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In 221 BC, the year in which the First Emperor unified China and Hannibal took over from Hasdrubal, the Americas had two urbanized cultural cores with advanced societies quickly setting themselves further apart from the hunter-gatherers still predominant across much of the continent: one in the Mexican highlands and the Yucatan region where the Mayas would soon become a distinct culture, and the other in the Peruvian highlands.
To these two American cores, one could add five across Eurasia: the relatively unsophisticated Celtic cultures of northwestern Europe and the related Germanic and proto-Slavic cultures of central-northern Europe; those of the Mediterranean and the Fertile Crescent stretching well into Central Asia; India’s; China’s; and the first of many Asian derivatives of Chinese culture: that of Korea-Japan.
After the founding of the Gija Joseon kingdom by a disgruntled Chinese prince, the first Korean kingdom and its successor states over the first half of the First Millennium BC maintained ties with northern Chinese states, a key source of technology, but not an invasion threat especially after the Zhou Dynasty disintegrated into what later be called Warring States.
Elite Koreans may have used Chinese writing for trade and government records since about 400 BC, although the complex Chinese culture took a while to make of an impact on a cold, mountainous peninsula with little contact with outsiders and a tendency to warlordism.
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