The Book of Songs is the earliest collection of poems at the beginning of China's ancient poetry. It collects 365,438+065 and 438+0 century to 6 century poems from the early Western Zhou Dynasty to the middle of the Spring and Autumn Period, among which 6 poems are Sheng poems, that is, they have only titles but no content, and are called Six Sheng Poems (South).

The Book of Songs is China's first collection of poems. The earliest record is the early years of the Western Zhou Dynasty, and the latest work is the Spring and Autumn Period, which spans about five or six hundred years. The origin is centered on the Yellow River basin, south to the north bank of the Yangtze River, and distributed in Shaanxi, Gansu, Shanxi, Shandong, Hebei, Henan, Anhui, Hubei and other places.

Textual research by experts in literature and history shows that The Book of Songs was written after Zhou Wuwang's downfall of Shang Dynasty (BC 1066). "Song of Zhou" is the earliest work in the early years of the Western Zhou Dynasty, and it is the work of noble literati. It is mainly composed of ancestral temple music songs and ode to the gods, and some of them describe agricultural production.

Extended data:

Creation background

Joo Won?, the birthplace of the Zhou Dynasty, was suitable for agriculture. Poems such as Gong Liu and Mianmian Guaju in The Scholars all show that Zhou prospered the country with agriculture, and the development of agriculture promoted social progress. After the conquest, the Zhou clan became the co-owner of the world, and the patriarchal clan system, land, private slaves and aristocratic lords became the social and political characteristics of this historical period.

Apart from the tyranny of Shang and Zhou Dynasties, the replacement of Shang and Zhou Dynasties by Western Zhou Dynasty was mainly related to its slavery economic system. After the establishment of the Western Zhou Dynasty, in order to alleviate the sharp contradiction between production relations and productivity and class struggle, slavery was transformed into serfdom.

Compared with Shang Dynasty, the Western Zhou Dynasty promoted the rapid development of social spiritual civilization due to the great changes in the economic system. As a representative of literature, the appearance of The Book of Songs is an inevitable product of the progress of the times, which in turn promotes the progress of social civilization.

Baidu Encyclopedia-The Book of Songs