The History of the World Podcast, written and presented by Chris Hasler. Volume 4, The Medieval World, Episode 63, The Three Kingdoms of Korea. and The next episodes of the History of the World Podcast are going to cover most of the

complete history of the Korean Peninsula from prehistory through to the beginning of the 20th century.

Unlike Japan Korea had a land connection with the Asia mainland so it was far more exposed to Asian cultural innovations

than the Japanese islands. Having said that the sea journey from Korea to Japan is only just over 100 miles so it is safe to assume

that there was historically a regular interaction between the peoples of the Korean Peninsula and the Japanese islands.

The Korean Peninsula was a fruitful place to live with good agricultural land and long coastlines which supported fishing communities.

With Korea being in close proximity to China, innovations such as pottery reached Korea at a very early time compared to cultures globally.

Although pottery can be dated back to around 10,000 years ago

there is no real evidence of agriculture earlier than 5,000 and a half

thousand years ago. One of the most important innovations to enter the Korean

Peninsula was rice cultivation. Although some societies were cultivating

some wild grains and integrating domestic rice from the introduction of general agriculture, there appears to be a significant upsurge

from around 1500 BCE onwards. And this also seems to be where societies and settlements enlarged and prospered. Rice was just one of many crops cultivated

in the Korean Peninsula after their own agricultural revolution.

And bronze production is evidenced by the middle of the 1st millennium B.C.

followed by Ironmongery, a few centuries after, all of which are believed to have been

introduced through Chinese societies. The history of Korean societies is structurally very similar to other areas of the world.

Time and time again we see that societies have an ancient written history of the origins of their people.

And these written histories seem to always portray an origin that their people can be proud of and one that commands respect from their neighbouring societies.

Often we find that written histories demonstrate a relationship to spiritual ancestors or deities who would often have supernatural abilities, such as the ability to influence nature.

In more modern times when we entered the scientific age we would discover that archaeological

evidence could stand in the face of these written mythological histories and cause us

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