Problems in the Samguk Sagi’s Representation of Early Silla History

Without question the twelfth-century Samguk sagi contains within its chronicle of Silla, the Silla Annals, the most extensive body of evidence regarding the history of that major Northeast Asian polity. Yet there are significant problems, especially chronological problems, with its account of the early history of Silla. The Silla Annals provides a record, albeit at some points a sparse record, of events important to the Silla court from the alleged assumption of power in 57 BCE by the polity’s putative first sovereign, Pak Hyŏkkŏse—who is reported to have been hatched from a gourd-shaped egg—to the kingdom’s demise almost a thousand years later in 935 CE. Nor is it surprising that the early portions of the Silla Annals’ narrative should be replete with chronological problems. According to the text itself, the compilation of the first official court history of Silla of which the editors of the Samguk sagi were evidently aware was not even authorized until 545, the sixth year of the reign of Silla’s King Chinhŭng (540–576), and thus some six centuries after the court’s alleged establishment in 57 BCE. Consequently, one must at least wonder what was the source of all the quite detailed information—names and titles of court bureaucrats and generals, reports of promotions in rank, place names, numbers of battle fatalities, etc., etc.—preserved in the Silla Annals’ recounting of the initial six hundred years of the millennium that it ascribes to Silla’s existence as a royal state.

It was to begin to address in a necessarily limited but public way this fundamental chronological problem posed by the Samguk sagi’s account of the early history of Silla that an interdisciplinary panel was proposed and accepted for the 8th Kyujanggak International Symposium held at Seoul National University in late August of 2015. Indeed, four of the five articles appearing in this journal are the more detailed written elaborations of papers that were presented at that panel, and the fifth—that by Mark Byington—was subsequently solicited due to the known relevance of some of his current research to matters treated here.

All five of the essays appearing here directly address problems, especially chronological problems, in the twelfth-century Samguk sagi’s representation of the early—or, to be more precise with regard to these five studies in particular, the pre-sixth-century—history of Silla, but they do so from several disciplinary vantage points. Two of the papers, those by Jack Davey and Lee Sungjoo, approach these concerns from the perspective of archaeology: in essence they compare the material evidence produced by archaeology with the written evidence of not just the Samguk sagi but also the third-century Chinese source, the Sanguozhi. The remaining three papers can, in broad view, all be characterized as examples of comparative history in which the evidence from other primary written sources are deployed to assess the chronology assigned to certain entries in the Silla Annals. Yet even in these three primarily textually based studies there are salient differences in approach: Richard McBride uses epigraphic evidence as the basis for much of his comparative textual analysis, whereas Byington relies primarily on comparative data from early Chinese sources, and I make extensive use of information preserved in both early Chinese and Japanese sources. It is notable, but not surprising, that one Chinese source in particular, namely the late third-century Sanguozhi, plays a major role in four of the five essays presented here—only in the case of McBride’s study of Silla’s bureaucratic structure does it not figure prominently.

As a final comment before briefly introducing the content of these five studies, it is important to note that not only are there differences in the methodologies and the kinds of evidence that they employ, but there are also significant differences in the nature of the results that they produce, yet they all reveal the problematic nature of the dates assigned in the Silla Annals to particular aspects of the early history of southeastern Korea.

In Davey’s and Lee’s...