Ancient Graffiti On Sacred Mountain Reveals Secrets Of North Korea

Jan Bartek – AncientPages.com – The elites of premodern Korea carved their names into rocks in the sacred mountains of Kŭmgangsan for much the same reason that today’s graffiti taggers wield cans of spray paint: reputation and control.

And while University of Kansas art historian Maya Stiller notes several important distinctions, her new book, “Carving Status at Kŭmgangsan: Elite Graffiti in Premodern Korea” (University of Washington Press), uses the comparison as a way into the hitherto-untold story of what she calls “the largest number of such graffiti in East Asia—in the entire world.”

Ancient Graffiti On Sacred Mountain Reveals Secrets Of North Korea

Autograph cluster (original and enhanced) of chungin (near-elite) friends Pak Iho, Hong Sŏkp’il, and Yi Chadam, late 18th/early 19th century. Inner Kŭmgang, Kŭmgangsan, Kangwŏn Province. Credit: Maya Stiller

It’s a complex tale with aspects of history, religion, sociology, literature and digital humanities—all wrapped inside the enigma that is modern North Korea, home to the Kŭmgang (Diamond, or Unbreakable) mountain range, which Stiller is one of few western academics to have visited in recent years.

The ᴀssociate professor of Korean art and visual culture in KU’s Kress Foundation Department of Art History said she went to North Korea looking for one thing and found something else so interesting and so little-known that she was compelled to both write a book and create a multifarious computerized database about it. Or, rather, to do those things in reverse order. It has taken several years of work.

Stiller had previously studied the Buddhist religious art of Korea’s Chosŏn dynasty (1392–1897), and she initially traveled to outer Kŭmgangsan in 2008, during a period when it was open to South Korean and other foreign tourists, to see notable monasteries there. But when she returned to even more secluded inner Kŭmgangsan (closer to the Demilitarized Zone border with South Korea) in 2014, she encountered such a profusion of previously undocumented autographic inscriptions along the so-called pilgrimage pathways that she decided to pH๏τograph them.

She wound up with over 1,000 pH๏τos containing about 4,500 separate inscriptions.

“I just noticed there were inscriptions everywhere, and I thought that that was particularly strange,” Stiller said. “I had noticed, when I was doing field research at Buddhist monasteries in South Korea, that there were inscriptions near the monasteries, but nothing like this. I thought this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to record these inscriptions. I felt that this was important for my understanding of the Chosŏn-period pilgrimages to the mountain.”

As the daughter of a German father and Korean mother, Stiller has German citizenship, which she says North Korean minders told her in 2014 gave her greater access to inner Kŭmgangsan than a scholar with U.S. citizenship would have been permitted. The country is entirely closed to outside scholars nowadays.

“Honestly,” Stiller said, “I think I’m the only one in the world who has this data, and so I felt obliged to share this with colleagues all around the world who are unable to visit North Korea.”

Before she wrote the new book, for which she created a series of maps and charts showing the development over time and the placement of the inscriptions, Stiller first created an Excel spreadsheet noting each inscription and various details about its location and thematic grouping. That database is now being translated into an open-source search engine. It will also highlight some of the most interesting individual inscriptions, like the two or three women’s names Stiller found among the thousands of men’s names.

After spending thousands of hours poring over her data and placing it in context with other historical information from royal court records, exam rosters and other accounts of travel to Kŭmgangsan, Stiller was compelled to admit that the inscriptions she found were not primarily Buddhist in nature at all. Rather, she wrote in the book, they are evidence of the primarily social motivations of the travelers (as opposed to “pilgrims”), who during the early Chosŏn period were almost exclusively high-status government officials, later joined by aspiring or near-elites who wanted to ᴀssociate themselves with ancestors or scholarly lineages through their holy mountain “tags.”

The book is illustrated with a number of Stiller’s pH๏τos, showing the carvings in situ and then with their characters enhanced with a layer of digital “calligraphy” applied by Weitan Yan, one of the history of art department’s graduate students, who is currently finishing up his dissertation on the art of writing in the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) in China.

See also: More Archaeology News

Now that the book has been published, Stiller is anxious to publish the website—www.aaok.info—a digital platform and search engine for the quanтιтative and qualitative analysis of rock carvings up and running, too. She plans for the final version to be uploaded by January 2022. When it is, anyone can search for travelers’ names, pH๏τos of their carvings and the information about them Stiller has compiled.

“The book is my contribution to the field of Korean studies, Korean art history, Korean literature,” Stiller said. “But I also have this digital-humanities component that I hope will make my work more publicly available to people outside of my immediate field.”

Written by Jan Bartek – AncientPages.com Staff Writer

Related Posts

Andalusia Was First Inhabited By Neolithic People From The Southern Part Of The Iberian Peninsula 6,200 Years Ago

Andalusia Was First Inhabited By Neolithic People From The Southern Part Of The Iberian Peninsula 6,200 Years Ago

Conny Waters – AncientPages.com – The island of San Fernando, Cadiz in Andalusia, was home to the first Neolithic farmers and shepherds who decided to permanently settle there around 6,200 years ago. They practised shellfish collection and consumption all year round, with a preference for winter. Location of Campo de Hockey site in southern Iberian […]

Unknown Bronze Age Settlement Discovered Accidently In Heimberg, Switzerland

Unknown Bronze Age Settlement Discovered Accidentally In Heimberg, Switzerland

Jan Bartek – AncientPages.com – Sometimes, when archaeologists look for one thing, they find something entirely different. This is exactly what happened in Switzerland when researchers were excavating, hoping to find an ancient Roman brick workshop, but they unearthed a previously unknown Bronze Age settlement instead. The excavation in Heimberg, on the right edge of […]

Unexplained Mystery Of The Dangerous Invisible And Unidentifiable Enemy In A French Town

Unexplained Mystery Of The Dangerous Invisible Enemy In A French Town

Ellen Lloyd – AncientPages.com – It was an ordinary day in a small, sleepy town in France. There were no indications anything strange was about to happen. Yet, an inexplicable and extraordinary event left the unsuspecting residents completely bewildered and unsure of what was unfolding. The situation that unfolded was indeed unusual, if not bizarre. […]

Rare 2,800-Year-Old Assyrian Scarab Amulet Found In Lower Galilee

Rare 2,800-Year-Old ᴀssyrian Scarab Amulet Found In Lower Galilee

Jan Bartek – AncientPages.com – Erez Avrahamov, a 45-year-old inhabitant of Peduel, made an incredible discovery while hiking in the Tabor Stream Nature Reserve located in Lower Galilee. He stumbled upon an ancient seal shaped like a scarab that dates back to the First Temple period. Credit: Israel Antiquities Authority This ancient artifact is as […]

Dinas Powys: Late ‘Antique Hillfort Phenomenon’ In Post-Roman Western Britain

Dinas Powys: Late ‘Antique Hillfort Phenomenon’ In Post-Roman Western Britain

Conny Waters – AncientPages.com – Dinas Powys, Glamorgan, located about 9km southwest of Cardiff, is a small inland fort of approximately 0.35ha. The hillfort was first excavated by a team of archaeologists led by Leslie Alcock from 1954 through to 1958. The site is often referenced as a prime example of elite settlements in post-Roman […]

Puzzling Vasconic Inscription On Ancient Irulegi Hand Resembles Basque Language

Puzzling Vasconic Inscription On Ancient Irulegi Hand Resembles Basque Language

Jan Bartek – AncientPages.com – A few years ago, archaeologists excavating an Iron Age site known as Irulegi in northern Spain discovered a flat bronze artifact shaped like a human hand. After careful cleaning, they found it bore inscriptions of words from a Vasconic language. This language family includes Basque and several other languages that […]