A longer version of the Documents was said to be discovered in the wall of Confucius's family estate in Qufu by his descendant Kong Anguo in the late 2nd century BC.

[2][3] In 317 AD, Mei Ze presented to the Eastern Jin court a 58-chapter (59 if the preface is counted) Book of Documents as Kong Anguo's version of the text.

In the transmitted edition, texts are grouped into four sections representing different eras: the legendary reign of Yu the Great, and the Xia, Shang and Zhou dynasties.

Some of its modern-script chapters are among the earliest examples of Chinese prose, recording speeches from the early years of the Zhou dynasty in the late 11th century BC.

While Confucius invoked the pre-dynastic emperors Yao and Shun, as well as figures from the Xia and Shang dynasties, he complained of the lack of documentation prior to the Zhou.

The chapters currently believed to be the oldest—mostly relating to the early Zhou—were little used by Warring States authors, perhaps due to the difficulty of the archaic language or a less familiar worldview.

Fu Sheng reconstructed part of the work from hidden copies in the late 3rd to early 2nd century BC, at the start of the succeeding Han dynasty.

[19] A version of the Documents that included the "Old Script" texts was allegedly rediscovered by the scholar Mei Ze during the 4th century, and presented to the imperial court of the Eastern Jin.

[21] Since the Song dynasty, starting from Wu Yu (吳棫), many doubts had been expressed concerning the provenance of the allegedly rediscovered "Old Script" texts in Mei Ze's edition.

[23] New light has been shed on the Book of Documents by the recovery between 1993 and 2008 of caches of texts written on bamboo slips from tombs of the state of Chu in Jingmen, Hubei.

The collection also includes two documents that the editors considered to be versions of the Old Script texts "Common Possession of Pure Virtue" and "Command to Fu Yue".

Guo Changbao 过常宝 claims that the graph for announcement (誥), known since the Oracle bone script, also appears on two bronze vessels (He zun and Shi Zhi gui 史[臣+舌]簋), as well as in the "six genres" 六辞 of the Zhou li[32][clarification needed] In many cases a speech is introduced with the phrase Wáng ruò yuē (王若曰 'The king seemingly said'), which also appears on commemorative bronze inscriptions from the Western Zhou period, but not in other received texts.

[33][34] The chapters are grouped into four sections representing different eras: the semi-mythical reign of Yu the Great, and the three ancient dynasties of the Xia, Shang and Zhou.

The first two sections – on Yu the Great and the Xia dynasty – contain two chapters each in the Modern Script version, and though they purport to record the earliest material in the Documents, from the 2nd millennium BC, most scholars believe they were written during the Warring States period.

[35] Not all of the Modern Script chapters are believed to be contemporaneous with the events they describe, which range from the legendary emperors Yao and Shun to early in the Spring and Autumn period.

[36] Six of these chapters concern figures prior to the first evidence of writing, the oracle bones dating from the reign of the Late Shang king Wu Ding.

They are believed to have been modelled on the earlier speeches by writers in the Spring and Autumn period, a time of renewed interest in politics and dynastic decline.

Pointing to the similarity of its title to formulas found in the Anyang oracle bone inscriptions, David Nivison proposed that the chapter was written or recorded by a collateral descendant of Wu Ding in the late Shang period some time after 1140 BC.

[47] The chapters dealing with the legendary emperors, the Xia dynasty and the transition to Shang are very similar in language to such classics as the Mencius (late 4th century BC).

They present idealized rulers, with the earlier political concerns subordinate to moral and cosmological theory, and are believed to be the products of philosophical schools of the late Warring States period.