Before the invention of paper, people wrote on bamboo slips in ancient China. The Yinqueshan bamboo slips of Sun Zi and Sun Bin’s Art of War, dating to the Western Han Dynasty (206 BC-AD 24), gave evidence to the writing of the two books. The nearly 5,000 slips offer precious materials to study ancient Chinese history, philosophy, and calligraphy.
Collected by the Shandong Museum, the slips were unearthed from the Yinqueshan Han Dynasty tomb in Linyi, Shandong province in 1972.