semi-legendary chronicles of earlier periods. During the Western Han dynasty, which adopted Confucianism as its official ideology, these texts became part of the state-sponsored curriculum. It was during this period that the texts first began to be considered together as a set collection, and to be called collectively the "Five Classics". List Classic of Poetry A collection of 305 poems divided into 160 folk songs, 105 festal songs sung at court ceremonies, and 40 hymns and eulogies sung at sacrifices to heroes and ancestral spirits of the royal house. Book of Documents A collection of documents and speeches alleged to have been written by rulers and officials of the early Zhou period and before. It is possibly the oldest Chinese narrative, and may date from the 6th century BC. It includes examples of early Chinese prose. Book of Rites Describes ancient rites, social forms and court ceremonies. The version studied today is a re-worked version compiled by scholars in the third century BC rather than the original text, which is said to have been edited by Confucius himself. I Ching (Book of Changes) The book contains a divination system comparable to Western geomancy or the West African Ifá system. In Western cultures and modern East Asia, it is still widely used for this purpose. Spring and Autumn Annals A historical record of the State of Lu, Confucius's native state, 722–481 BC attributed to have been written by Confucius. The Classic of Music is sometimes considered the sixth classic but was lost. Up to the Western Han, authors would typically list the Classics in the order Poems-Documents-Rituals-Changes-Spring and Autumn. However, from the Eastern Han the default order instead became Changes-Documents-Poems-Rituals-Spring and Autumn. Authors and editors of later eras have also appropriated the terms "Book" and "Classic" and applied them ironically to compendia focused on patently low-brow subject matter. Examples include the Classic of Whoring (Piaojing 嫖經) and Zhang Yingyu's A New Book for Foiling Swindles (Dupian Xinshu 杜騙新書, ca. 1617), which is known colloquially as The Book of Swindles or The Classic of Swindles. Authorship Traditionally, it was thought that Confucius himself had compiled or edited the texts of the Five Classics. The scholar Yao Xinzhong allows that there are good reasons to believe that Confucian classics took shape in the hands of Confucius, but that "nothing can be taken for granted in the matter of the early versions of the