 Many biographies begin their description of his life with a story of Confucius at an early age performing rituals, reflecting accounts and statements that demonstrate his prodigious mastery of ritual and music. The archaeological record shows that one legacy of the Zhou period into which Confucius was born was a system of sumptuary regulations that encoded social status. Another of these legacies was ancestral sacrifice, a means to demonstrate people’s reverence for their ancestors while also providing a way to ask the spirits to assist them or to guarantee them protection from harm. The Analects describes the ritual mastery of Confucius in receiving guests at a noble’s home (10.3), and in carrying out sacrifices (10.8, 15.1). He plays the stone chimes (14.39), distinguishes between proper and improper music (15.11, 17.18), and extols and explains the Classic of Odes to his disciples (1.15, 2.2, 8.3, 16.13, 17.9). This mastery of classical ritual and musical forms is an important reason Confucius said he “followed Zhou” (3.14). While he might alter a detail of a ritual out of frugality (9.3), Confucius insists on adherence to the letter of the rites, as when his disciple Zi Gong 子貢 sought to substitute another animal for a sheep in a seasonal sacrifice, saying “though you care about the sheep, I care about the ritual” (3.17). It was in large part this adherence to Zhou period cultural forms, or to what Confucius reconstructed them to be, that has led many in the modern period to label him a traditionalist.