Most of us were riveted this week by the unfolding drama of the Somali pirates who boarded the Maersk Alabama, captured Captain Richard Phillips, and held him hostage in a small fiberglass lifeboat.   Like many onlookers, I hoped for a peaceful resolution, and I was much struck by a comment made by Admiral Rick Gurnon, president of the Massachusetts’ Maritime Academy, last Sunday in the thick of the crisis.   In an interview with a Boston Herald reporter, Gurnon counseled both patience and negotiation as the surest routes for resolving the tense situation.  “The best battle is the one you don’t have to fight,” said Gurnon, “Don’t listen to the hotheads.  Wait it out.”

 

Gurnon, as some will know, was paraphrasing The Art of War, one of most influential books ever to emerge from China.  Written by anonymous Chinese scholars some 2200 years ago, during the Warring States period, this slender volume is a terse meditation on the many ways of trumping an enemy.  And it remains  a military classic even today.  The U.S. Marine Corps requires all its officers to read it, and the United States Secretary of Defence, Robert Gates,  is clearly a big fan: he paraphrased it twice in appearances before Congress over the last year.

 

                What you might not know, however, is that we owe our finest English-language translation of The Art of War to an archaeological discovery.   In 1972, Chinese archaeologists working at Yinque Shan (Silver Sparrow Mountain) in Shangdong province opened two Han tombs littered with lacquered cups, pieces of jade and silk, terra cotta warriors and thousands of bamboo strips covered in black-inked characters. The strips, which dated to the second century B.C., bore the earliest known copy of The Art of War, one little corrupted by later copying errors.

 

Three decades after archaeologists stumbled on these remarkable tombs, Victor Mair sat down and began thinking about a new translation of The Art of War.  Mair, a professor of Chinese literature and language at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the world’s greatest living Sinologists, found the book “a difficult, sometimes maddeningly obscure text.”  So he decided to approach his translation in a new way.  He took the ancient bamboo strips from Yinque Shan as his starting point and, over a two-year period, meticulously reinterpreted passages distorted over time.

 

Mair likes nothing better than to work in an economy-class seat at 35,000 feet, which is a lucky thing, since Mair travels extensively.  Over a period of 25 days in the late summer of 2005,  Mair translated The Art of War as he flew from Philadelphia to Hongkong, Changchua, Ji’an, Shanghai,  Beijing,  Bombay, Hyderabad, and then back home to Philadelphia.  The result was a modern masterpiece acclaimed by critics for its spare, poetic clarity.  Mair’s “consummate knowledge of classic Chinese and sensitivity to the nuances of the text shows it in a genuinely fresh way,” observes  Nicola di Cosmo, a professor of East Asian Studies at Princeton.  

 

And there is one other  connection here to archaeology.  Mair is the researcher who brought the famous Xinjiang mummies to the attention of the world.  Dating back to the Bronze Age and sharing the same genetic lineage as modern Swedes, Finns and Sardinians,  these  Caucasoid mummies demonstrate beyond all doubt that the East and West have shared cultural traditions since at least the 21^st century B.C., if not longer.      

 

 But I digress.  I thought of Mair and The Art of War last Sunday night, when I heard that snipers aboard the USS Bainbridge shot and killed three of the pirates holding Phillips.   They won the battle—gaining Phillip’s freedom—but may have lost the war, fuelling heightened violence in the region.  I wish someone had listened to Gurney, or better yet,  read Mair’s translation of The Art of War. 

This entry was posted by Heather Pringle on Friday, April 17, 2009. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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