LAUSR

In this special issue, we have included four papers that were presented at the 28th Association for Korean Studies in Europe (AKSE) Conference held in Prague, Czech Republic, in April 2017. All four papers discussed historical texts that were newly discovered after 2000, including inscribed wooden tablets (mokkan, 木簡), stele (sŏkbi, 石碑), and epitaphs (myojimyŏng, 墓誌銘). First, Dae-Jae Park’s paper discusses a new approach to examine the household register of Lelang Commandery, which was discovered in P’yŏngyang, North Korea, and first introduced to the world in 2006. The household register of Lelang Commandery is a set of wooden documents with detailed information on the number of households in each of the 25 counties in Lelang Commandery in 45 BCE. Through an examination of the characters “其戶 (kiho),” found near the end of the register, Park confirms that the households in 18 counties centered around the county town (Chosŏn county) were distinguished from the households in the seven counties of Yŏngdong (嶺東) in Lelang Commandery. Based on this trend in documentation, it is possible to presume that the seven counties of Yŏngdong were areas under the rule of both the governor of Lelang Commandery and the commandant headquarters of the East Section