Images from a grave recently excavated in Gyeongyu, South Korea, dating to the Silla Kingdom, 7th-8th century CE. That's some fabulous archaeological skill right there, to expose all those tiny beads and the gold pieces of the earrings without removing them. The headpiece is gilt bronze.
As are the shoes. Which makes me wonder; did this woman actually walk around in bronze shoes, or was this just for the funeral?
Grave goods. If you want even bigger images, the History Blog has them.
"As are the shoes. Which makes me wonder; did this woman actually walk around in bronze shoes, or was this just for the funeral?"
ReplyDeleteOn a practical level, we can make a quick comparison to an example of a bulky-but-useable shoe design, wooden klompen from the Netherlands.
A particularly heavy variety of wood like rosewood might have a density of around 0.8 grams per cubic centimeter. In comparison, bronze has a density of 8.73 grams per cubic centimeter. So if you used particularly thin bronze and a design with a lot of negative space, you might conceivably have shoes within the realm of useability, but you'd need them to have 1/10th the volume of material of comparable wooden shoes. Doable, but probably very fragile if you did.
On a cultural level, I don't know much about Korea, but I do know that in both Japan and China, there's a strong connection between burials and bronze objects that seem as though they must have been purely ritualistic - although as I understand it, most of those are much, much older than the 7th or 8th century CE.