, which
Sima Qian credits Sun Tzu with having participated in. The earliest account of Sun Tzu's life is a short biography in
Shiji (
Records of the Grand Historian) written around 97 BC by
Sima Qian. It states that Sun Tzu was born in
Qi - now in modern
Shandong - near the end of the
Spring and Autumn period (776–471 BC), and had the courtesy name of "Wu." Mair considers the biography to be "essentially fictional". Sun Tzu is also mentioned in later
Tang dynasty-period documents.
Yuanhe Xingzuan (
Compilation of Surnames from the Primal Accord Reign Period) written in 812 AD by Lin Bao says that Sun Tzu's descendants lived in Le'an from the
Han dynasty but provides no evidence; there were no pre-Han places or governmental units called "Le'an" and Mair considers it "impossible to bridge the gap of well over a thousand years" between the Spring and Autumn period and the Tang period records. It is also unclear where Le'an is in modern China; the Le'an geneology in the
New Book of Tang has been associated with the Shandong counties of Boxing and Huimin; there is insufficient evidence to support either. The
Shiji biography consists of an account of how
King Helü of
Wu, having heard of Sun Wu's
Art of War, summoned him to the palace and asked him to demonstrate his ability to train soldiers by training the king's
harem of 180
concubines into soldiers. Sun Tzu was said to have divided them into two companies, appointing the two concubines most favored by the king as the company commanders, and proceeded to give them orders, which they ignored, instead breaking out into laughter. Over the king's protestations, Sun Tzu then had the two concubines executed, at which the rest of the "soldiers" began to behave at once, and the king appointed Sun Wu as a general. He went on to lead the state of Wu to victory against the much larger state of
Chu during the
Battle of Boju in 506 BC. Later accounts also associate Sun Tzu with
Wu Zixu, who was credited with the authorship of the
Wuzi, another ancient Chinese military text. Zixu was said to have been a refugee from Chu, and he introduced Sun Wu to King Helu. Beginning in the 12th century (during the
Song dynasty), several Chinese scholars began to doubt the historical existence of Sun Tzu. During the
Song dynasty,
Ye Shi (1150–1223) noticed that the
Zuo Zhuan, which mentions most of the notable figures from the Spring and Autumn period, does not mention Sun Tzu at all despite the fact that Sima Qian had claimed in the
Records of the Grand Historian that Sun Tzu had proved on the battlefield that his theories were effective at the
Battle of Boju. The
Zuo Zhuan, which was written centuries earlier than the
Records of the Grand Historian and provides a much more detailed account of the Battle of Boju, does not mention Sun Tzu at all. The name "Sun Wu" () does not appear in any text prior to the
Records of the Grand Historian, and may have been an invented descriptive
cognomen meaning "the fugitive warrior"the surname "Sun" can be glossed as the related term "fugitive" ( ), while "Wu" is the ancient Chinese virtue of "martial, valiant" (
wǔ ), or a
Jianghuai dialectal synonym of "
knight", which corresponds to Sunzi's role as the hero's
doppelgänger in the story of
Wu Zixu. unearthed in 1972 include Sun Tzu's
Art of War, collection of
Shandong Museum|left Furthermore, the earliest parts of
The Art of War, the work traditionally credited to Sun Tzu, probably dates to at least a century after him. Anachronisms in
The Art of War include terms, technology (such as anachronistic
crossbows), philosophical ideas, events, and military techniques that should not have been available to Sun Wu. Additionally, there are no records of professional generals during the
Spring and Autumn period; these are only extant from the
Warring States period, so there is doubt as to Sun Tzu's rank and generalship. which had been sealed between 134 and 118 BC. The content of the earlier text is about one-third of the chapters of the modern
The Art of War, and their texts match very closely. Another text discovered in the same collection was
Sun Bin's
Military Methods, In the early 20th century, the Chinese writer and reformer
Liang Qichao had theorized that the text of the
Art of War was actually written in the 4th century BC by this purported descendant of Sun Tzu. Although this hypothesis is no longer tenable, the Sun Bin text's material overlaps with much of the "Sun Tzu" text, and the two may be "a single, continuously developing intellectual tradition united under the Sun name". Unlike Sun Wu, Sun Bin appears to have been an actual person who was a genuine authority on military matters and may have been the inspiration for the creation of the historical figure "Sun Tzu" through a form of
euhemerism. This discovery also demonstrated that much of the historical confusion about anecdotes attributed to Sun Tzu could have been due to the fact that there were two authors that could have been referred to as "Master Sun." ==
The Art of War==