A History of Korea Read Online Free PDF

chieftains reposed where heaven and earth met. The Bronze Age chieftains, who, as noted, believed they were the sons of heaven, dominated their people with the mandate of heaven.
    Small-scale states, dominated by these chieftains, emerged in various parts of the Korean peninsula and southern Manchuria during the Bronze Age. The rulers of these petty states built the earthen fortifications begirded with moats on hillside plateaus and controlled the agricultural population that farmed the plains beyond the fortifications. Because of their physical appearance, these political units have been generally termed
s ŏ ng ŭ p kukka,
or walled-town states. Although the states were tribal in character, they were also territorial in that they controlled populations beyond their own tribal domains. Walled-town states were the earliest form of state structure in Korea. The Bronze Age may be considered particularly important in Korean history, as the Korean people, during this period, developed more advanced technology and implements, practiced rice farming, and witnessed the appearance of the first political units.
Korean Roots
    The possibility of a biological link between Paleolithic people and present-day Koreans has not yet been clearly explored, partly because both archeological and anthropological evidence is lacking. Scholars do agree, however, that modern Koreans do not descend directly from Paleolithic men but instead from the Neolithic people who succeeded them. The ethnic stock of these Neolithic men has continued unbroken to form one element of the later Korean race. It is believed that in the course of a long historical process these Neolithic people merged with one another and, together with new ethnic settlers of Korea’s Bronze Age, eventually constituted Koreans of today.
    Because the population increased so rapidly at the point when the Neolithic Age became the Bronze Age, Bronze Age settlers in southern Manchuria and the Korean peninsula are also believed to have constituted the Korean race. In fact, these Bronze Age men, who had migrated on a large scale and subjugated Neolithic natives, were to become the mainstream of the Korean people.
    The ancient Chinese thought that these Korean ancestors belonged to
dongyi
(
tongi
in Korean), or eastern barbarians, and often divided them into two groups: the northern people, called
Ye, Maek,
or
Yemaek,
and the southern people, called
Han.
This classification is meaningless, however, as these two branches of the Korean people all spoke the same language, Korean, and shared the same culture and customs. For several thousand years they joined forces to create unified Korean kingdoms.
    The Bronze culture on the Korean peninsula shared many things in common with the cultures of southern Manchuria and eastern China. For example, the dolmen tombs, the undecorated pottery, and the mandolin-shaped copper dagger have been unearthed only in these areas. It is not accidental, therefore, that from ancient times the Chinese have called the populations of these regions dongyi and distinguished these people from themselves. According to tradition, the Chinese and the dongyi people had fiercely competed for supremacy in central China before the Qin and Han empires unified China in the late third century BC . China’s Yin (Shang) dynasty (1751–1122 BC ) is known to have been founded and ruled by the dongyi people. As the Zhou dynasty, founded in the Wei River valley, began to wield influence over eastern China in the twelfth century BC , the dongyi people in the region massively migrated eastward to southern Manchuria and the Korean peninsula. When Yin fell to Zhou in 1122 BC , a group of the dynasty’s ruling class came to the east and became the rulingelite because of their advanced culture. Thus the legend of Jizi, in which Jizi, a member of royalty of the Yin dynasty, came to Old Chos ŏ n to found Jizi Chos ŏ n, has been handed down through the generations.
    When China proper was unified