The Founding of Korea
Korean world creation myths are long and varied, and I won't summarize them all here. I will, however, treat the myth of the creation of Korea.
It seems there was once a god named Hwanin. Hwanin is an alias of Indra, who happens to be a Buddhist god worshipped in India and elsewhere. Anyway, Hwanin had a son, Hwanung. Hwanung was desperately worried about mortals on Earth. His father was so touched by this that he let his son go down there and keep an eye on things. Hwanin went to the top of Mount Taebaek and founded a city he called Shinshin (the City of the Gods) and from it monitored all 360 human affairs (agriculture, trade, industry, good and evil, and what-have-you).
Not long after he founded the city, a tiger and a bear approached him and asked to be made human. Well, you know how mythology goes. You ask the gods for something and they never just give it to you. You have to pass a test or three. Hwanung gave this bear and tiger a handful of mugwort and some garlic cloves, and told them to eat them and wait in a cave, hidden from the sun, for 100 days. The tiger didn't even make it three weeks. The bear, however, stuck it out and turned into a beautiful woman. She was named Ungnyeo, and not long after her transformation she began to wish for a child. Unfortunately there wasn't a husband to be had in those parts for love or money. She prayed beneath a sandalwood tree to be blessed with a child; Hwanung took pity on her and married her. (Yeah, I imagine that was a tough decision for ol' Hwanung.) She gave birth to a son called Dangun.
In case you're wondering where all this is going, Dangun went on to found the first Korean kingdom, Gojoseon, and became Korea's first king. The rest (literally) is history.
What follows now is widely regarded as fact. Please don't misconstrue that ostentatious statement; I don't wish to cast doubt on the veracity of the Korean myths. Au contraire, I adore mythology in most of its forms, and have nothing but respect for this country and its culture (as I've stated elsewhere).
Scientific research, or whatever some dope put up on Wikipedia, indicates that the Gojoseon (or Old Joseon) Kingdom was established in "approximately" 2333 B.C. In the beginning, it included all of present-day North Korea and a fair whack of Manchuria, and eventually came to incorporate the rest of the peninsula. Settlement of the area goes back far beyond the founding of Gojoseon (as far back as 8,000 years, past the Bronze Age into the Lower Paleolithic), but Gojoseon was the first recognizable civilized kingdom to arise on the peninsula. "Civilized" is an apt term: part of the government of the principality included "The Eight Prohibitions," supposedly set down by Dangun himself, which demonstrated a high-mindedness surprising for the period. Some examples are:
He who kills another shall be put to death. He who causes bodily injury to another shall pay compensation in grain. He who steals another's possessions shall either be made a slave of his victim or pay a fine of 500,000 coins to be exonerated.Not only does this demonstrate that Gojoseon used currency and recognized and protected private property, but also that there was such a thing as a tort in ancient Korea. Who'd a' thunk it?
There's more. Apparently, Korea beat a couple of major ancient civilizations to the punch as far as scientific and architectural achievements are concerned. That's according to one video I watched, created by the Voluntary Agency Network of Korea. It said that the Koreans built larger pyramids about two thousand years before the Egyptians raised theirs, and were inscribing detailed astronomical charts on their dolmens about twelve hundred years before the Mesopotamians drew any up. Such achievements are hard to believe, and I found little verification of them elsewhere; I'd like to believe it wasn't propaganda. I must admit the video, as well as all the others I've watched that were put out by the VANK, smacked of propagandist grandstanding.
In any case, the Gojoseon Kingdom lasted quite a long time, and had an exemplary social structure and military force by all accounts. But then there was a series of rather devastating wars with China, during which the once-mighty Korean kingdom lost several thousand kilometers of territory. Wudi invaded in 109 B.C., and that was the last straw: Gojoseon finally fell a year later. The remnants of its fiefdoms split into many conflicting kingdoms, of which three would eventually come to dominate, commencing the Three Kingdoms era of Korea: Goguryeo, Silla, and Baekje.
Okay, that's enough for today. Any more and you guys will go to sleep on me. Straighten up there! I'll see you this same time next week. Don't forget to do your reading homework, and make notes on the foundation mythology and Dangun's Eight Prohibitions, and never dive into murky water while you're at it. Dismissed.
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