Chinese
The compilers of China's oldest surviving books left no names. The Book of Songs gathers three hundred and five poems sung between roughly the eleventh and seventh centuries BC — harvest songs, complaints about conscription, courtship, and hymns for ancestral sacrifice — collected from several states and edited into a canon that Confucius quoted constantly. The Book of Changes grew from Zhou dynasty divination records into a layered text of hexagram statements, line statements and philosophical commentaries added over centuries. The Classic of Mountains and Seas assembles geography, ritual and monsters from a range of periods and hands. Traditional attributions to King Wen, the Duke of Zhou, Confucius or Yu the Great are honorific rather than historical, and none survives modern scholarship. This record stands for the collective, multi-generation authorship of the early Chinese classics and is kept separate from anonymous authorship in other traditions.