Dolmen
Writer
관리자
Posted at
2019-09-03
The Seven Wonders of the World include sites such as the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Great Wall of China, and Stonehenge in England among others. However, Korea’s dolmens are no less mysterious. About half of all the dolmens in the world or around 40,000 dolmens are found on the Korea Peninsula.
Diverse artifacts, including human bones, stone objects, and jade and bronze artifacts, have been unearthed from the dolmens, although how such large stones were transported and built at that time still remains a mystery.
In the past, the dolmens in Korea used to be classified into two categories: the northern type (table type), which includes the dolmens located north of the Hangang River, and the southern type (go-table type). However, after go-table dolmens were found north of the Hangang River, and tabletype dolmens were found south of the river, the northern/southern-type appellations were dropped. Meanwhile, other scholars have added new types to this system of classification.
Dolmens are often referred to as tombs, but it is difficult to make this claim with any certainty. Yi Gyu-bo, a great scholar of Goryeo in the 12th century, left the following remarks about dolmens: “People say that the saints put the dolmens there in the olden days. It is indeed a wonderful technique (that enabled men to position such huge rocks in that way).”
In the early 20th century, American missionary Horace Grant Underwood claimed that dolmens were not tombs but rather that they were put there for sacrificial rituals offered to the gods of the earth. A Korean folklorist named Son Jin-tae pointed to a folktale in which dolmens were believed to be the houses of witches (Mago halmeoni in local legends).
Dolmens are rarely found in China, except for Manchuria, or Japan, yet many thousands of them can be seen across the Korean Peninsula. They were erected over many thousands of years, but this process stopped sometime before Christ. There are many unsolved mysteries surrounding the dolmens, such as the reason for their concentration in such great numbers on the Korean Peninsula in Northeast Asia and their connectivity with those found in Europe or India. UNESCO’s acceptance of the South Korean government’s application for registration of the dolmens in Ganghwa, Hwasun, and Gochang in 2000 as a world cultural heritage attests to the world’s growing interest in their importance in the field of cultural anthropology.
Diverse artifacts, including human bones, stone objects, and jade and bronze artifacts, have been unearthed from the dolmens, although how such large stones were transported and built at that time still remains a mystery.
In the past, the dolmens in Korea used to be classified into two categories: the northern type (table type), which includes the dolmens located north of the Hangang River, and the southern type (go-table type). However, after go-table dolmens were found north of the Hangang River, and tabletype dolmens were found south of the river, the northern/southern-type appellations were dropped. Meanwhile, other scholars have added new types to this system of classification.
Dolmens are often referred to as tombs, but it is difficult to make this claim with any certainty. Yi Gyu-bo, a great scholar of Goryeo in the 12th century, left the following remarks about dolmens: “People say that the saints put the dolmens there in the olden days. It is indeed a wonderful technique (that enabled men to position such huge rocks in that way).”
In the early 20th century, American missionary Horace Grant Underwood claimed that dolmens were not tombs but rather that they were put there for sacrificial rituals offered to the gods of the earth. A Korean folklorist named Son Jin-tae pointed to a folktale in which dolmens were believed to be the houses of witches (Mago halmeoni in local legends).
Dolmens are rarely found in China, except for Manchuria, or Japan, yet many thousands of them can be seen across the Korean Peninsula. They were erected over many thousands of years, but this process stopped sometime before Christ. There are many unsolved mysteries surrounding the dolmens, such as the reason for their concentration in such great numbers on the Korean Peninsula in Northeast Asia and their connectivity with those found in Europe or India. UNESCO’s acceptance of the South Korean government’s application for registration of the dolmens in Ganghwa, Hwasun, and Gochang in 2000 as a world cultural heritage attests to the world’s growing interest in their importance in the field of cultural anthropology.