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
Zhan Guo Ce, and a similar school of works of
Gan De and
Shi Shen, as well as previously unknown medical texts like
Wushi'er Bingfang ("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.