The Art of War, buried for 2,000 years

In April 1972, workers digging at Yinqueshan, near Linyi in China’s Shandong province, broke into two tombs from the Western Han dynasty, sealed more than 2,100 years ago. Inside were nearly 5,000 strips of bamboo, once tied together with cord into books.

The cords had rotted, so the strips lay jumbled in mud. Scholars spent years sorting and matching them. Among the texts they found was a version of The Art of War more than a thousand years older than any copy previously known.

There was a bigger surprise. The tombs also held a second, long-lost book: the Art of War of Sun Bin, a descendant of Sun Tzu who lived about a century later. Historians had begun to doubt that Sun Bin’s book had ever existed; some had suggested the two Suns were the same person.

The find showed that the text we read today is close to what readers studied in the Han dynasty. A book about strategy had survived using the oldest strategy of all: staying hidden and waiting.