Sun Tzu

Chinese general and strategist to whom The Art of War is traditionally attributed, a treatise in thirteen chapters that has shaped military thought across East Asia and, later, well beyond it. Tradition places him in the Spring and Autumn period, around 544–496 BC, in the service of King Helü of Wu, on the authority of the Han historian Sima Qian. Historians have questioned his existence since the twelfth century, and bamboo slips unearthed in 1972 support the view that the text as we have it belongs to the Warring States period, a century or more after his supposed lifetime.