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Sima Qian's father Sima Tan served as Grand Historian, and Sima Qian succeeded to his position. Thus he had access to the early Han dynasty archives, edicts, and records. Sima Qian was a methodical, skeptical historian who had access to ancient books, written on bamboo and wooden slips, from before the time of the Han dynasty. Many of the ...
Before compiling Shiji, Sima Qian was involved in the creation of the 104 BC Taichu Calendar 太初暦 (太初 became the new era name for Emperor Wu and means "supreme beginning"), a modification of the Qin calendar. This is the first Chinese calendar whose full method of calculation (暦法) has been preserved.
The Shiji (Records of the Grand Historian), written by the Han dynasty historian Sima Qian, is about 526,000 Chinese characters long, making it four times longer than Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War, and longer than the Old Testament.
Although Sima Tan began writing the Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji), he died before it was finished; it was completed by his son, Sima Qian. The year of Sima Tan's death (110 BCE) was the year of the great imperial sacrifice fengshan by Emperor Han Wudi, for which the emperor appointed another person to the rank of fangshi, bypassing ...
Sima Qian's account of the execution of the scholars has similar difficulties. First, no text earlier than the Shiji mentions the executions, the Shiji mentions no Confucian scholar by name as a victim of the executions, and in fact, no other text mentions the executions at all until the 1st century CE. The earliest known use of the famous ...
Sima Qian's Shiji (or Records of the Grand Historian, completed around 94 BC) was the first work to turn these fragments of myths into a systematic and consistent narrative of the Yellow Emperor's "career". [61] The Shiji ' s account was extremely influential in shaping how the Chinese viewed the origin of their history. [62]
Shiji: Records of the Grand Historian: Sima Qian: First complete history. Extant. 19.568–9, n 2; biography of Cao Zhi [3] 世語 Shiyu: Accounts of this Generation: Guo Song (郭頒) Also known as Wei Jin Shiyu (魏晉世語), and not to be confused with Shishuo Xinyu, which is sometimes shortened to Shiyu as well. A particularly poor ...
According to Sima Qian's Shiji, Sun Tzu, the author of The Art of War, was the main commander of the Wu army, but he was not mentioned in the Zuo Zhuan and other earlier historical texts. The Chu forces were led by Lingyin (prime minister) Nang Wa (also known as Zichang) and Sima (chief military commander) Shen Yin Shu.