Korea University has a conference starting this Thursday, March 25, 2004, on the issue of Goguryeo. It’s an international conference and is supposed to last for two or three days, with scholars from Korea, China, Japan, Russia, the United States, and other places. I don’t yet know the schedule, but I hope to attend a few sessions. There’s supposed to be a webpage at Korea University’s website, but my wife couldn’t find it. Maybe somebody else will have better luck.

Jeffery Hodges

You see this with studies of ancient Egypt too. I’ve watched a good many documentary and read articles by Egyptian and other scholars going out of their way to say that the fabulous construction work done was “not by slaves.” There seems to be a new archeological movement to look at the remains of places around the pyramids and such where the workers lived, and finding such places where workers slept and ate and made crafts and what not — means they weren’t slaves. As if in the US and other areas that had slaves, nothing was done to provide food and shelter and other basic necessities of a large group of people.

Which reminds me of when I was in elementary school and was taught that the Maya people had a garden of Eden type society where they lived in harmony with the land and with other tribal groups. But, many years later, I learned (after they broke the code for the Mayan writing system) that Maya society was just as blood thirsty as and had human sacrifices like the others.

I found out that the interesting ball game that was something like soccer and something like basketball that my elementary teacher spoke glowingly about actually often resulted in the losing team being sacrified. Nice…

I’d like to read a good history book about the northern areas of Korea including Koguryo. I’ve heard no such study has been done, and it is impossible given the current realities jof North Korea and China for that matter.

But, even in the later Chosun period, special govenment policy sought to encourage migration from southern Korea to the norther areas. Things like allowing slaves to move and become free if they settled a piece of land up there. People from the northern half of Korea even this late could also not hold official government posts. They were also administered as military districs which was unique to them alone.

All this seems to tell me that even in later Korean history, this area still had a strong current of “non-Korean-ness” to it. In fact, I believe Manchurian tribal groups were also encouraged to settle in these areas if they would stop raiding and plundering Korean settlements. Which seems to suggest to me that the Koguryo and Parhae dyansties probably had a minority Korean segment (of elites) ruling a majority non-Korean society made up of differing tribes.

Can we say, “Imperialism”? I wouldn’t say that, but if we are going to take post-modern techniques and interpretations, I’d guess we’d have to say it.

Of course, there could have been a mass exodus of ethnic Koreans out of the Manchurian tribal region after the founding of Silla. In fact, if I remember correctly, at the unification of Silla, didn’t the Silla start to send an army up north but they were met by a Koguryo contengent sent by their king to surrender itself to Silla?

But, regardless, if Parhae is considered “Korean” it would be hard to skate around the “imperial” label — as defined in contemporary academia.

Korean high school textbooks say that the Korean pennisula was first divided into two language groups, with the people in the northern half of the pennisula speaking the “puyeo-gye” language and the people in the southern half speaking the “han-gye” language. Later, these two language groups divided into the Koguryo, the Baekje, and the Silla languages. Korean textbooks go on to say that medieval Korean did not really begin to appear until the founding of Koryo.

The professor lamely tries to justify deleting the passages by saying that even though the Chinese text, “Samgukji,” talks about the “puyeo-gye” and “han-gye” languages, it did not actually say that the languages were different. Of course, the professor does not explain why the Chinese text would refer to one language by two different names.

The professor suggests that the person who wrote the section on the history of the Korean language in Korean textbooks might have been influenced by Japanese historians during Korea’s colonial period, which, to some, would be reason enough to delete the passages without question.