Korean Studies
Internet Discussion List
KOREAN STUDIES
REVIEW
Worthy Ancestors and Succession to the Throne: On
the Office Ranks of the King's Ancestors in Early Silla Society, by
Peter Banaschak.
Münster: LIT Verlag,
1997. 72 pp. (ISBN 3-8258-3453-0).
Reviewed by Adrian
Buzo
Swinburne University of Technology
This brief book arose out of the author's MA thesis and offers useful
statistical analysis of material in the Samguk Sagi (hereafter
SGSG)
and the Samguk Yusa (SGYS) on the monarchs of Silla from
Pak Hyôkkôse
to Muyôl (654-661). The author's point of departure is his
assertion
that many of the lists of Silla monarchs and tables showing lines of
descent compiled by modern era historians are eclectic composites of
material from these two sources.
This would not matter so much if the two sources either closely
coincided or
provided relatively complete information but, Banaschak argues, this is
not
the case. Accordingly, he has assembled tables comparing the SGSG
and
SGYS information. To do this he tabulates information on the
ancestry
of 28 Silla monarchs in seven categories - father, mother, paternal
grandfather, maternal grandfather, wife, wife's father - giving a
matrix of 196 possible pieces of information. He finds, perhaps not
surprisingly since it is the more orthodox work of history, that the
SGSG provides more information in these categories (164 out of
196 for
the SGSG vs 127 out of 196 for the SGYS) and is
particularly careful
to include information about the male ancestors of the monarch.
Banaschak then proceeds to analyse the scale of discrepancy between
the two in their information on the titles, office ranks and names of
the royal ancestors. Here again, the SGSG is more forthcoming,
and
the overall level of corroboration between the the SGSG and
SGYS is
limited: they agree on less than half the possible pieces of
information.
Finally, Banaschak asks whether Kim Pusik, compiler of the SGSG,
and
Iryôn, compiler of the SGYS, who were both descendants of
the Silla
royal Kyôngju Kim clan, were therefore disposed to give more
information
on the Kim royal line rather than the two earlier royal lines of Pak
and Sôk. He answers in the affirmative, but I suspect there is a
simpler reason than clan bias for this: the historicity of the Kim
clan monarchs is far more firmly established than the Pak and Sôk
clan monarchs.
For contemporary ideological reasons Kim Pusik was committed to
establishing the seniority of the Silla kingdom over Koguryô or
Paekche, and so established 57 BC as a founding date. Gardiner
(1969:45-46), for example, suggests that this was a magical date,
arrived by counting back through eleven sixty-year cycles from 663,
the auspicious year that Paekche finally fell. This gave Kim a major
problem, though, because Silla lacked a written tradition until the
second
half of the fourth century and the first-known compilation of state
annals
did not occur until 545. Thus to fill up an otherwise blank chronology
covering nearly 400 years of pre-literate rule, Kim seems to have
brought
together separate ruling house traditions of the Pak and Sôk clans
and
arranged them sequentially. We cannot determine what the Pak and
Sôk clans actually ruled over, for it couldn't have been Silla in
the form of a
centralised state since only the Kim clan did this. Nor do we know
whether
the Pak and Sôk clan records available to Kim were any less
complete than
the Kim clan records, though the superior Kim clan status as royal clan
throughout Silla's literate age would surely have ensured more complete
surviving genealogical material.
In sum, the author has provided interesting empirical data and has
fashioned a useful research tool, but because in the main he eschews
interpretation he also begs many questions. Have modern scholars been
indiscriminate in compiling their tables of descent or have they
followed any principles? Are there, for example, grounds for
preferring one source over the other, perhaps by reference to
contemporary inscriptions? Do the author's findings affect any key
issues in Silla history or is it only a more general point of
methodology that is at stake here? Here lie obvious points of
departure for future work.
Reference:
Gardiner, K. H. J. The Early History of Korea: The Historical
Development of the Peninsula up to the Introduction of Buddhism in the
Fourth Century A.D. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press,
1969.
Citation:
Buzo, Adrian 1998
Review of Peter Banaschak, Worthy Ancestors and Succession to the
Throne: On
the Office Ranks of the King's Ancestors in Early Silla Society
(1997)
Korean Studies Review 1998, no. 5
Electronic file:
http://koreanstudies.com/ks/ksr/ksr98-05.htm
Return to Index of
Reviews
Return to Entry
Page