ABSTRACT
The fact that it was a queen who was buried in the north mound of Tomb 98, the largest of the mounded tombs, wearing one of the finest of the golden crowns, has created a difficult question of historiography for the Silla polity. The problem is not that this woman could not have been a ruling queen. The problem is that there is no ruling queen in the historical king lists during the Mounded Tomb period. Silla tombs rarely contain human remains, so discovering the sex of the burial depends on identifying artifacts that belong to males versus females. It seems that the problem was built into the system of patrilineal descent, which often left a widow able to control the government through her young son who had been named emperor. By appointing her own family members to posts of power, she could effectively become the ruler and control the government.
