The Art of War takes shape as the Spring and Autumn order collapses into the Warring States — the era when war stopped being a seasonal ritual of chariot-riding aristocrats and became total, professional, and ruinously expensive. Tradition says Sun Wu of Qi presented these thirteen chapters to King Helü of Wu around 512 BC and proved his method by drilling the king's palace women into ranks (executing two favorite concubines to make the point); modern scholarship reads the text as a 5th-century compilation refined by a school of strategists. Either way it is the first book anywhere to treat war as a system — costed, calculated, won or lost before the armies meet — and its bamboo strips were already classics when a copy was sealed into a Han tomb at Yinqueshan around 130 BC.

Treatise The Art of War 500 BC