Hangul was a king’s invention—then Korea split in two
Pottery on the peninsula reaches back to about 8000 BC. Myth places Gojoseon’s founding in 2333 BC; archaeology shows complex chiefdoms in the Mumun period. King Sejong personally created Hangul in the fifteenth century—centuries before the 1945 division at the 38th parallel.
Paleolithic tools appear across northern and central provinces from roughly half a million years ago, though direct ancestry to modern Koreans is usually traced to Neolithic peoples around 2000 BC. Jeulmun comb-pattern pottery after 7000 BC links stylistically to neighbors from Mongolia to Jōmon Japan. Mumun farmers (about 1500–300 BC) intensified dry and paddy fields; Middle Mumun chiefs and bronze ritual gear emerge after 700 BC. The Samguk yusa (1281) recounts Dangun founding Gojoseon in 2333 BC—a national myth without archaeological proof. Historical Gojoseon appears in Chinese texts such as Guanzi and fell to Han China in the late second century BC, opening the Proto–Three Kingdoms era.
From the first century BC, Goguryeo, Baekje, and Silla contested the peninsula and Manchuria until Silla’s unification in 676. Balhae rose in 698 over old Goguryeo lands, creating a Northern and Southern States balance until the tenth century. Wang Kŏn’s Goryeo dynasty reunited the Later Three Kingdoms (892–936), codified law, and flourished under Buddhist culture before thirteenth-century Mongol domination. In 1392 Yi Seong-gye founded Joseon after a 1388 coup. Sejong the Great (1418–1450) drove administrative and scientific reforms and designed Hangul. Joseon and Ming forces, with Admiral Yi Sun-sin’s navy, repelled Japanese invasions of 1592–1637, after which the kingdom grew more isolationist.
Unequal treaties in the mid-nineteenth century, the 1895 assassination of Empress Myeongseong, and Gabo Reforms preceded the short-lived Korean Empire (1897–1910). Japan imposed a 1905 protectorate and annexed Korea in 1910 (treaties later ruled void); the March First Movement of 1919 signaled mass resistance. After 1945 Allied occupation split the peninsula; separate states formed in 1948. Kim Il Sung’s 1950 invasion opened the Korean War, ending in a 1953 ceasefire. Both Koreas joined the UN in 1991; South Korea liberalized after 1987 into a developed democracy while the North remained a militarized hereditary system dependent on foreign aid.
Source: History of Korea
