 On April 10 , 1972 , the <unk> Han Tombs were accidentally unearthed by construction workers in Shandong . Scholars uncovered a collection of ancient texts written on unusually well @-@ preserved bamboo slips . Among them were The Art of War and Sun Bin 's Military Methods . Although Han dynasty bibliographies noted the latter publication as extant and written by a descendant of Sun , it had previously been lost . The rediscovery of Sun Bin 's work is regarded as extremely important by scholars , both because of Sun Bin 's relationship to Sun Tzu and because of the work 's addition to the body of military thought in Chinese late antiquity . The discovery as a whole significantly expanded the body of surviving Warring States military theory . Sun Bin 's treatise is the only known military text surviving from the Warring States period discovered in the twentieth century and bears the closest similarity to The Art of War of all surviving texts . 
