Kojosŏn e taehan saeroun haesŏk by Kim Chŏngbae (review)

Scholars outside of Korea have given little attention to the country’s prehistory and ancient history. Since almost no comprehensive English publications on these subjects have appeared in years, scholars and students who are interested in pre-fourth-century Korean history have to rely on scholarship in Korean. Kim Chŏngbae’s scholarship includes archaeological and historical research on the origins of the Korean people and culture, as well as the application of early state formation theory in the context of Korea. This book is the fruit of Kim’s decades-long research and field trips to Northeast China, Inner and Outer Mongolia, and Kazakhstan. The scope of his field trips is impressive, especially considering his distraction from research for years by his multiple administrative duties as president of a university and several research institutions.

Kojosŏn e taehan saeroun haesŏk is divided into four sections. Section 1 is a historiography and prospectus on the research of Kojosŏn or Old Chosŏn. Section 2 discusses major characteristics of Korean bronze culture. Section 3 focuses on two representative relics in Korean Bronze Age culture, the dolmen and the petroglyph, and section 4 is about kingship in Kojosŏn and its relation to the owners of the mandolin-shaped bronze dagger.

Kim synthesizes earlier scholarship and presents unique viewpoints on Old Chosŏn, which has been a highly contested issue due to the scarcity and ambiguity of historical records. The book starts with an overview and critique of the scholarship, including the work of Korean nationalist scholars, the evidential school, socioeconomic historians, and recent scholarship from North Korea. Since scholars have generated the maximum possible interpretations of the meager written records, archaeological data has become an indispensable and inspiring source for new clues. This book represents a new direction in approaching ancient history by incorporating written records and archaeological data, and it has thereby made a significant contribution to the understanding of this enigmatic period of Korean history.

First, the author puts ancient Korean history and culture in a much broader temporal and spatial scope. Thanks to his field trips to formerly inaccessible areas in China and Central Asia since the late 1980s, the author sheds light on new archaeological data not widely known, especially to Western academia. That data includes bronze daggers and stone cists from Kazakhstan, a slab of animal bone carved with a chariot and horses excavated in Inner Mongolia, petroglyphs with animal motifs from Inner and Outer Mongolia, and a wooden tablet excavated in North Korea with demographic information of the Nangnang (Lelang) Commandery in 45 BCE.

The author attempts to solve the ongoing debates about the origin of the bronze dagger. The mandolin-shaped bronze dagger is peculiar to Inner Mongolia, Northeast China, and the Korean peninsula. Scholars have debated the origin of bronze daggers, and Chinese scholars are divided into the camps of either a western origin (Inner Mongolia) or an eastern origin (Liaoning Province). Korean scholars have paid extraordinary attention to this debate because the bronze dagger is one of the most representative artifacts of Korean Bronze Age culture. Not surprisingly, most Korean scholars lean toward an eastern origin. Kim opposes both scenarios and proposes an earlier model: that bronze daggers found in Karaganda, Kazakhstan, were the prototype of the mandolin-shaped dagger. The author argues that the bronze dagger was transmitted from Karaganda to Inner Mongolia, then to the Liaodong area, and finally to the Korean peninsula. The Karaganda bronze daggers belong to Fedrov Culture (fifteenth to fourteenth centuries BCE), an early stage of Andronov Culture.

Second, the wooden tablet discovered in the P’yŏngyang area indicates that the Nangnang Commandery had twenty-five counties and a population of 28,0561 in 45 BCE. Kim further projects that the Old Chosŏn population was 56,297...