Yi Zhou Shu

The Yi Zhou Shu (traditional Chinese: 逸周書; simplified Chinese: 逸周书; pinyin: Yì Zhōu Shū; Wade–Giles: I Chou shu; lit. 'Lost Book of Zhou') is a compendium of Chinese historical documents about the Western Zhou period (1046–771 BCE). Its textual history began with a (4th century BCE) text/compendium known as the Zhou Shu ("Book of Zhou"), which was possibly not differentiated from the corpus of the same name in the extant Book of Documents. Western Han dynasty (202 BCE–CE 9) editors listed 70 chapters of the Yi Zhou Shu, of which 59 are extant as texts, and the rest only as chapter titles. Such condition is described for the first time by Wang Shihan (王士漢) in 1669.^[1] Circulation ways of the individual chapters before that point (merging of different texts or single text's editions, substitution, addition, conflation with commentaries etc.) are subject to scholarly debates.

Traditional Chinese historiography classified the Yi Zhou Shu as a zashi (雜史) "unofficial history" and excluded it from the canonical dynastic Twenty-Four Histories.