Traditional Accounts
Several events concerning the Shang dynasty are mentioned in various Chinese classics, including the Classic of History and the Commentary of Zuo. Working from all the available documents, the Han dynasty historian Sima Qian assembled a sequential account of the Shang dynasty as part of his Records of the Grand Historian. His history describes some events in detail, while in other cases only the name of a king is given. A closely related, but slightly different, account is given by the Bamboo Annals. The Annals were interred in 296 BC, but the received versions have a complex history and there are controversies regarding the various versions.
Sima Qian calls both the dynasty and its final capital by the name Yīn (殷), a popular term that has been synonymous with the Shang throughout history, and is often used specifically to describe the later half of the Shang dynasty. In Japan and Korea, the Shang are still referred to almost exclusively as the Yin (In) dynasty. However the word does not appear in the oracle bones, and seems to have been the Zhou name for the earlier dynasty.
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