eastiseverywhere:Korea Week!Bronze knife-shaped coins from the Lianhuabao-Sejukri culture.Korea (300
eastiseverywhere:Korea Week!Bronze knife-shaped coins from the Lianhuabao-Sejukri culture.Korea (300s BCE)[Source]Before we move out of the Gojoseon, I’d like to share one last artefact demonstrating Chinese influence on Korea. That knife money above is directly inspired by Zhou dynasty Chinese currency - or perhaps even manufactured there!Bronze knife moneyChina (c. 300s BCE)[Source]You’ll notice that both the Korean and the Chinese money are marked with symbols. That’s an early form of the Chinese character 明 (ming), meaning bright.It’s evidence for Chinese writing being present in Korea from really early on. But as you probably know, using Chinese characters to write the Korean language was a pretty tricky business, since the languages don’t even come from the same language family. (Korean might be an isolated language, but there have been theories linking it with Japanese, Mongolian, and surprisingly, Tamil.)Of course, King Sejong would fix that with his invention of the Hangul alphabet in 1443, but we’re getting way ahead of ourselves… -- source link
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