Sun Tzu may not have written The Art of War, or even existed
The world's most famous book on strategy carries the name of a general whom the most detailed early chronicle of his supposed great victory never mentions. Chinese scholars began doubting Sun Tzu in the twelfth century, and the oldest layers of The Art of War appear to date from at least a century after he lived.
Tradition, set down by the historian Sima Qian around 97 BC, makes Sun Wu a native of Qi, in modern Shandong, who served King Helu of Wu and lived from 544 to 496 BC. Sun Tzu is an honorific meaning Master Sun. In the best-known episode, the king tests him by asking him to drill 180 palace concubines. When the women laugh at his orders, he has the king's two favourites, whom he had made officers, put to death over royal protests; the rest obey at once, and he is made a general who goes on to beat the larger state of Chu at Boju in 506 BC.
The scholar Victor Mair calls this biography essentially fictional. In the Song dynasty, Ye Shi (1150 to 1223) pointed out that the Zuo Zhuan, far older than Sima Qian and much more detailed about Boju, says nothing of Sun Tzu. The name Sun Wu appears in no earlier text and may be an invented tag meaning something like fugitive warrior, fitting his role as a companion figure in the legend of Wu Zixu.
The book itself contains anachronisms, including crossbows, ideas and military methods that Sun Wu should not have known, and professional generals are recorded only from the Warring States era. Since Ye Shi, most Chinese, Japanese and Western scholars have dated the text to the start of that period.
Archaeology sharpened the picture in 1972, when construction workers at Yinque Shan in Shandong uncovered bamboo slips sealed between 134 and 118 BC. They held roughly a third of the modern chapters, in wording very close to today's. The same find recovered a separate treatise by Sun Bin, said to be his descendant, which settled an old argument, because both men had been called Sun Tzu and some historians had thought them one person.
Source: Sun Tzu
