinglongwa village in Chifeng. They were identified as relics from around 6200 BC and introduced as the Xinglongwa culture; they are the same as those unearthed from the shell mound at Munam-ri in Goseong County, Gangwon Province, Korea. The jade is said to be of the same quality as the jade deposits of the Xiuyan area on the Yalu River. The Chahai, Fuhe, and Zhaobaogou cultures excavated around the Liao River came together in the world-famous Hongshan culture (4500–3000 BC), which represents the Liao River civilization.

The hallmarks of the Hongshan culture include refined pottery, jade brought from distant Baekdusan and carved with metal tools, and large rocks split to the needed size with metal tools and dragged great distances to build stepped stone-mound pyramids, in which bodies were laid to rest in small, finely made stone coffins. Hongshan jade carving came 1,000 years before the Yellow River civilization, and its stepped stone pyramids came 2,000 years before Egypt's.

A pyramid is a great tomb built of stone. It comes from the union of two elements. The first is a religious habit, growing out of the custom of ancestor worship, of preserving the bodies of ancestors or oneself forever in the belief in eternal life. The second is the technique of handling large stones and the management of the devoted labor of the masses. The Confucian attitudes of East Asia — filial piety toward parents and loyalty to the king — have roots in the moral life of East Asia long before Confucius, and it was on the basis of this, together with the astronomical knowledge of yin-yang and the Five Elements (陰陽五行) and the science of construction technology, that the enormous stone-mound pyramids could be raised. The thousands of stepped pyramid remains scattered widely around Jilin along the Yalu River and on the outskirts of Xi'an, including the Tomb of the General (將軍塚) of Goguryeo, seem to prove that this is the homeland of the pyramid. One can imagine that the pyramids of Africa and South America, which did not pass through an evolutionary process within tens of thousands of years of living custom, are a culture that was imported from outside.

We can understand that even before that, just as East Asian farmers built their thatched-roof houses, they made straw boats (boats woven from bamboo and dried plant stems) and traveled to every continent of the world.

The cluster of pyramids on the outskirts of Xi'an (in the Google photo below), first made known to the world in 1945 by an American transport pilot, is said not to have drawn the interest of Chinese archaeologists until 1963. Together with the host of pyramids around Jilin Province in Manchuria, it is the world's largest concentration of pyramids, numbering in the thousands. According to Korea-China Archaeological Studies (1994, a translation; the original is Wang Zhongshu, "An Outline of Ancient Chinese Tombs" [中國古代墓葬槪說], Kaogu [考古], no. 5, pp. 449–458), many tombs of the Warring States period (春秋戰國時代, 770–221 BC) have so-called square-pyramidal (方錐形) mounds, that is, mounds in the shape of a four-sided pyramid. It has also been shown that the tombs around Xi'an are royal tombs of the Western Han period. Some of them are in a style called truncated square-pyramidal (截頭方錐形).

Because relics of the Dongyi people from before 3,000 BC were excavated from among these pyramids (photo below), China's Xinhua News Agency at the time even reported that "Chinese civilization was formed by adopting the civilization of the Dongyi, the people of Gojoseon." In those days the Han Chinese farmed along the Yellow River, and the Mongols were not even in their field of view. The Khitan, Wuhuan, and Jurchen were fully nomadic and far removed from settled civilization.

The early form is stepped, each tier lower than the one below as it rises, like the Tomb of the General (將軍塚) of Goguryeo in Manchuria. It has the same form as Goguryeo tombs. Scholars call this the inset-stacking method. It is a Goguryeo building technique not found in China or Japan. No scholar disputes this point. Banpo (Banpocun), in the outskirts of Xi'an, is also an ancient site of the Yangshao culture where a great many relics from 7,000 years ago have been unearthed.

The German author Hartwig Hausdorf presented a book titled Das chinesische Roswell (German): UFO Encounters in the Far East from Ancient Times to the Present. Many of the photos in it are boldly stamped "Photo by Hartwig Hausdorf." Those photos are of the pyramids near Xi'an. The Chinese government expelled him. It is not a well-grounded rumor, but there is a plausible story. It is said to be the testimony, given before his death, of the late Zhang Wenqiu (張汶邱), a Chinese excavation expert who took part in digging the pyramids in the Xi'an area:

"In April 1963, our team of 36 archaeological excavators received orders from the authorities to stand by, because we were to investigate a site believed to be another tomb of Qin Shi Huang. Before we set out, the head of the survey told us members that this site was extremely important and that we must take special care never to leak anything about the investigation or excavation to outsiders. We traveled by train, bus, and truck and arrived after two days at our destination, a broad plain, and out the window there were many huge pyramids, like the pyramids of Egypt. Every one of us cried out in amazement when we arrived. So there were pyramids like this in our China too! — joy and wonder all mixed together. We began excavating this tremendous site, which we took to be another of Qin Shi Huang, the first to unify China.

"Our survey group was divided into four teams, and over the next three days we chose the three central pyramids, in order of size, and began digging. All three were of nearly the same form, but the one in the middle was more magnificent than the two on either side. When we went in through the underground entrance of the huge brick pyramid, the stone chambers were divided into about three to five levels, and the farther we went into the upper spaces, the more we found: murals splendidly painted with horses and chariots, pictures, many kinds of writing, some 6,200 sculptures and carvings; some 1,500 household implements such as millstones, mortars, cauldrons, and bowls; some 400 food items such as animal bones; some 7,800 grave goods including bronze swords, bows, gold crowns, knives, spears, and ornaments; 14 bodies, including the one lying exactly at the center with its hair in a topknot (the hair custom of East Asians); and some 3,000 guardian figures — all found in great quantity.

"Faced with such enormous relics and remains, which none of us had ever seen before, we all felt as if bewitched, as though we were excavating the world of aliens, the tomb of aliens. My job was to check the relics and draw up the inventory, and by the third day of work about seventy percent had been identified and listed. That afternoon, when I gave an interim report to the professor who was then head of the excavation, he let out a great sigh and said, 'This site is not a relic of our Yellow River people but of the Joseon people. It is Joseon civilization from before Chinese history! This is serious. We must first report to the authorities and then receive new instructions, so stop all the digging, leave all the relics where they are, and let's get out of here for today!' So we all stopped digging, came out, and stayed in our lodgings.

"That night, along with the halt to the excavation, an order to withdraw came down. All of us on the team found it strange, but we soon understood it was because the site was not ours. Before leaving, each of us wrote and submitted to the local public-security officers, in our lodgings, a pledge to keep secret what had happened there. After we returned, I never again heard any news about those pyramids. That was the last of those pyramids for me, and it is all I know." That is the story that circulates.

Because the Qin state was located in the northwest of China, Han Chinese historians seem to have been thrown into confusion for the first time, finding themselves in the position of treating the world's first empire, the Qin, and its First Emperor as barbarians — that is, as Xiongnu. It seems that when the Chinese government, excavating from the 1960s on, unearthed relics of the Dongyi (Gojoseon and Goguryeo), it halted the excavations and began the Northeast Project, launching first of all a policy of absorbing them into Chinese history. The Northeast Project is an effort to include in China the Qin, the first unified state of East Asia. Excavation of the tomb of the First Emperor, a Dongyi, remains halted to this day. The realm ruled by the Qin is thought to have been a great empire reaching as far as present-day Kazakhstan.

In his 2003 book Voyages of the Pyramid Builders (photo below), Robert M. Schoch suggests that the Maya culture of Central America was an extension of the culture of the Shang dynasty of East Asia, and thereby suggests that the source of the world's pyramid-building technology may lie in East Asia. Gavin Menzies, a former Royal Navy captain, argued from evidence in his 2003 book that the Ming navy visited the Americas in 1421 and possessed a map of the world's oceans. In Lost Discoveries, published in 2002, Dick Teresi explains, while arguing that the roots of modern science began in Babylonia and reached the Maya, that East Asia had possessed most technologies and sciences far earlier.

Among the kings and nobles who built the pyramids along the Nile in Africa, we can see East Asian faces. Khufu (Gobu), owner of the largest pyramid, was small of build with an East Asian look. Hemiunu, the architect who worked with him, also had the high cheekbones of an East Asian face, and their descendants have the beautiful features typical of mixed-race people. Many bore four-syllable names of the kind given in East Asia — the same phenomenon as names like Yeon Gaesomun and Eulji Mundeok in our own Goguryeo, and the names of Native North Americans. Among the furnishings used by African nobles are paintings and carvings that seem to show Arabs and Black natives as slaves, and the forms of their jade, ivory, and lacquered wood resemble East Asian products.

The Sanxingdui culture, excavated in 1986 in Chengdu in southwestern China, has led to the understanding that the clans of Shu, which lay between the Liaodong Peninsula and the Shang, migrated to Central Asia around the time of the Zhou conquest, carrying with them a culture and civilization that produced huge bronze masks, bronze human statues, thin gold-leaf objects, and countless jade objects. These cultures share commonalities with Egyptian and Greek culture, and later with Persian culture as well.

From the Neolithic period on, in the south of the Korean Peninsula, people dug reservoirs for farming and piled up the great quantities of earth into small hills. Sometimes these became altars for offering rites to heaven, and sometimes large tombs (mounds), and so many still remain at the southern tip of the peninsula; I have already explained that this culture connects to the Mississippi River basin in North America. The pyramid began with the tomb built as a great mountain of earth. The large turf-covered ancient tombs scattered around Osaka and Nara in Japan are none other than the tombs of the Buyeo people who migrated to Japan from Baekje in the south of the Korean Peninsula. The largest of these is known as the tomb of Emperor Nintoku (仁德王). Today only a single moat surrounds it, but originally there were three, with a total length of about 1,000 meters. That scale reaches half that of the Egyptian pyramids.

In the same place, the southern tip of the Korean Peninsula, the oldest and greatest number of dolmens in the world are gathered. The roughly 40,000 dolmens around the Korean Peninsula amount to half of all the dolmens scattered along the world's coasts. In the Neolithic, as metal tools produced from coal fires began to split natural stone into rectangular blocks in Manchuria, thousands of stepped pyramids began to rise around Jilin Province in Manchuria and on the outskirts of Xi'an.

We can see that in the Neolithic culture of East Asia, thousands of years of metal culture and the social competition of high population density brought by agricultural development made it the cradle of human culture and civilization. Around the Korean Peninsula there are countless remains of the pyramid's evolution, passing through earthen mounds and the megalithic culture of dolmens. The pyramids that appeared on the African and South American continents are a sudden mutation, and their process of growth cannot be found. The highly refined furniture and craft culture that appeared there only for a time also suggests that its roots lay not in Africa or Central and South America but in East Asia. Here in East Asia, where the nomadic life of Manchuria and the farming life of the south joined together, lie the roots from which culture and civilization grew earliest.

The Aztec culture of Mexico built the Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon, similar in size to the Egyptian pyramids. In front of the Pyramid of the Moon a festival avenue stretches two miles long, and there the living, writhing dragon of East Asia is carved. If the pyramid culture of East Asia could reach across the Pacific, it is not hard to imagine it reaching the Mediterranean by land and sea routes. The process by which the pyramid was conceived over thousands or tens of thousands of years and born through labor pains can be seen around the Korean Peninsula, but not in Africa or Southwest Asia, nor on the North or South American continents.

The dense population on the Korean Peninsula and the Yellow Sea coast since the Neolithic fused the customs of large earthen tombs (ancient mounds) and dolmen (standing-stone) tombs, and came to build large stone tombs (stone-mound tombs) in the form of stepped pyramids in the Yalu River basin of the Liaodong Peninsula and near Xi'an. Mound culture and standing-stone culture, having evolved through tens of thousands of years of the Stone Age, evolved over thousands more years into the stepped pyramid. The thousands of stone-mound tomb remains in Jilin in Manchuria and in the surrounding regions, including the outskirts of Xi'an in the northwestern interior, together with the Goguryeo tomb groups, are a world heritage of East Asian culture.

Culture and civilization pass from places of high population density to places of low density. There are four means by which they travel great distances across the world. The first is the great migration of a clan or people, accomplished over a long period. The second is through commercial links over land or sea — as when the cotton and silk of Southeast Asia reached Southwest Asia and Europe, or when the Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism of East Asia were passed on to Southwest Asia as Christianity or Islam. The third is diffusion through sudden political change: an invader carrying culture and civilization into the invaded region, or absorbing the local culture; this happens over relatively short distances between neighboring regions. The fourth is when a group of the political elite become desperate fugitives and carry their followers, their knowledge, and their way of life to the place where they take refuge. When a new ruler intends to wipe out the former ruler and all the nobles who were loyal to him, desperate fugitives are created, vast and meticulous preparations begin, and they go so far that no one can follow.

I imagine that the pyramids that reached Central America were a case of the third kind, and those that reached the Nile a case of the fourth. The Han Chinese living in the Central Plain on the middle Yangtze conquered the many states of the Korean-Peninsula-line seafaring people (the Dongyi) who had lived at the mouth of the river and on the lower Yellow River — Shang, Yin, Shu, Liao, Qin, and others — and established invading states such as the Zhou. At that time, along land and sea routes that were already open, the kings and nobles of the many Dongyi states made the greatest escape in East Asian history so as not to become sacrificial victims or slaves of the Central Asians. According to the records of Sima Qian, when the Shang, at the height of its culture, was invaded by the Zhou of Central Asia, some 250,000 people fled. They had knowledge of the land and sea routes to Mediterranean Africa, and it seems they could make a desperate escape overland to North America and by the equatorial sea route to South America.

The enormous structures of the pyramids built 3,000 years ago are all the more astonishing because they are buildings possible only through advanced science and the organized management of vast labor on a religious foundation. Around that same time, many stepped pyramids were built in Peru on the Pacific coast of South America, and a little later the Pyramids of the Sun and Moon appeared in Central America. When we consider that the Korean Peninsula and Yellow Sea coast had high population density from the Neolithic onward, along with a fine religious culture and metal civilization, and the possibility that these people were linked to South America and Africa through ocean voyages using the compass, we come to see world history with new eyes.

China's Northeast Project

In 1963, Chinese archaeologists excavated a huge pyramid on the outskirts of Xi'an said to be the tomb of the First Emperor of Qin. The excavated relics were not from the First Emperor's tomb. They realized they were relics of Gojoseon, not of the Yellow River civilization. Radiocarbon dating attempted in 1973 revealed that the relics were thousands of years older than the First Emperor. Until then, no one knew that the regional culture north of the Great Wall — known as the land of the Dongyi or the Huns, barbarians without culture — had existed earlier and more splendidly than China's Yellow River civilization. Once this was known, all excavation and scholarly research in the whole area, including the First Emperor's tomb, was forbidden, and the Northeast Project policy was announced.

The Chinese public-security authorities have closed off and forbidden access to every historical site that is a point of dispute with the history of the Korean people. They have declared that the histories of the 56 minority peoples within China's present territory are Chinese history, breaking away from the limited historical view the Han Chinese had kept until now, and they have issued school textbooks stating that the culture of the Dongyi (Gojoseon, Goguryeo, Balhae), which preceded China, is also Chinese culture, beginning with education in the schools. It is the same kind of political education as Japan issuing textbooks that claim Dokdo, Korean territory, as Japanese territory and using them in its schools.

According to the Korean Wikipedia, the Northeast Project (東北工程) includes research carried out by the Center for Borderland History and Geography (邊疆史地硏究中心) from early 2002 to early 2004, and from 2007 to the present, concerning the past history of the three northeastern provinces of China (Heilongjiang, Jilin, and Liaoning) and the resulting present and future situation. Its official name is the Serial Research Project on the History and Current State of the Northeast Borderland (東北邊疆歷史與現狀系列硏究工程). The Northeast Project is a national undertaking under the official policy of the government of the People's Republic of China, and it is said to be based on the theory of a unified multi-ethnic state.

The Northeast Project begins with the Hongshan culture beyond the Great Wall and the tomb of the First Emperor at Xi'an. The Hongshan culture was discovered in 1908 by the Japanese archaeologist Torii Ryūzō (鳥居龍蔵), and large-scale surveys were carried out in 1935 by Hamada Kōsaku (濱田耕作), Mizuno Seiichi (水野清一), and others. After the war, excavations followed one after another in various places. The culture was originally called "Hongshanhou" (紅山後) in 1954 because it lay behind Hongshan (紅山), and gradually, in commemoration of Hongshanhou, it came to be named the "Hongshan culture." In 1984 a clay face of a goddess was unearthed. From the Goddess Temple (女神庙) at Niuheliang (牛河梁) in Chaoyang (朝阳市), Liaoning Province, it was designated a first-class Chinese historical relic, is held by the Liaoning Provincial Institute of Archaeology (辽宁省考古研究所), and in 2002 was named one of 64 cultural relics prohibited from leaving the country for exhibition.

The First Emperor's tomb area at Xi'an is also Dongyi culture, so excavation has been halted and the Northeast Project hurried along. Proceeding together with it is the Liao River Project (遼河工程), one of the projects put forward concerning the history and current state of the Liao River region in the northeast of the People's Republic of China; its official name, since June 2003, is the "Chinese Civilization Origins Project" (中華文明探源工程), also called the root-seeking movement. The People's Republic of China has defined the Liao River civilization, earlier than the Yellow River civilization (黃河文明), as the root of Chinese civilization, and has defined the long history of East Asia, rooted in the history of the Dongyi, as follows. (Wikipedia has compiled the Neolithic/Bronze Age cultures of the Liaoning region and the excavations of major sites into the following record from 10,000 years ago to the present.)

8000–7000 BC, Neolithic (新石器時代): Xinle culture site (settled villages of matrilineal clans), 新樂文化 (Xinle), northern Shenyang, Liaoning Province.

7000–6500 BC, Neolithic: Xiaohexi culture site, 小河西文化, Aohan Banner, Chifeng, Inner Mongolia.
6200–5200 BC, Neolithic: Xinglongwa culture site, 興隆洼文化 (Xinglongwa), Aohan Banner, Chifeng, Inner Mongolia.

6000–5200 BC, Neolithic: Chahai culture site, 査海文化, the Chahai area on the Inner Mongolian border.

5200–5000 BC, Neolithic: Fuhe culture site, 富河文化, Fuhe basin, Aohan Banner, Chifeng, Inner Mongolia.

5000–4400 BC, Neolithic: Zhaobaogou culture site, 趙宝溝文化 (Zhaobaogou), Luan River valley in Inner Mongolia and northern Hebei Province.

4500–3000 BC, Neolithic: Hongshan culture site, 紅山文化 (Hongshan), Inner Mongolia, Liaodong, and Hebei.

3000–2000 BC, Chalcolithic (銅石倂用時代): Xiaoheyan culture site, 小河沿文化, Xiaoheyan basin, Aohan Banner, Chifeng, Inner Mongolia.

2000–1500 BC, Early Bronze Age: Lower Xiajiadian culture site, 夏家店下層文化, Mengke River (孟克河) basin, Aohan Banner, Chifeng, Inner Mongolia.

The Qing, the longest-lasting dynasty in Chinese history and its last empire, was also a state of the Manchu people founded by Nurhaci, who grew up by Baekdusan on the Korean Peninsula. China calls the mountain Changbaishan and treats it as a sacred place; bordering the Korean Peninsula, its southern side is Baekdusan and its northern side Changbaishan. Chinese archaeology already acknowledges that the culture of a people who spoke the language of the Korean Peninsula developed thousands of years before the Yellow River civilization, but it is reluctant to announce to the outside world that the Yellow River civilization followed in the footsteps of the Manchurian civilization. Before any such announcement, it is creating an environment in which that culture is claimed from the start as Chinese culture and Chinese history.