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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

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