The Mawangdui silk manuscript of the Zhou Yi is a primary manuscript, recovered in 1973 from a Han tomb near Changsha; the atlas records no author, since none is known, and no publication year, since it is an excavated artifact rather than a published text. Its strength is that it is physical, datable evidence for a genuinely different early arrangement of the hexagrams, grouped in eight sets sharing an upper trigram, unlike the received King Wen sequence. Its limit is that whether this arrangement predates King Wen's or represents a local variant is a live scholarly disagreement, and the manuscript itself does not settle it.
Facts
Assessment
Reliability Tier1
Reliability tier 1: a primary excavated manuscript, physical datable evidence though whether its arrangement predates or represents a variant of the received sequence is a live scholarly disagreement the manuscript itself does not settle. NotesRecovered in 1973 from a Han tomb at Mawangdui, near Changsha. Its hexagrams are arranged in eight groups sharing an upper trigram, an order entirely unlike the received King Wen sequence. Whether that arrangement is older than King Wen's or a local variant is disputed. Tier corrected from 4 to 1: the site uses a three-tier scale (1 scholarly or peer-reviewed, 2 reputable secondary, 3 the tradition's own account). Scholarly translations and primary manuscripts are tier 1; 4 and 5 were outside the scale.
Citation
AuthorAnonymous
No scribe or compiler is named for the Han-tomb silk manuscript in the scholarly record; genuinely anonymous rather than an unresearched gap, the same shape as other anonymous ancient primary texts already carried this way in the corpus. Source TypeManuscript
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
This source names King Wen of Zhou directly: "an upper trigram, unlike the received King Wen sequence."
Claims Backed By This Source (8 claims)
This source backs 8 claims across the atlas. As facts: 5 well-attested. As cited relationships: 1 holds. Plus 2 entities citing it as a general reference with no single fact or relationship attached.
Disposition By Topic
- Sources, 6 claims: 5 well-attested, 1 holds.
- I Ching Hexagrams, 2 claims: 2 general references.
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The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.