Mawangdui Silk Texts

The Mawangdui Silk Texts (traditional Chinese: 馬王堆帛書; simplified Chinese: 马王堆帛书; pinyin: Mǎwángduī Bóshū) are Chinese philosophical and medical works written on silk which were discovered at the Mawangdui site in Changsha, Hunan, 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, a copy of Zhan Guo Ce, works by Gan De and Shi Shen, and previously unknown medical texts such as Wushi'er Bingfang (Prescriptions for Fifty-Two Ailments).[1] Scholars arranged them into 28 types of silk books. Their approximately 120,000 words cover military strategy, mathematics, cartography, and the six classical arts: ritual, music, archery, horsemanship, writing, and arithmetic.[2]

  1. ^ "The Treasure on Silk and Inscribed Slips". Hunan Provincial Museum. Archived from the original on 4 July 2016. Retrieved 17 July 2016.
  2. ^ 'The Age of the Bamboo Slip', China Through a Lens (6 June 2003) Archived 23 January 2005 at the Wayback Machine. Retrieved 4 October 2006.