Because no historical records exist for that time, nobody can be 100 percent certain that it was indeed Sun Tzu who wrote TheArtofWar. Indeed we cannot even be sure that such a person really existed. If he did indeed exist, where did he come from? Historians were already debating these issues some 1,000 years ago and according to the research carried out during the Tang (618-907) and Song (960-1279) Dynasties and to genealogy records and sources in the national library, it is almost uniformly accepted Sun Tzu was born in what is now known as Huimin County, Shandong Province in the town of Le’an.
If general agreement has been reached on where Sun Tzu’s place of origin is, there are countless other areas of this mysterious figure’s life where the opinions of historians diverge sharply. Even the two most authoritative books on that period, Records of the Historian and the Spring and Autumn of Wu and Yue, written during the Han Dynasty (206 BC-220 AD) give markedly different accounts of events and even differ on the problem as to where Sun Tzu was in fact born. Authoritative consensus seemed impossible. Then in1972, during an archaeological excavation of a tomb at the foot of Mt. Yinqueshan, in the Linyi region
of Shandong Province, when the archeologists were sorting through the funerary objects uncovered in the tomb, they discovered a number of bamboo slips covered in writing. This writing proved to be none other than The Art of War and thus it was finally confirmed that The Art of War had indeed been produced in an age before paper had been invented. The discovery also confirmed that the author of this remarkable work was indeed none other than Sun Tzu.
