The Book of Song (simplified Chinese: 宋书; traditional Chinese: 宋書; pinyin: Sòng Shū), also called "The History of the Song," is a historical text of the Liu Song Dynasty of the Southern Dynasties of China. It covers history from 420 to 479, and is one of the Twenty-Four Histories, a traditional collection of historical records. It was authored by Shen Yue from the Liang Dynasty (502-557) and contained 100 volumes at the time that it was written. By the time of the Song Dynasty, some volumes were already missing. Later editors reconstructed those volumes by taking material from the History of the Southern Dynasties, plus a few works such as the Historiette of Gao by Gao Jun, though many of those volumes were no longer in their original condition. Modern historians believe that there are serious problems with the text; one of them being that the book is often very unclear and is biased against the surrounding ethnic groups, including the ruling elites of Northern Wei.
Famous quotes containing the words book of, book and/or song:
“With this Ring I thee wed, with my body I thee worship, and with all my worldly goods I thee endow.”
—Book Of Common Prayer, The. Solemnization of Matrimony, “Wedding,” (1662)
“There comes Poe, with his raven, like Barnaby Rudge,
Three-fifths of him genius, and two-fifths sheer fudge.
Who talks like a book of iambs and pentameters,
In a way to make people of common sense damn metres,
Who has written some things quite the best of their kind,
But the heart somehow seems all squeezed out by the mind.”
—James Russell Lowell (1819–1891)
“I am black and beautiful, O daughters of Jerusalem, like the tents of Kedar, like the curtains of Solomon.”
—Bible: Hebrew, Song of Solomon 1:5.