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:
“And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened: and another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works.”
—Bible: New Testament St. John the Divine, in Revelation, 20:12.
“It is no great art to say something briefly when, like Tacitus, one has something to say; when one has nothing to say, however, and none the less writes a whole book and makes truth ... into a liar—that I call an achievement.”
—G.C. (Georg Christoph)
“She sang a song that sounds like life; I mean it was sad. Délira knew no other types of songs. She didn’t sing loud, and the song had no words. It was sung with closed lips and it stayed down in one’s throat.... Life is what taught them, these Negresses, to sing as if they were choking back sobs. It is a song that always ends with a beginning anew because this song is the picture of misery, and tell me, does misery ever end?”
—Jacques Roumain (1907–1945)