The Art of Warfare

The most widely read military classic in human history, The Art of Warfare is the seminal work on the philosophy of warfare. But only in 1972, when Chinese archaeologists unearthed a cache of manuscripts in a second-century B.C. tomb in Shangtung province, did scholars have the evidence necessary to extend the boundaries of the text beyond the traditional thirteen-chapter version. In the Silver Sparrow Mountain (Yin ch’üeh-shan) dig, in addition to uncovering a partial copy of the thirteen-chapter text dating over a thousand yers earlier than previously available manuscripts, scholars found five hitherto unknown chapters.

Now Roger T. Ames, one of the leading contemporary interpreters of Chinese philosophy and culture, offers the first English translation of this classic to take full advantage of the newly discovered materials. In addition to an entirely new translation of the thirteen-chapter classic informed by these early documents, Ames has provided a translation of the five new chapters found with the Silver Sparrow Mountain texts. He also has incorporated extensive passages which for centuries had been attributed to Sun-tzu but which can only now be properly included in The Art of Warfare because of their similarity to the five new chapters. In all, Professor Ames’s new edition contains more than fifty percent new material. Fluid, crisp, and rigorously faithful to the original, this new text is destined to stand as the definitive version of this cornerstone work of Classical Chinese.

Ames prefaces his translation with an introduction describing the dramatic discovery of the new texts and the painstaking work of Chinese scholars to clean, sort, assemble, and date them. He also includes a critical Chinese text of the entire new version. Ames’s close comparison between the traditional and the new texts leads him to conclude that The Art of Warfare is a composite work that evolved over the years, with the five “outer chapters” being representative of a large body of materials added to explain and elaborate upon points in the core text.

The Ames translation and introduction to the complete Sun-tzu: The Art of Warfare is of compelling importance not only to students of Chinese history and literature, but to all readers interested in the art or the philosophy of war.