The Man'yōshū(万葉集?, literally "Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves",) is the oldest existing collection of Japanese poetry, compiled sometime after 759 AD during the Nara period. The anthology is one of the most revered of Japan's poetic compilations. The compiler, or the last in a series of compilers, is today widely believed to be Ōtomo no Yakamochi, although numerous other theories have been proposed. The collection contains poems ranging from AD 347 through 759 the bulk of them representing the period after 600. The precise significance of the title is not known with certainty.
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