Lands of Asia layouts (Eng) 26.11.21

4 .8
4.8
ANCIENT KOREA
AND ANCIENT
CENTRAL ASIA
The discovery in 1965 of wall paintings (of great significance to
scholarship) in the palace at the site of Afrasiab made it possible to establish that
historical and cultural ties had existed between ancient Korea (Goguryeo state) and
Sogdia. In the paintings, featuring many different figures and depicting embassies
from many countries, L.I. Albaum, the first scholar to examine the murals, identified
two of the figures as representatives from the ancient state of Goguryeo (Korea). They
are portrayed wearing a distinctive headdress decorated with a plume of two feathers.
An inscription of several lines on the robe of one of the figures was deciphered by V.A.
Livshits, and suggests that the various figures on the wall paintings are ambassadors
to the Sogdian Ikhshid Varkhuman, who, according to O.I. Smirnova, ruled in the
period AD 650 or 655 until 696 at the latest. Several scholars, including B.I. Marshak,
A.M. Belenitsky, A.M. Mode, Jan Bogin and S. Antonini among others, subsequently
gave further interpretations of the paintings. A young Japanese scholar, E. Kageyama
pointed out that very similar images of Korean ambassadors can be found in twelve
paintings in the Mogao cave temples in Dunhuang, which along with other paintings,
are the narrative illustrations of the Vimalakirti-nirdesa sutra. A similar image
of a Korean ambassador reproduced on the walls of Prince Zhangnai’s tomb led
Kageyama to believe that all these representations follow a typical style of painting
in the Chinese capital. For this reason, Kageyama suggested that the depictions of
the Korean ambassadors in the paintings at Afrasiab are not evidence of a visit by
them to Samarkand in the second half of the 7th century AD, but instead reflect a
style of Chinese art. It should be noted, to her credit, that Kageyama has proposed
this hypothesis with due caution (‘if this argument is right’) as there is no evidence
to refute the claim that these paintings do indeed depict the actual presence of
Korean ambassadors in Samarkand where, as I have suggested, they came with other
ambassadors for the coronation of the Ikhshid Varkhuman. In this light, I would like
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