Oh, and the Kokuryo dynasty started sometime in the first-second century BC, so the 1500-year figure? Correct. There are indeed records of some form of TSD (early version, if anything) dating back to that time, mostly paintings found in tombs along the Ap Lok river.
Now that you've
(a) confused the time depth of the Kokuryo dynasty with the age of TSD (rather like me arguing that the Egypt Natioal Airlines has been around for almost five thousand years because the Pharonic Dynasties began approximately 2800 B.C.) and
(b) repeated the now well-known misinterpretation of the Koguryo tomb murals, again showing that you've done no serious investigation of Korean history (and completely missed my reference to this historical fallacy in the post that you responded to, apparently)
you might, as I suggested earlier, try to educate yourself on the matter, instead of retailing dojang folklore, by consulting Dakin Burdick's seminal papers `People and events of Taekwondo's Formative Years', the first in the 1997 volume of
JAMA, and the extended version at
http://budosportcopelle.ml/gesch.html, where he notes that
Of course, most literature on taekwondo describes the art as `thousands of years old', but this is simply not so. Most of the martial arts practiced in Korea before the nineteenth century were merely reflections of Chinese martial arts. The three most common pieces of evidence for the antiquity of taekwondo---the tomb murals of Koguryo Kingdom, the statue of Kumkang-Yuksa, and the Muye dobo tongji (Illustrated Manual of Martial Arts)---actually show that early Korean martial arts were largely derivative of Chinese martial arts(my emphasis)
noting futher that
(i) the Koguryo tomb murals, which depict (among other martial activities) groups of men seemingly engaged in empty-hand combat, actually constitute no evidence at all bearing on ancient Korean martial art, because, as he puts it in an earlier study,
none of the Koguryo tomb murals can be definitively identified as the practice of a kicking and striking art. The murals on the ceiling of the Muyong-chong are said to show `two men practicing a sort of Taekwondo'. They actually show two men---both with goatee, moustache and long hair---wearing loin cloths. They are at least four feet apart (their outstretched hands are a foot away from each other). The positions could be stretching, dancing or possibly wrestling Mongolian style, but they certainly do not resemble modern Taekwondo stances or techniques.'
The joke, as it happens, is that, according to Burdick `the martial arts depicted in Koguryo tomb murals closely resemble those in the tomb murals of the Eastern Han, located in what is now eastern China. This suggests that the form of Koguryo era martial arts emerged because of Chinese cultural influence, rather than independent development by the future Koreans'.
(ii) Burdick comments that `the statue of Kumkang-Yuksa at Sokkuram, which is often cited as the figure of an ancient warrior practicing taekwondo, is in fact a Buddhist guardian figure found throughout East Asia, and thus cannot be said to be unique to Korea either.' The Henning article I told you about, but which again you obviously didn't bother reading, echoes this observation, noting that `these guardians are in the style common to contemporary Tang China (618--907), on which they were most assuredly modeled.
Even some reputable Korean sources refer to these figures as `wrestlers' rather than `boxers', but they are most commonly called `strong men' (lishi in Chinese or ryuksa in Korean).' (p.10; my emphasis).
(iii) The massive late 18th c. Korean martial arts manual
Muye dobo tongji, supposedly an encyclopaedia of native Korean combat techniques, turns out to be `nearly identical to the
Jixiao Xinshu (New Book for Effective Discipline)... by the Chinese General Qi Jiguang (1528--1587)', written nearly two and a half centuries earlier. (The translation and transliteration task involved, as Burdick notes, would have been well within the capabilities of the
Muye dobo tongji's author, `a scholar famed for his erudition in classical Chinese'. Henning, in the 2000
JAMA paper crucial to this topic (which, as I say, you evidently still haven't read, though you seem to be under the impression that you know something about early Korean MAs) offers a detailed breakdown of the sources of the techniques discussed in the
Muye dobo tongji, noting the separate weapons and techniques itemized there.
And all this is just the tip of the iceberg. So you see, JT, the problem is that you have strong opinions which are based on recycled bad history (fueled in some instances by Korean national government fables; see Burdick for documentation; I'm getting tired of supplying you with information you can find out on your own), rather than any actual knowledge on your part. And the point is that Sensei Rivers, Master Penfil, Upnorthkyosa and I can see this lack of even basic knowledge of the topic in every one of your posts; that's why you're getting the feedback you're getting. REPEAT: every time you post, JT, you make your lack of technical and historical knowledge obvious. Is none of this feedback getting through to you, so that you finally get the point that maybe it's time to actually
learn something before posting your views for everyone to read, and shake their heads at?
