 While the author and his work are traditionally dated to the 6th century BCE, the Mawangdui and especially the Guodian manuscripts (discovered in 1972 and 1993, respectively; Henricks 1989 and 2000) have helped to establish that early exemplars of the Daode jing—shorter than the current versions and different from one another—circulated by the latter half of the 4th century BCE. It is also usually acknowledged, though, that the text incorporates earlier oral traditions. While this makes the issue of dating virtually impossible to solve, it also suggests that at first there was no “original” and “complete” exemplar of the text, which probably existed in several versions of varying content and length until, probably in the late 3rd century BCE, it was compiled in a form close to the one we know today. (For overviews of the Daode jing and its exegetical tradition, see Chan 2000 and Robinet 1999, respectively.)