 the mawangdui silk texts () are texts of chinese philosophical and medical works written on silk and found at mawangdui in china in 1973. they include some of the earliest attested manuscripts of existing texts such as the i ching, two copies of the tao te ching, one similar copy of strategies of the warring states, and a similar school of works of gan de and shi shen, as well as previously unknown medical texts like recipes for fifty-two ailments. scholars arranged them into silk books of 28 kinds. together they count to about 120,000 words covering military strategy, mathematics, cartography and the six classical arts of ritual, music, archery, horsemanship, writing and arithmetic.'the age of the bamboo slip', china through a lens (6 june 2003). retrieved 4 october 2006. ==overview of the texts==  the mawangdui silk texts were buried in tomb no. 3 at mawangdui, which was sealed in 168 bc, and lay hidden in changsha, hunan for over 2000 years. some texts were only previously known by title; some are previously unknown commentaries on the i ching attributed to confucius. in general, they follow the same sequence as the various received versions &ndash; versions that have been passed down by copying and recopying from generation to generation from texts collected and collated during the 5th century. however, they are, in some important respects, notably different from the sundry received texts known before their discovery. the chinese characters found in the silk texts are often only fragments of the characters used in the later versions that tradition has handed down. many chinese characters are formed by combining two simpler chinese characters, one to indicate a general category of meaning, and one to give an indication of pronunciation. where the traditional texts have both components, the silk texts frequently give only the phonetic half of the intended character. there are several hypotheses that might explain this fact: * the copyist may have been simply too lazy to write the full form of many of the characters. * perhaps the earlier of the two silk texts (or maybe the text that it was copied from) was simply the result of someone taking dictation in the fastest way that s/he could write. the scribe wrote down the part of each character that indicates its pronunciation with the idea that s/he could later recopy the text with the appropriate meaning components for those abbreviated characters. * in english, the word "dog" can have two apparently unrelated meanings: "a kind of carnivorous mammal" or "to pursue with unflagging patience." we hardly
Archaeological_artifacts_of_China Archaeological_corpora Chinese_classic_texts Chinese_manuscripts Han_dynasty_texts Silk