I was reprimanded for my "drive by" short on the history behind sports. People have argued about what is a sport and what is not, so I created a very short blog touching on the first sports. The first sport that I touched on in that blog was wrestling..... Now I give you this blog.
Dating back to the Summero-Akkadian civilization, wrestling sealed itself into the spot of one of the oldest sports to be documented. To all of you who have not brushed up on your Anthropology, the Summero-Akkadian civilization was in the cradle of life, Mesopatamia. The most famous tomb of the Sumer area is that of the great King Ur. It is this era, and close to his reign, that people documented wrestling as a past time and not a survival tactic. These cave drawings have been dated to 3,000 BC. There are similar drawings in Egyptian art that have been dated to 2400 BC. After this time, the Greeks give us our best accounting of the sport.
In 708 BC the Greeks intoduced wrestling into the Olympic games. This is shortly after the Olympic games were created. There are very detailed accounts of how this sport was to be carried out and performed. This was much more rough and physical than the wrestling of today. Historians call this style Greco-Roman wrestling. The Romans also practiced this sport in the now famous Coloseum for entertainment. Pitting the best against the best for all to see. Today there are as many as 100 different styles of wrestling. Judo is one of the more recognized off shoot of the original Greco-Roman style. Today Judo is an entry by itself into the modern day Olympics.
I will not get into depth about Professional wrestling, as this is an animal of a different sort.
So here you are, another short but more detail oriented look at the sport of wrestling. I will hit on something else next week. I am at work ya know!! LOL.
