With today's technology, it's not unlikely that every single moment of someone's life
is documented like it or not.
But that's a fairly new phenomenon, and throughout most of history we needed to rely on scholars
and scribes to do most of the documenting for us.
And they certainly didn't cover everyone, either, which has left some huge gaps in historical
record.
Those gaps are present for some of history's most famous people, and when researchers start
looking really closely at some of the biggest names out there, they sometimes find they
might not have existed at all.
Let's look at some heavy hitters that might be entirely fictional.
Sun Tzu
The Art of War has long been revered as the guidebook on how to properly wage war.
So who would be more suited to write it than someone like Sun Tzu, an ancient Chinese military
leader and warrior who knew how to fight and win?
But now, people wonder if Sun Tzu was real at all.
Scholars currently know nothing about where The Art of War came from, only that it would
randomly appear usually on sewn-together bamboo slabs for whatever military person or scholar
needed it.
There's no record of Sun Tzu promoting himself as the author, going on book tours, or anything
of that sort.
Even more telling is the fact this great warrior isn't even mentioned in some of the most important
military texts in ancient China.
Some historians now believe Sun Tzu is a pen name, and The Art of War's contents are cobbled
together from generations of Chinese military lessons, theories, and strategies.
Considering how people worldwide are still reading it, it's clearly solid advice.
It just probably didn't come from the mind of one single military genius.
Kunta Kinte
In his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Roots, Alex Haley poignantly wrote:
"In all of us there is a hunger, marrow deep, to know our heritage."
His own ancestral hunger led him to Gambia, where he said his own ancestor, Kunta Kinte,
was born.
Everyone is familiar with the story, but there's a debate how much of Kunta Kinte's story is
true.
Haley famously had a strained relationship with the truth, but some historians have gone
a step further and dismissed Kinte's backstory as simply implausible.
Historians and genealogists have found a ton of evidence that contradicts much of what
Haley wrote.
Dates and geography don't match up, and when it came to research, Haley essentially told
the story he wanted to verify.
His source, an unreliable local villager, told him that yes, he was almost definitely
right.
That's not to take anything away from the impact Roots had on American perceptions of
slavery.
It also deeply impacted Gambia, where an island was named after Kinte and his birthplace became
a tourist attraction.
These are effects are real, but there's a chance that Kinte isn't.
Pythagoras
Pythagoras' influence on mathematics can't be overstated, but there's a growing movement
of people who don't see him as merely the bane of freshman geometry class.
Instead, they see him as a work of fiction.
Everything we know about the man comes from outside sources, like his followers, a group
known as Pythagoreans who may have just made him up as a figurehead.
There's even doubt that his mathematical breakthroughs, like his famous A-squared plus B-squared equals
C-squared, came from him or his followers.
As some historians point out, Babylonian scribes were using some of "his" theorems in their
everyday lives 1,000 years before he existed.
Way to steal their thunder, Greece.
One of the big reasons we'll probably never know the truth about this one is that the
Pythagoreans were bound by a strict code of silence.
It wasn't until Plato's writings a few centuries post-Pythagoras that we really got a glimpse
into their beliefs and their sacred symbols.
So, there you have it.
Even math class might be full of lies.
Shakespeare
Despite all the writing, all the work, and all the portraits we have of Shakespeare,
many people are convinced "William Shakespeare" was a pen name.
Ultimately, we don't actually know much about the small-town bloke named Shakespeare from
Stratford-upon-Avon.
Even stranger is that when he died, he left a will.
What wasn't in the will?
Any mention of what would have been his life's work.
Suspicious, right?
So, who really wrote all that stuff?
Plenty of candidates have emerged over the years, like Francis Bacon, Ben Johnson, and
Christopher Marlowe, but those possibilities haven't stuck.
There's another legitimate possibility with an obscure but brilliant Earl of Oxford.
The theory says that Edward de Vere, whose surviving writings are an undeniably Shakespearean
style, used an assumed name because playwriting was pretty low-brow.
On top of that, he was spilling all kinds of royal secrets and didn't want anyone to
know it was him.
When he died, his followers published his plays under the pen name of some random commoner
named William Shakespeare, who died years back.
It's kind of fitting that it sounds exactly like one of Shakespeare's dramas.
Homer
Despite the popularity and importance of The Iliad and The Odyssey, their author the Greek
poet every English teacher makes their students read remains shrouded in mystery.
For one thing, Homer almost certainly wasn't the originator of these tales, which likely
preceded him by about 1,000 years.
He was simply the first to write them down, so we give him credit for doing all the hard
work… but we still don't know much about him as a person.
Some say Homer was blind, while at least one author argues that Homer was actually a woman.
Other historians believe that Homer was not a single person, but rather a group of Greek
scholars.
And some get even more abstract, suggesting he's essentially the shared consciousness
of an entire culture.
That's heavy, and in the end?
We'll probably never know the truth behind this one.
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