The Engishiki, compiled between 905 and 927 and put into effect in 967, is an administrative code in fifty books covering court procedure in exhaustive detail. Its importance for Shinto is twofold. Books one to ten cover the Department of Divinities, and book eight preserves twenty-seven norito — the oldest sustained liturgical Japanese anywhere, including the great purification liturgy still recited in modified form. Books nine and ten are the jinmyōchō, a register of 2,861 shrines and 3,132 kami officially recognised and entitled to court offerings; a shrine listed there is an Engishiki-naisha, and to this day shrines advertise the status on their signage as proof of antiquity, because it is documentary evidence of existence before 927. The code also fixes the ritual calendar, the specifications of offerings, and the ranks of priests. It is the single most important document for reconstructing what shrine practice looked like before the medieval merging with Buddhism.