Famous people who may never have existed

In our present age of ubiquitous information, it's easy to search for the biography of a celebrity or politician, since history is better preserved now than ever before. Alas, it was not always this way. The facts about many historical figures weren't written down until years — sometimes decades or even centuries — after they allegedly lived. Given this amount of time, the evidence of the individual's existence itself may have completely deteriorated, aside from the stories themselves. Here are some famous people whose names you will recognize but who may never have existed at all, at least in their popular form.

Mulan

Disney introduced movie buffs to the legend of Mulan, though she was already a big deal in Chinese literature. The tale of a warrior's daughter dressing as a man and fighting in her ailing father's place is a timeless bit of badassery and girl power, and it's commonly accepted that Mulan was a real person who actually did all these things. But the evidence is scarce to say the least.

The book Chinese Shadow Theatre: History, Popular Religion, and Women Warriors mentions Mulan might've been a made-up figure, based in part on Wei Huahu, an actual female warrior from ancient China. It's unknown, however, if Huahu ever fought in men's clothing. As for Mulan herself, the earliest known reference to Mushu's big buddy was in an ancient ballad appropriately titled "The Battle of Mulan." But the song doesn't specify when she lived, gives few details of the actual battles she fought, and didn't give a full name for her outside of "Mulan." It's that kind of vagueness that makes you go hmmmm.

Then there's a text called Lienü zhuan translated as Exemplary Women of Early China, written by Liu Xiang around 18 BC, and packed with over 120 biographies of famous women from ancient China. Mulan, despite supposedly being a major deal, has no biography. Granted, she supposedly lived several hundred years after Xiang first published his book, but there's a section at the end for "supplemental biographies." No one has ever added Mulan, even though what she did was quite exemplary indeed.

Shakespeare

Surely the great William Shakespeare was real, right? He has writings — lots of them — and we have portraits of the man. How could that equal a phony? Amazingly, quite easily; many people are convinced "William Shakespeare" was a pen name, and whoever wrote those stories might be lost to history.

As recapped by PBS, there was a guy named William Shakespeare, but we know little about him. We don't know where he learned to write, how he learned so much about law, politics, and history, and his will mentioned no plays or sonnets, which you'd think would be foremost on his mind. It sounds like the real Shakespeare didn't write much more than a grocery list. If true, we're unsure about who the "real" Shakespeare is. Plenty of candidates have emerged over the years, like Francis Bacon, Ben Johnson, and Christopher Marlowe, but these possibilities haven't stuck.

There's another legitimate possibility in the obscure Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere. According to J. Thomas Looney, a schoolteacher who uncovered a great deal about the man, Vere wrote poetry that reads much like what the Bard wrote. According to this theory, Vere used an assumed name because, as nobility, he didn't want to be associated with a low-brow art like playwriting. Then, when he died, his followers published his plays under the pen name of some random commoner named William Shakespeare, who died years back. That's good, because most aspiring writers would much rather be called "Shakespeare" than "Vere."

Robin Hood

The legendary English folk hero Robin Hood is well-known for robbing from the rich and giving to the poor, residing in Sherwood Forest with his gang of outlaws, and wooing Maid Marian. The stories are certainly fictitious, but was Robin Hood a real person or simply based on one? It's impossible to say if any one individual inspired the legend's creation. The stories are either totally invented, or are a combination of elements taken from different historical sources.

Identifying a single person as the basis for the famous outlaw becomes even more difficult given that, as the stories began to grow in popularity in the 13th and 14th centuries, random English outlaws began to call themselves Robin Hood. Nevertheless, some historians speculate that Robin Hood was based, in part anyway, on nobleman Fulk FitzWarin, who rebelled against King John (one of Robin Hood's foes). FitzWarin's life was later turned into its own medieval tale, Fouke le Fitz Waryn, which holds some similarities to the Robin Hood stories. If he was the basis, then a name change was a good decision. The name Fulk FitzWarin doesn't exactly strike fear into the hearts of villains.

Confucius

To quote Confucius: "If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success." That's deep … and deeply problematic. Research suggests that dishonest children become successful adults and that highly successful adults lie. That's a whole lot of wrong there, Confucius.

Of course, if Confucius never existed, then the quote's been misattributed, meaning the words can't accord with the truth. Thus, in being wrong, the quote would be right, which sounds super wrong. And the Confucian confusion doesn't end there. Experts believe he was born in Lu, China, and created the Ru School of Chinese thought. But depending on which document you read, Confucius comes off as an unflinching idealist, an ambitious politician, or a fifth-century B.C. superhero. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy cautioned that even The Analects, academia's go-to resource for info on Confucius, suffers from striking inconsistencies and improbabilities.

Confucius's whole shtick was setting guidelines for righteous living, but historians debate his basic precepts. In The Human Record: To 1700, Alfred Andrea and James Hoverfield discussed filial piety (respect for elders and ancestors), a principle often regarded as Confucianism's core. According to the authors, it wasn't really a big deal to him. In fact, many claims attributed to Confucius are arguably apocryphal. Fittingly, the guy described as China's Socrates raises more questions than he answers.

William Tell

William Tell is a Swiss folk hero best known for child endangerment. Tell allegedly lived in Switzerland during the early 14th century, when the Hapsburg dynasty of Austria ruled the land. As the story goes, an Austrian official placed a hat on a pole in city of Altdorf and commanded every Swiss subject to remove their caps as they passed by it. One day, Tell, a local peasant who was accompanied by his son, refused to do so. In response, the Austrians forced Tell to shoot an apple off his son's head at 120 paces or face execution. Tell loaded his crossbow and skillfully shot the apple. He then went on to lead a small revolt against the Austrians — presumably after buying his son some new pants.

Tell is essentially the Swiss version of Robin Hood and, much like the outlaw of Sherwood Forest, he probably never existed. The apple story is extremely similar to a Viking folktale, which most likely was imported to Switzerland at some point and used by Swiss patriots as a rallying cry against their Austrian rulers.

Sun Tzu

Sun Tzu's The Art of War has long been revered as the preeminent guidebook on how to properly wage war. So who better to advise than someone like Tzu, an ancient Chinese military leader and warrior who knew how to fight and win? He also knew how to motivate his charges, reportedly beheading two men popular with the king, just to show the other courtesans nobody was safe from punishment and discipline.

But now, people wonder if Sun Tzu was real at all. As History.com explains, 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, and even the story of him beheading those poor courtesans is unsourced and quite possibly a myth.

It stands to reason "Sun Tzu" is a pen name, and Art of War's contents are cobbled together from generations of Chinese military lessons, theories, and strategies. Considering how people worldwide are still reading and learning from it, thousands of years after it first appeared, it's clearly solid advice. It just probably didn't come from the mind of one cruel military genius.