This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
The line texts read today descend from an uneven transmission stretched across many centuries. The divinatory core of the I Ching, its sixty four hexagrams and their line judgments, reached roughly its present form by the early Zhou dynasty, while the commentaries that explain and moralize the lines, collectively called the Ten Wings and traditionally credited to Confucius, were added considerably later, and modern textual scholarship treats the two layers as historically distinct rather than as one continuous work by a single author.
That layered history became far easier to study directly after 1973, when archaeologists excavated a set of silk manuscripts at Mawangdui, near Changsha, sealed inside a tomb closed in 168 BC. The Mawangdui text arranges its hexagrams in a different order than the version familiar today and occasionally attaches a different judgment to the same line, giving scholars a datable, physical checkpoint for how the wording had already begun to vary well over two thousand years earlier than any previously known copy could show.
Publishing a translation built directly from that manuscript, rather than from the later received text alone, let readers see for the first time how much of the line judgments long taken as fixed had in fact shifted across the centuries separating the Mawangdui burial from the version still printed and consulted today, a gap textual scholars now treat as ordinary for any text copied and recopied by hand over two millennia.