Chapter 5: The Beginning of the Silk Road and the Great Wall

5. The Beginning of the Silk Road and the Great Wall

The world map of human genetic lineages published in 2008 is backed up by archaeological excavation data on humankind gathered well before its publication. Archaeological digs in Australia reveal traces of human habitation from 50,000 years ago, and the North American continent shows traces of human habitation from 40,000 years ago. As the maritime peoples of East Asia adapted and changed into inland peoples, modern humans migrated from the Korean Peninsula into Manchuria, Mongolia, and Tibet beginning 50,000 years ago. The evidence then shows that around 35,000 years ago the modern humans of Asia dispersed across Eurasia. The sea route from Africa to East Asia had already been opened, and routes began to open for migration from East Asia into the sparsely populated western regions of the Asian interior. As population density in East Asia began to rise with the development of agriculture, its power began to expand westward. Because it had developed and possessed the passageways across the Eurasian continent, East Asia began to dominate the Eurasian continent.

Most of Europe, northern Siberia, and the northern part of North America were first opened to human habitation around 20,000 years ago, when the warming climate cleared away the glaciers. The coastal passage that began on the already-opened Korean Peninsula and connected to the Mediterranean began to grow busy. From that time the people of East Asia pioneered the inland Silk Road and advanced from Manchuria, Mongolia, and Tibet as far as Turkey, Hungary, and Finland. Around the turn of the Common Era the Huns kept migrating into western Europe and pressed upon Rome, and a thousand years later Genghis Khan possessed the passageways by which to rule the world; thus East Asia has dominated the Eurasian continent. The Great Wall, begun in East Asia's Warring States period, also served as a transportation corridor linking the eastern regions to the western regions.

5.1 The Silk Road

The road running from the Korean Peninsula through Beijing, Xi'an, and Chengdu to Tibet was the passage by which the human lineage group M174 linked the Korean Peninsula and Tibet, and it was the shortcut connecting eastern India and East Asia. The road that led from eastern India along the Ganges and Indus rivers to the Gandhara region and Mesopotamia, and at last to the Mediterranean, was the inland passage of the maritime peoples—the oldest route in the world linking East Asia and the Mediterranean.

If, 2,000 years ago, the skills of carving giant dragons and raising pyramids in East Asia could travel along the coastline all the way to Central America, then we can imagine that there was also the capability for coastal travel from East Asia to Southwest Asia. According to the Book of Han, Treatise on Geography (漢書.地理志), around the first century BC, in the time of China's Han dynasty, there was a trade route that began in northwestern China and passed through Central Asia to reach Europe overland, and at the same time there was also a maritime trade route. This route, it says, began in what is now Xuwen County in Guangdong Province, and after about five months of sailing, and continued sailing beyond that, reached Thailand, Myanmar, India, and Sri Lanka. Goods such as Chinese silk and spices were carried along this route all the way to Europe and Africa.

The Silk Road was the road by which East Asians moved to the Mediterranean beginning 30,000 years ago, and it became the great highway crossing the continent from the Korean Peninsula at its eastern end all the way to Europe. It was the front-yard road by which the people of East Asia advanced to the western part of the Asian continent. As the Huns moved westward, a new tribe was born on the Mongolian side, and the name of that tribe was the "Dolgwol" (Göktürks). These Göktürks came south and founded a nation that became today's Turkey, and this is the reason Turkey is called a brother nation to us, the Korean people. Turkish history, too, says, "We are the Asena people (the Asadal people: the people of the land of light, the sun people)." The Huns, mostly moving westward, founded the nations of "Hungary," "Bulgaria," and "Finland," and as they kept pressing westward, it seems this set off the great migration of the "Germanic peoples."

Even looking at the history of China, where 56 ethnic groups live together, apart from the Song dynasty most of it is a history of empires in which northern peoples held power, and the Great Wall itself is a border line where northern peoples fought one another. That the Great Wall and the Silk Road began around the Korean Peninsula—the most densely populated area of East Asia—and stretched westward shows that this was the starting point of East Asian history, which began 50,000 years ago.

Just as the Great Wall begins on the Korean Peninsula, so too the land and sea routes of the Silk Road connecting East Asia and the Mediterranean begin on the Korean Peninsula. It is the road by which East Asians migrated into the lands of Europe from about 20,000 years ago, when the European climate warmed and the glaciers began to melt. The appearance and customs of Italians and Eastern Europeans differ in look and character from those of the blond, blue-eyed Western Europeans. It was the road by which the Huns reached Europe, and the back road by which the Mongols reached Europe and Southwest Asia. Only when Zhang Qian (張騫, d. 114 BC) of the Former Han opened the road across the Pamir Plateau to the Greater Yuezhi in 138–126 BC was a complete road finally made. From AD 700, the administration of the Silk Road, as East Asia's transportation network, built and maintained a central organization to guarantee the security of postal delivery and customs clearance of goods, and to collect taxes. It set up and managed lodging facilities so that traders in rice, spices, silk, tea, and the like could travel safely.

The Silk Road is the ancient East–West trade route by land or by sea. The name itself comes from the fact that the term "silk road" originally referred to Chinese silk flowing to the Roman Empire. But throughout history the Silk Road was also a passage through which culture circulated. The Silk Road had long been thought of simply as a transverse axis linking East and West, but according to recent research it is seen as one vast transportation network reaching in all directions—north, south, east, and west—including many north–south routes, and the concept of the Silk Road has broadened accordingly. The Silk Road developed into a worldwide, net-like network of routes composed of three main trunk lines, five major branch lines, and tens of thousands of paths.

The Steppe Route crosses the northern grasslands of Eurasia from east to west: beginning on the Korean Peninsula, it passes through the North China region of China and along the Orkhon River at the northern edge of Mongolia's Gobi Desert to reach Kazakhstan and the Dzungarian Basin south of the Altai Mountains. It continues to the shores of the Aral Sea, the Caspian Sea in southern Russia, the northeastern side of the Black Sea, and the southern end of the Baltic Sea. It is thought that the earliest exchange between civilizations began 10,000 years ago, when East Asian spices and light silk fabrics spread widely along this steppe route through the northern Eurasian grasslands. Around 4000–3000 BC, it seems, East Asian Bronze Age culture and stone-building techniques were transmitted along this road, and around 1000 BC Iron Age culture spread along it as well.

The Oasis Route refers to the road stretching east–west that links the oases dotted across the arid zones (deserts) and semi-deserts of Central Asia. An oasis is exactly the kind of place, here and there in deserts and other arid zones, where water always collects, trees grow, and people can live. Oases were not only the homes of desert dwellers but also centers of trade, where goods and culture gathered and were distributed and where transportation developed.

The Oasis Route, lying at the very heart of the Silk Road, played the most important role. Before historical times the Steppe Route was much used, but afterward the Oasis Route became the main passage for East–West exchange. Records tell us that from 10,000 years ago fairly well-developed transportation routes had already been made in the East Asian region, and that the Pamir Plateau stood as an obstacle until Zhang Qian (張騫, d. 114 BC) of the Former Han opened the road across the Pamirs to the Greater Yuezhi in 138–126 BC, at last making a complete road.

The Sanxingdui site, excavated in 1986 to the world's astonishment, lay in the area of Chengdu in Sichuan Province, and its giant bronze masks and statues, along with its bronze sculptures of trees and birds, fully contained characteristics linking East Asian culture, Indian culture, and Mediterranean culture. These people, who had originally migrated from the state of Shu in the Liaodong region, belonged to the family of Korean Peninsula culture: they built half-moon-shaped mounds and dug embankments to collect water and control it; they show the yin-yang and the Five Elements (陰陽五行) thought seen in Goguryeo culture; and their faces have eyes turned up at both outer corners and high cheekbones.

A four-legged dragon appears on the east side of the tree, and nine birds symbolize the south, showing the meanings of water and sunlight. Some masks have protruding eyes, giving them the sight of a thousand li, and the eyes of a four-legged dragon with outspread wings also project far forward—a distinctive feature in which we could see common ground with Egyptian culture's emphasis on the eyes, its custom of covering the dead with masks, and various other artistic expressions. We can imagine that, in their way of life, they used birds to catch fish, and this custom can still be seen in Japan and in Guilin, China.

Through the Han, Tang, and Song dynasties, the groups who used this passage were warriors called Sogdians, and they received the patronage of the royal families of the countries they passed through. The oxen, horses, and camels they used for transport wore wooden or iron bells that rang, shaped like the moktak [wooden fish-shaped percussion instrument] of a Buddhist temple. During the Tang dynasty, 4,000 foreign envoys from all over the world visited Chang'an (Xi'an); many of them stayed on in China, and their tombs were excavated in 1999.

Qin Shi Huang founded the Qin dynasty (259 BC–210), the world's first empire to unify East Asia, and made his capital at Xi'an. The culture of Xi'an, located at the center of the Silk Road, carried its momentum along the Silk Road to the Italian peninsula, and 200 years later the Roman Empire was born. This can be called a good example proving that it was the road by which East Asian peoples connected to the Mediterranean and East Asian culture was transmitted to the Mediterranean. That Goguryeo's samjogo (the three-legged black crow) and the customs of yin-yang and the Five Elements appear in Roman culture proves this.

The culture of the Tang dynasty contrasts sharply with that of the Han dynasty. Han culture was a consolidation of East Asian culture that began from the cultures of coastal nations and fused with the nomadic nations. Tang culture was the culture and civilization of a great world empire connected to the Eurasian continent, Africa, and the Americas, after East Asian culture had advanced into India by way of eastern India, and after it had advanced into Europe by way of Southwest Asia and the Mediterranean. After the Tang held power for 300 years, in East Asia the Jin dynasty ruled by the Manchu people grew in the north, and the Yangtze River culture of the Song dynasty grew in the south. The Mongol state, which had been competing with the Jin in the north, united the peoples of the same bloodline in the Manchurian and Tibetan regions and at last set out on the history of East Asian power conquering the world.

Admiral Zheng He (鄭和), a general and explorer of the Ming dynasty, was a trusted confidant of the Yongle Emperor and is famous for setting out, at the emperor's command, on seven great expeditions to the Southern Seas. He set out on his first expedition in June 1405. According to the History of Ming (明史), 27,800 crew members in all boarded a fleet of 62 ships, including great vessels 44 jang (丈; about 137 meters) long and 18 jang (about 56 meters) wide. Compared with Vasco da Gama's later fleet of three 120-ton ships with 170 crew, and Columbus's fleet of three 250-ton ships with 88 crew, this was an enormous armada combining the navigational knowledge and technology of an advanced East Asian nation.

The fleet, departing from Suzhou (蘇州), passed through Champa and Sumatra and along the sea lanes by Palembang, Malacca, and Ceylon, reaching Calicut in India around the beginning of 1407. Through this voyage the various countries of Southeast Asia that had had no dealings with the Ming came one after another to pay tribute to the Ming. The fourth expedition set out after a somewhat longer interval, in the winter of 1413. This time more preparation was needed, since the intention was to push farther west. After reaching Calicut, the fleet continued sailing west, reaching Hormuz in the Persian Gulf and Aden on the southern Arabian Peninsula. It returned home in July 1415.

The fifth expedition set out in the winter of 1417; the main fleet reached Aden as on the fourth expedition, but a detachment that split off along the way is said to have reached Malindi on the east coast of the African continent. When it returned home in August 1419, it brought back rare animals such as lions, leopards, zebras, and rhinoceroses. Gavin Menzies, a British student of maritime history, argues in his book 1421: The Year China Discovered America that in 1421 Admiral Zheng He crossed the Atlantic, arrived in South America, explored the Pacific coasts of North and South America, and then returned to China following the Pacific's equatorial currents. He says they saw the New World earlier than Columbus in 1492. It seems Chinese navigators already knew the fact that the Earth is round.

Just as the saying goes that Rome fell because it grew drunk on silk, the Silk Road was the lifeline that nursed the birth of Europe. Yet European historians still stubbornly insist that it was the road by which the Roman Empire advanced eastward.

5.2 The Great Wall

Originally the south and north of East Asia were divided by the Yellow River into the domains of farmers and nomads. Later, in the time of ancient China's Qin dynasty (Shi Huang), the Great Wall (萬里長城) began to be built to hold off northern peoples such as the Xiongnu and the Mongols. It is said to have begun as fortifications when the three states of Zhao, Yan, and Qin built long walls during the Warring States period. In 221 BC Qin Shi Huang connected the long walls of Yan and Zhao and extended them farther west to guard against invasion by the northern nomadic peoples. However, because Qin Shi Huang belonged to the Dongyi cultural sphere, the early construction of the Great Wall began from a conflict between Dongyi and Dongyi.

There is a saying: "To see 5,000 years of Chinese history, go to Shanxi (山西)." Shanxi Province, where northern and southern peoples fused, is called "the China within China," and it is the birthplace of Yellow River civilization. For a long time the Yellow River was the boundary between southern and northern peoples; disputes and wars broke out there often, and it is the region where great events of Chinese history took place. It is where the state of Jin (晋), one of the twelve states (列國) of the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods, stood. The nations of nomadic peoples ruled it one after another. The nations of the Han Chinese, the Mongols, the Manchus, and the Hui (a Muslim people connected with Persia) were unified by the Xianbei's Northern Wei (386–534), and in its early years the Northern Wei capital was Datong in northern Shanxi. The Northern Wei later came to rule nearly all of northern China.

During the Tang dynasty (618–907) this region was called Hedong (河東), meaning "east of the Yellow River." Because it was a strategic military point, it was contested by countless foreign peoples. This was because, for the northern peoples to conquer the Chinese mainland, they had to strike Shanxi, just below the Great Wall. Because Shanxi served as a rear-base center at every such upheaval in history, it is called "a treasure house of Chinese history, culture, and art." Shanxi is enclosed by the Yellow River on the south and west, and on the north the Great Wall marks its border with Inner Mongolia. The Ancient City of Pingyao, the Wang Family Compound, the Jinci Temple, the Yungang Grottoes, the Yingxian Wooden Pagoda, the Hanging Temple, and others are found here.

As the place with the most coal mines in China, it secured financial resources early and became China's financial center; with many wealthy people and politicians, it is a region with a high standard of living. Shanxi Province (山西省), known as the starting point of the "Noodle Road," was from the very beginning a region of East Asians who had lived in loess caves for tens of thousands of years. Even today one can often see residents who dig earthen caves and live in them. It is said that as Han Chinese from Central Asia crossed the Yellow River and migrated into Shanxi thousands of years ago, the blood of the two peoples mixed and beautiful women began to be born. China's Four Great Beauties—Xi Shi, Wang Zhaojun, Diaochan, and Yang Guifei—are said to have been born in Shanxi, where the two peoples met.

Of Xi Shi it is said that when she looked down into a well, the swimming fish stopped still; of Wang Zhaojun, that a wild goose in flight, at the sight of the woman's beauty, stopped its wings and fell to the ground. Of Diaochan it is said that the moon, on seeing her, felt ashamed and hid its face; and of Yang Guifei, that the flowers, on seeing her, bowed their heads in shame.

The Great Wall was continually repaired and extended by China's successive dynasties up through the Ming, and it remains to this day as the symbolic monument dividing the south and north of East Asia. Its length on the map is about 2,700 km, but counting the overlapping sections, its total length reaches 6,351 km. After the maritime peoples of East Asia migrated to Manchuria and Mongolia from 50,000 years ago and settled into nomadic life, becoming the inland people of the north, a distance grew between their life and habits and those of the farmers who lived in the south. Just as Baekje and Goguryeo differed on the Korean Peninsula, in China too the conflicts between southern and northern peoples filled Chinese history. Yet most of that history is one of rule by the northern peoples.

From 10,000 years ago, Han Chinese from Central Asia migrated into the economically flourishing northeastern region and mixed with the southern maritime peoples, and their competition with the northern nomadic peoples gave birth to the Great Wall of the Ming dynasty. The existing walls show different building methods depending on their history and location. The parts located in the north are early ones built of earth, and so, unlike the later Great Wall, they were also low. The Great Wall is not only a long barrier-type wall but also a highway for moving armies, and there are also many sections made up of border outposts, bastions, and fortresses. The Great Wall sections set up in places such as southern Liaodong, which were not borders with the northern peoples, are mostly forward-base fortresses rather than true walls.

In the Han period Emperor Wu extended the wall to Wuwei and Jiuquan, and during the Northern and Southern Dynasties period (420–589) the Northern Zhou and Northern Qi built walls on a large scale. After Emperor Yang of Sui repaired the wall and built a new wall at the southern edge of the Ordos, the Jin dynasty built walls on a large scale in the Khingan Mountains to hold off invasions by the Tatars. The Ming's Yongle Emperor and Zhengtong Emperor built a double wall in front of Beijing, and then the Ming's Jiajing Emperor rebuilt the wall extensively; the form completed in the 16th century is the Great Wall we see today.

The history of East Asia is a history of conflict between northern nomads and southern farmers. The relic of that conflict is the Great Wall itself. But as time went by, the line of conflict moved further and further south. In the Northern and Southern Dynasties period (南北朝時代: 420–589), the Southern Dynasties founded by the Han Chinese and the Northern Dynasties founded by nomadic peoples stood opposed until the Sui unified them, and throughout, the Korean Peninsula, while ruling the seas, always kept its ties with the northern peoples. During this period, south of the Yellow River four dynasties—Song (宋), Qi (齊), Liang (梁), and Chen (陳)—rose and fell in turn, and these were called the Southern Dynasties (南朝). Also, combining these with the Wu of the Three Kingdoms period and the Eastern Jin, which likewise had their capital at Jiankang (建康; the new name of Jianye 建業), they are called the Six Dynasties (六朝), and this era is sometimes called the Six Dynasties period, though this is a periodization used mainly in cultural history.

During this era the region south of the Yellow River was greatly developed, and afterward, in the Sui and Tang periods, the Jiangnan region became the economic foundation of all China. In contrast to its political turmoil, the Southern Dynasties saw Buddhist culture and civilization flourish, and an aristocratic culture called Six Dynasties culture prospered. It was the time when Tao Yuanming, Wang Xizhi, and others were active. In North China, the Northern Wei (北魏), founded by the Tuoba clan of the Xianbei, brought order out of the chaos of the Sixteen Kingdoms period, dissolved the tribal system of the northern nomads, and transformed itself into a Chinese-style state based on an aristocratic system.

5.3 The Beijing–Hangzhou Grand Canal

While on the map of East Asia the Great Wall stands out clearly as a line of conflict, the Beijing–Hangzhou Grand Canal became a symbolic landmark of north and south coming together as one. During the Zhou dynasty, in 486 BC, China's first canal, the "Hangou (邗溝)," connecting the Yangtze and the Huai River, was built, and then in AD 605, on the orders of Emperor Yang of Sui (隋煬帝), the Grand Canal was constructed after six years of work. With a total length of 1,764 km—nearly twice the length of the railway from Busan to Sinuiju—the Grand Canal passes through six provinces and municipalities—Beijing, Tianjin (天津), Hebei (河北), Shandong (山東), Jiangsu (江蘇), and Zhejiang (浙江)—and cuts across five great rivers: the Hai (海河), the Yellow (黃河), the Huai (淮河), the Yangtze (長江), and the Qiantang (錢塘).

Even today it carries coal from the north southward and rice and grain from the south northward, while also serving as a key waterway for the export economy of the Yangtze River Delta. The Beijing–Hangzhou Grand Canal, the world's largest artificial waterway, with a history of 2,500 years, became a waterway beginning in Beijing (北京) and linking southward to Hangzhou (杭州). It borders six provinces (省), including Beijing and Tianjin, and connects five great rivers, including the Yellow River (黃河), the Huai (淮河), and the Chang Jiang (長江, the Yangtze), becoming a shipping passage with a total length of 1,794 km. In today's China it is the waterway that links Beijing, representing the north, with Shanghai, representing the south. Looking at the Great Wall and the Beijing–Hangzhou Grand Canal alone, the culture and civilization of East Asia show a history and scale of civilization that can be seen nowhere else in the world.

5.4 The Story of the Huns

The modern humans who first settled on the Korean Peninsula and the Liaodong Peninsula began living alongside the wolves and wild horses that had long inhabited the Manchurian region. They began raising wolves in their households, which became the dogs we keep at home today, and, unlike the oxen accustomed to Southeast Asian farming, they brought wild horses into domestic life, bringing an epoch-making change to nomadic life. Because the nomadic states of the horse-riding peoples were constantly on the move, they lasted only short periods in history.

Figures well known to European scholars—Kanishka, Attila of the Huns, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Babur "the Tiger," and others—and the Scythians, Huns, Tatars, Turks (Göktürks), Mongols, and Manchus made their names as conquering tribes. The ruthless horse-riding conquerors, called the wolves of the Asian steppe, trampled the Han Chinese, India, and the inhabitants of Europe.

There are not many concrete historical records about the Huns, who rode horses and wielded metal weapons developed since the Neolithic, but it is said that the Xiongnu were destroyed by an allied army of the Xianbei, the Later Han, and the Southern Xiongnu. After that the Southern Xiongnu were assimilated into the Han Chinese, and the Northern Xiongnu began to move west. The leadership of the Xiongnu who advanced west at this time crossed the Ural Mountains and settled, and after about two centuries, having been assimilated with the nomads already living there, the people who brought a whirlwind upon Europe are also called the Huns. That place is the Altai region. The Altai Kazakh tribe call themselves the Kerei. The feature seen in the 4th-century skulls found in the Yean-ri tomb cluster in Gimhae and in the skull found in the Geumnyeongchong tomb of Silla is cranial deformation (pyeondu). Pyeondu refers to a skull in which the forehead has been artificially pressed flat, a furrow-like crease encircles the head, and the cranium is elongated. The Records of the Three Kingdoms, Book of Wei, Account of the Dongyi wrote, "The people of Jinhan press their heads flat to make pyeondu." According to scholars, pyeondu was a custom of nomadic peoples and appears as "a trace of the Xiongnu."

The Records of the Three Kingdoms says, "Dongmyeong, the founder of Buyeo, was the son borne by a maidservant of King Geumwa (金蛙王) of the state of Kaoli." Professor Sumiyabaatar, a leading Mongolian historian, said, "King Geumwa's Kaoli is the state of Gori, and this tribe also appears in the founding myth of 8th-century Mongolia." And according to the legend of "Tanjagang, father of the Altai people," King Geumwa is the progenitor of the Altai people. That is, through the line King Geumwa–Kaoli–Buyeo, the Altai became a root of the Korean people. Chinese historians also called the peoples living in the Altai "Xiongnu." The Book of Han called "Joseon the left arm of the Xiongnu," and said that "since they could not defeat the Xiongnu, Buyeo and Yemaek will rise again." It regarded Gojoseon, too, as Xiongnu."

It is surmised that the cause of the Huns' (Xiongnu's) movement into western Europe was a natural disaster brought on by climate change, or that they migrated from a densely populated place along the steppe road to sparsely populated Eastern Europe. The nomadic Huns (Xiongnu), to escape natural disasters, must have begun a great migration by way of southern Siberia along the Central Asian steppe, heading north along the grasslands and moving west. I could not confirm the basis for the claim, made in the American production Attila, The King of the Barbarians, that the great migration of the Huns (Xiongnu) set out from the Korean Peninsula, but it is quite understandable and conceivable. In the German broadcaster's documentary tracking the Huns, Secrets of History, Drs. Berinto and Schmidt base their evidence of a direct relationship between the Korean people and the Huns on bronze cauldron artifacts unearthed in the Gaya region at the southern tip of the Korean Peninsula and on the Hunnic (Xiongnu) bronze cauldrons excavated in the regions the Huns passed through as they moved west (photo below).

Like the bronze cauldron carried on the horse's back in the horse-and-rider figure, National Treasure No. 91, excavated in 1924 from the Geumnyeongchong tomb in Nodong-dong, Gyeongju, the Huns carried bronze cauldrons on horseback. Their bronze cauldrons, some thirty of which have been found along the Huns' migration route, show the path of the Huns' movement. The horse-and-rider figure unearthed from the Gyeongju tomb is dressed in typical nomadic attire. The triangular hat and the dongbok (bronze cauldron) carried on the horse's back are the same form as the Hunnic (Xiongnu) cauldron. The rider is thought to have had pyeondu, and it is said that the reason the diameter of the gold crowns is small is that the Silla kings had pyeondu, as seen in Maya culture. The rider's feet are in stirrups. Stirrups of the same type the Huns used did not exist among Europeans. Stirrups were made of leather or like a shoe pouch and attached to the saddle so that the rider could keep his balance on horseback. The stirrup was one part of the most powerful horsemanship that allowed the Huns to conquer Europe (photo above).

Hunnic artifacts on the Korean Peninsula have been found in North Korea and in the Jilin region of China, and they are also being found in the grasslands of northern China, the Ordos region of Inner Mongolia, the southern Soviet Union, Hungary, and elsewhere. The Xiongnu artifacts found deep in the south of Korea, in the Gyeongju tombs and in Daeseong-dong, the Gaya tombs of Gimhae, are artifacts with a direct relationship to the northern Xiongnu. The bronze cauldron was a vessel used by nomads who had inherited Neolithic metal culture, for boiling meat used in ritual ceremonies. It is argued that the triangular hat and clothing worn by the horse-and-rider figure, a National Treasure, are those typically used by nomads, and that its saddle and stirrups are the same as those the Huns used.

Sima Qian says the Xiongnu had rather large heads, protruding cheekbones, and broad faces; they had thick mustaches but little hair on the face and no beards. Their eyebrows were thick, and their eyes were narrow slits with pupils burning fiercely like fire. The appearance of the Xiongnu described above by Sima Qian is similar to the record of Attila's appearance left by the Greek historian Priscus (Priskos), who in AD 448 visited Attila's court on the banks of the Danube in what is now northern Hungary as a member of an Eastern Roman embassy. Later the Gothic historian Jordanes, organizing Priscus's writings in Latin, described Attila's eyes as ash-gray, but I wonder whether the way Europeans saw Attila was an optical illusion of looking at an Asian. The Xiongnu became the foundation on which Rome was built, and the force that brought Rome to ruin.

The transportation network connecting to the world saw world empires built, centered on Chang'an (Xi'an), in the time of East Asia's Qin Shi Huang (240 BC) and in the Tang dynasty (AD 618). At this time on the Korean Peninsula it was the era of Gojoseon, and the time when the Buddhist culture of Unified Silla reached its height. It was around this time that Baekje crossed over to Japan and gave rise to Japan's Asuka culture. The Mongol-descended Huns who fled from Tang power occupied Rome, and at the same time entered India and invaded the Kushan Empire. The East Asian culture and the civilization of warfare of the Mongol-descended Huns were transmitted to Eastern Europe, and some among them, it seems, migrated to northern Europe and became the Viking pirates of Finland. At this time the Germanic peoples began to ride horses and established the order of western Europe. The descendants of the Huns raided the coasts of Britain and Europe for 300 years and settled in England, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway.

While the horse-riding peoples who grew up early in Manchuria were moving west over a long period along the vast steppe, they also moved south along the east coast of the Korean Peninsula and, riding horses, gave rise to Silla culture with its advanced metal culture. The Gyeongsang dialect of the Korean Peninsula has a strong, rough pronunciation and carries the characteristics of the northern languages. The horse-riding people who pushed Japan's indigenous inhabitants (the Ainu maritime people) toward Hokkaido were also mostly of lineage M714, and so were a people of the Korean Peninsula.

Dr. Jon Carter Covell was an American-born historian of Asian art. After graduating from Oberlin College in the United States, she became the first Western scholar to receive a doctorate in Japanese art history, from Columbia University in 1941, with "A Study of the Ink Paintings Bearing the Seal of Sesshū (雪舟), a 15th-Century Japanese Zen Painter." She researched Buddhist Zen art for many years at Shinju-an in Daitoku-ji (大德寺) temple in Kyoto, Japan, and from 1959 to 1978 taught Asian art history at the University of California, Riverside, and at the University of Hawaii.

Among the more than a thousand articles written by Dr. Jon Covell and her son Dr. Alan Covell between 1978 and 1986, let us also look at the largest shipbuilding effort on the Korean Peninsula, which took place around AD 369. The ships built in Korea at that time stopped midway at Tsushima and then put in at Kyushu. They announced on several occasions that the bold Buyeo-Gaya people of the time sailed on these ships to conquer Wa, the backward land that was then more than half of western Japan, and afterward held the throne of the Japanese kings, generation after generation, for more than a hundred years.

They point out that the 4th-century Buyeo-Gaya voyage across the Korea Strait is an event far more worthy of attention than the famous voyages the Vikings made some 500 years later. The Vikings were bold and hardy seamen, but even in their active period in the 10th century they could not make voyages accompanied by horses. But the Buyeo people of the Korean Peninsula, the "horse-riding people," successfully accomplished that record-setting voyage of carrying horses to an island nation in vibrant Asia, at a time when in the West the Roman Empire was being trampled by "barbarians." They write that the Buyeo warriors, well-armed descendants of the Huns, easily conquered the land of Japan. I wonder whether the horses of Jeju Island were also brought over at this time, or whether that happened during the Yuan invasion.

6. The Culture of the Native Peoples of the Americas Began in East Asia