Culture
The capital of the Silla kingdom was Gyeongju. A great number of Silla tombs can still be found in the centre of Gyeongju. Silla tombs took the form of a stone chamber which was surrounded by a soil mound.The historic area around Gyeongju was added to the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2000. Much of it is also protected as part of Gyeongju National Park. Additionally, two villages near Gyeongju area names of which are Hahoe and Yangdong would be submitted for UNESCO heritages in 2008 or later by related cities and the South Korean government. Since the tombs were harder to break into than those of Baekje, a larger amount of objects has been preserved. Notable amongst these are Silla's elaborate gold crowns and jewelry.
The Bronze Bell of King Seongdeok the Great attracts a large number of tourists. The bell produces a distinctive sound, about which there is a legend. Cheomseongdae near Gyeongju is the oldest extant astronomical observatory in East Asia, while some disagree on its exact functions. It was built during the reign of Queen Seondeok (632–647).
Muslim traders brought the name "Silla" to the world outside the traditional East Asian sphere through the Silk Road. Geographers of the Arab and Persian world, including ibn Khurdadhbih, al-Masudi, Dimashiki, al-Nuwairi, and al-Maqrizi, left records about Silla.
The current descendants to the Silla dynasty fall under the Kim name. Family records since the last ruler have been provided, but these records have yet to be fully verified.
Read more about this topic: Silla
Famous quotes containing the word culture:
“Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man,—a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Children became an obsessive theme in Victorian culture at the same time that they were being exploited as never before. As the horrors of life multiplied for some children, the image of childhood was increasingly exalted. Children became the last symbols of purity in a world which was seen as increasingly ugly.”
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)
“One of the oddest features of western Christianized culture is its ready acceptance of the myth of the stable family and the happy marriage. We have been taught to accept the myth not as an heroic ideal, something good, brave, and nearly impossible to fulfil, but as the very fibre of normal life. Given most families and most marriages, the belief seems admirable but foolhardy.”
—Jonathan Raban (b. 1942)