Be proud of you did n’t get on the amiss side of someone knock-down back in 5th - century Korea , because you may have been offer up to the gods as a human ritual killing .

As reported byAFP , two skeleton find oneself under the walls of Moon Castle in South Korea ’s Gyeongju have just been excavated , and it appear they may have been lay there for an otherworldly reason .

The twain were buried without impedance , which means they were in all probability either unconscious or beat at the clip . Although the thought that they could   have been alive at the time of their entombment is not beyond the realm of possibility – the practice of burying be victim with dead kings , so that they may do them in the heavy beyond , was a common exercise in Ancient Korea .

Whether they were human sacrifices or convenient corpses , their burial beneath the castle ’s walls is no fortuity .

“ This is the first archaeological evidence that folklore about humans being sacrifice for the foundations of buildings , dam or wall were true chronicle , ” spokeswoman Choi Moon - Jung of the Gyeongju National Research Institute of Cultural Heritage order AFP . They were n’t used literally as foundations , of course – instead , their liquor were supposed to imbue the structure with good fortune .

As the remains have just been excavated , small is known about the victim , who were inhabitants of the Silla Kingdom , which use up territory in what is now both North and South Korea . This dynasty , which last from 57 BCE to the year 935 CE , is one of the world ’s prospicient sustained monarchy . Although cushion by two unfriendly realm for some sentence , it subdue them in the twelvemonth 668 and unified the region under one rule .

Some of the res publica ’s most important art date stamp back to this period , and it was during this clip that Buddhism was introduce to the peninsula .

Once a mighty ethnical and military exponent , polite wars , regicide , and rebellions reduced the king ’s tycoon to nothing more than a nominal head . After most a millenary of rule , Silla broke apart into three contend kingdoms , which also come by the wayside .

[ H / T : AFP ]