Oldest Martial Art?

[Steel Tiger]

Hello, It was so simple "A caveman could do it"!

Throwing stones....could have been the first weapons ever use against man? Today it has not change much except for the size of the rocks.

PS: We sell 8oz,10oz and 12oz stones...to place an order: call 1- rock throwing. Only the best is sold! All rocks are age for temperment.
(for custom colors and shapes, add $2.00 more)

Hmmm, some 12oz purples sound very attractive.

 

[JBrainard]

I have issues with that legend. To begin with -- it's just a legend. I'm not personally aware of much real support, and there WAS martial arts training (as in systemized training of soldiers) in China before the Shaolin Temple. In fact, it seems more likely to me that what would have been taught would be more of a yoga-type system than combatives, if the goal was developing the monks's strength for their religious practice. I recall reading an interesting critique of that legend, but I can't recall exactly where.

Don't get me wrong, I realize that you can shoot HUGE holes through the Ta Mo legend. I brought it up more as a "lead in" to my statements about the Indian martial arts and Pancration.

As a sidenote: I don't think the caveman clubing each other thing has anything to do with this discussion. My ability to pick up a rock and lob it at your head doesn't make me a martial artist

 

[Andrew Green]

As a sidenote: I don't think the caveman clubing each other thing has anything to do with this discussion. My ability to pick up a rock and lob it at your head doesn't make me a martial artist

I don't know, really no way of telling how complex the training they gave their young was. Either way though, I'm pretty sure we had a gradual progression / change. Assigning a date or name to the "first" martial art seems like it would be kind of like naming the first spoken language. At what point does it cross over from grunts to a language?

 

[Xue Sheng]

Don't get me wrong, I realize that you can shoot HUGE holes through the Ta Mo legend. I brought it up more as a "lead in" to my statements about the Indian martial arts and Pancration.

As a sidenote: I don't think the caveman clubing each other thing has anything to do with this discussion. My ability to pick up a rock and lob it at your head doesn't make me a martial artist

shuai jiao
Legend states that Jiao di was used in 2,697 BCE

Jiao li was a grappling martial art that was developed in the Zhou Dynasty (between the twelfth and third century BCE). An official part of Zhou military's training program under the order of the king

Bodhidharma aka Ta Mo or Da Mo came to China considerably later during wither the Liú Sòng Dynasty (420–479) and later or Liáng Dynasty (502–557).

 

[still learning]

Hello, Just read about wrestling in ancient Greece when everyone was naked and bodies oil. No weight classes and No pins. NO time limits.

The winner was the one who throw downs the other person three times, became the winner (ancient Greece).
================

Today head gear, clothes and ankle high shoes is require. NO oils on the body, and to win you must pin the shoulders/back, or more than 15 points ahead,or ahead on points, can last as long as three rounds of three minutes long. Plus you must be in the same weight class, 98lbs,112lbs,119lbs,125lbs and so on...Hawaii HIgh.

===============
PS: Our rocks are not for pets....(None pet rocks available). Rocks are design for human anatomy. We are located only a stone thow away...1-800-XXX-XXXX ............Aloha

 

[Steel Tiger]

I thought it was always quite clear that Da Mo brought to China a series of exercise techniques that the Chan monks at Shaolin used to keep themselves fit. These exercises were the basis of the Yi Jin Jing (Muscle and Tendon Change Classic) and perhaps the Ba Dua Jin (Eight Brocades Change). It is not explicit that he introduced any fighting techniques.

That having been said, a fighting form we used to teach basics, the Tiger Fist, is quite different to 'normal' tiger forms, and when compared to Kalari there are quite a few similarities. It originated in Sichuan, much closer to India and generally speaking somewhat separated from the rest of China.

 

[Andrew Green]

If you really want I am sure you could find a place that will let you wrestle with a bunch of naked oiled up guys... Might even make a little money doing it

Today head gear, clothes and ankle high shoes is require. NO oils on the body, and to win you must pin the shoulders/back, or more than 15 points ahead,or ahead on points, can last as long as three rounds of three minutes long. Plus you must be in the same weight class, 98lbs,112lbs,119lbs,125lbs and so on...Hawaii HIgh.
/quote]

 

[Karatedrifter7]

Boxing practiced by the Ancient Egyptians. Before that, Neanderthal style Kung Fu.

 

[Kosho Gakkusei]

Depends on your worldview.

Biblical: Cain used a stone to kill Abel.

Evolution: Some half monkey/man tribe decided they wanted the other's cave, land, women, or food.

_Don Flatt

 

[Last Fearner]

As a sidenote: I don't think the caveman clubing each other thing has anything to do with this discussion. My ability to pick up a rock and lob it at your head doesn't make me a martial artist

This has been a point that I have made several times, but I don't believe everyone will ever agree on it. One reason is that we can not definitively prove what happened first and where, because records were not always kept, and sifting through archaeological and ancient history is often open to interpretation.

Furthermore, I don't believe everyone will ever agree on what "qualifies" as a Martial Art!!! I have my point of view that I believe is valid, but others are always searching for something older.... "my art came first!"

We can ask, "when was the first automobile" invented," and probably come up with a close estimate. However, you would get people showing old photos of horse and buggies with four wheels and a driver, or ancient drawings of egyptian chariots! We have had modes of "transportation" for a long time, but if I define an "automobile" as a device for conveyance which is self propelled, I would say that it began when the internal combustion engine replaced the horse for pulling a cart.

I believe we can find evidence (or theories and legends) of armies and people who fought, and trained to fight for eons. People threw rocks, hit each other with clubs, stabbed each other with spears and other sharp implements, wore heavy armor, carried shields, and swung swords and other deadly objects at each other.... and then they invented gun powder.

Does any of this really describe the "Martial Art." If this basic, concept of crude "fighting" and military "combat training" is your perception of the "Martial Art," then by all means, keep digging further into the past and looking for anything that resembles, or is related to people fighting, or training for combat.

For me, these are the seeds that grew into the physical aspect of what exists in the Martial Art today. However, IF the Martial Art (as a general concept) was only about the "physical" aspect, then what sets it apart from any fighting method? What makes it unique in the first place? Why have there been combat and training methods for hundreds of thousands of years, but only recently an appreciation for this "special" and unique system called the "Martial Art."

The wheel is ancient. If the automobile began when wheels were merged with internal combustion (although other methods are used today), then the Martial Art began when the ability to fight and kill and win wars was combined with ethics, morality, an appreciation of life and the desire to protect and preserve the lives of innocent people everywhere - - not just in your own family, neighborhood, or country. Human rights, honor, dignity, and protecting the weak wherever injustice occurs is what I believe made the Martial Art more than a sport of wrestling, a contest of boxing, or an army training to win in battle.

Is any act of violence or murder to be construed as the "Martial Art?" How can we look any ancient drawings and evidence of nearly any form of physical combat and determine that the intent of the practitioners was honorable, and that they combined their ability to take a life, with the self-restraint not to take a life unecessarily. If that does not matter to you, then continue believing that it is, and was, all "Martial Art." For me, nothing could be further from the truth!

Respectfully,
Chief Master D.J. Eisenhart

 

[exile]

Just to get some hunches on the table, I suggest we start off with a little bit of deduction here.

First of all, we know that even as late as the Mesolithic period in Europe, Asia and Africa, human populations were relatively extremely low, with very spare population/territory ratios. Anthropological studies of human groups (in places like the (sub)Arctic, Tierra del Fuego, the Great Basin and other areas strongly suggest that under these conditions, territoriality is not a social trait, and this is particularly true in hunter/gathering societies. Aggression directed inward is dangerous for such groups, and outward aggression rarely gets a chance to develop because of the infrequency of contact; moreover, in the absence of fixed resources, such groups, even under conditions of relative abundance, tend to find their food supplies by roaming, exhausting the resources available in one area before moving on. Defending a fixed territory would be pointless even if there were someone nearby to defend it against, that sort of thing. So such groups are almost certainly low-violence groups, and it seems very unlikely that there would be the systematized comprehensive combat systems covered by the term `martial art' = (comprehensive) combat skill set.

We find territoriality coming in under two conditions:

(i) in contexts favorable to agriculture, the Neolithic Revolution leads to both fixed territories occupied by groups who can count on, and must therefore defend, fertile land which can yield dependable harvests year after year; these same dependable harvests increase the likelihood of survival for more individuals. More people, fixed land translate to both territoriality and pressure on the carrying capacity of the fixed territory. Since this is happening across the board in a give larger area, we wind up with a bunch of increasingly large groups struggling to accomodate their growing populations and increasingly turning to aggression against other such groups in order to occupy additional desirable areas.

(ii) in certain unusual contexts where agriculture is not known but game is abundant and predictable, e.g., the North Pacific coast and the the high plains of preagricultural western North America, reliable heavy runs of fish or regular migratory movements of buffalo or similar resources yield a similar effect: territoriality and serious armed intergroup conflict. These do not appear to lead to full-scale protracted conflicts that we would want to label war, but they do put a premium on skills with weapons.​

As population densities increase, social stratification becomes more evident; there are many arguments amongst anthropologists as to why (or at least there used to be, way back when some of my best friends were anthopologists :wink1. The point is that somewhere in the course of things, increased population, competition for resources within as well as between groups and improved technology for weapons production to support this intergroup conflict leads to higher levels of violence requiring systematic training in the use of weapons and the maintenance of both standing armed forces and law enforcement personnel.

The first great cities we know about—those in the Valley of Mexico and the Andean high plateau, in the Indus Valley, on the Yangtze, on the Nile and the Tigris-Euphrates Valley—all seem to be the culmination of cycles of conquest that begin along the lines I've been sketching; it's likely that they represent several thousand years of increasingly dense societies forcibly constructed by waves of intergroup fighting. One reasonable place to start one's quest for the oldest martial art would be somewhere between the full-blown Neolithic Revolution on the one hand and the appearance of the first great cities and fully stratified societies supporting professional armies as a necessary condition for their own survival in the face of attacks by other such cities.

That means that, on this scenario, you are looking at a time frame somewhere between, say, 11,000 years ago at the lower end and maybe 8,000 years back for the most ancient cities in the Middle East. This is all of course a bit rough. But it probably gives the right order of magnitude.

I also strongly suspect that the first martial arts were weapons-based, and that empty-handed fighting systems arose as extensions of weapons-based systems. We know that this has happened in at least one instance: as Iain Abernethy points out,

many of the Minimoto samurai took Okinawan wives and remained upon the island for the rest of their days. The bujitsu of the Minimoto samurai had a large influence on the fighting methods employed by the Okinawan nobles. One part of Minimoto bujitsu that had an influence on the development of karate was the idea that all motion is essentially the same. Whether striking, grappling or wielding a weapon, the Minamoto samurai taught that all combative methods relied upon similar physical movements... the results of this combat philosophy can still be seen in modern day karate.​

(Bunkai-jutsu: the Practical Application of Karate Kata, p.6.) My guess would be that military systems of weapons applications preceded civilian empty hand systems, that the latter arise only under rather more specialized circumstances than the former (enforced occupation by a colonial power in the era preceding firearms) and that something along the lines that Abernethy sketches for the relationship between weapon and empty-handed jutsu systems may well be involved in the evolution of unarmed martial arts.

So these are my hunches. And before they can be defended even seriously, they need to be subject to the most stringent investigation against the available evidence, to the extent that we can find any. If we can't, then they remain unsupported speculations without the faintest claim on anyone's belief; all one can say on their behalf is that they comport well with various ethnological and archaeological data and show goodness of fit with known historical events. But they remain nothing but hunches. Still, you have to have a hunch to start with if you want to get any further, eh?

 

[slideyfoot]

As has been mentioned, its probably pointless to try and pin down when martial arts 'started', as it would most likely be caveman-bash-with-rock-fu. However, we can at least look into documented martial arts.

The oldest martial art is possibly boxing – you’ll frequently see reference to ‘evidence in North Africa from 4000BC’, though I’ve yet to actually see a picture. I’ve also seen mention of Egyptian hieroglyphs from around 3000BC, but again no pictures.

Wrestling has a proven history dating to at least 1950 BC, with murals from Beni Hasan, Egypt demonstrating recognisable wrestling technique. As Kronos puts it:

1950BC: The world’s oldest known wrestling manual appears as frescoes on the walls of four separate tombs built near Beni Hasan, Egypt. Their purpose was probably to show the departed ways to defeat the opponents they might encounter in the afterlife. If the dead were able to follow the pictures, they might have been successful, too, as nearly all of the 400 holds and escapes shown are still used in freestyle wrestling. The wrestlers are usually naked except for a wrestling belt, and are shown with contrasting skin colors to make it easier to distinguish individual holds.

And from this site:

At Beni Hasan more than 4000 wrestling scenes were found, dated from 2000 BC. There, we attend a number of athletic movements and postures of athletes in pairs. The wrestlers, wearing belts, attempt to turn their opponents to their back by back or shoulder movements.

If you scroll down, that site does includes a picture - its tripod, so you can’t hotlink, but it shows ground wrestling scenes from Beni Hasan. Wall paintings from tombs 15 & 17, c. 2000 BC. Drawings reproduced from Poliakoff, Combat Sports in the Ancient World, Yale University Press, 1987 fig. 7 & 11.

Even older are the limestone plaques and bronze jars depicting wrestlers from Nintu Temple VI in what used to be Sumeria (modern-day Iraq), dating from as far back as 3000 BC (from here):


http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/%7Edromano/classes/02d.jpg

Terracotta Plaque of Wrestlers and Boxers
Khafaji, Nintu Temple
Early Dynastic Period, 3000-2340 B.C.
Iraq Museum, Baghdad


http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/%7Edromano/classes/02a.jpg


Sculpted Stela of Wrestlers
2900 B.C.
Badra, Iraq
Iraq Museum

http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/%7Edromano/classes/02c.jpg

Copper Statuette of Wrestlers
Khafaji, Nintu Temple
Early Dynastic Period, ca. 2600 B.C.
Iraq Museum, Baghdad

 

[exile]

These are terrific images, Slideyfoot. But I always get a little uncomfortable with this kind of graphic-image interpretation unless it's backed up with some kind of corroborating text. Issues of this sort have arisen in the course of attempts to use physical evidence to defend `ancient' forms of KMA. In one of his papers on the origins of Taekwondo, for example, Dakin Burdick notes that

Although Taekwondo is a modern art, many Korean practitioners claim that the art began in the Koguryo dynasty (c. 37 B.C.). They claim that various Koguryo dynasty royal tombs contain murals of men practicing Taekwondo. Interpretation of these postures, which seems to be mere wishful thinking, apparently began with Tatashi Saito's "Study of Culture in Ancient Korea." Saito said that:

"The painting either shows us that the person buried in the tomb practiced Taekwondo while he was alive or it tells us that people practiced it, along with dancing and singing, for the purpose of consoling the dead."

None of the Koguryo tomb murals can be definitively identified as the practice of a kicking & striking art. The murals on the ceiling of the Muyong- chong are said to show "two men practicing a sort of Taekwondo." They actually show two men -- both with goatee, moustache and long hair -- wearing loin cloths. They are at least four feet apart (their outstretched hands are a foot away from each other). The positions could be stretching, dancing, or possibly wrestling Mongolian style, but they certainly do not resemble modern Taekwondo stances or techniques.

The ceiling of Sambo-chong shows a man in deep horse stance who appears to be pushing the walls apart. The WTF claims that this is "Poomse practicing of Taekwondo," something that would be hard to determine from a single figure, and certainly not the simplest explanation of the position. Similarly, the paintings on the ceiling of Kakchu-chong shows two men either dancing or Mongolian wrestling (the figures date from the age of San-Sang, the tenth King of Koguryo), but Dr. Lee Sun Kun (President of Kyung Puk University) tries to say that the mural "shows sparring of Soo Bak."​

(See article at http://budosportcopelle.ml/gesch.html)

The absurdity of this kind of long post-hoc rationale for such claims emerges especially clearly when one learns that, according to Burdick `the martial arts depicted in Koguryo tomb murals closely resemble those in the tomb murals of the Eastern Han, located in what is now eastern China. This suggests that the form of Koguryo era martial arts emerged because of Chinese cultural influence, rather than independent development by the future Koreans'. (See Burdick's 1997 version of this paper, `People and events of Taekwondo's formative years' in the Journal of Asian Martial Arts)

Of the second-most-often cited piece of material evidence bearing on the existence of an ancient Korean combat system which contributed tothe current MAs TKD/TSD, Burdick comments that `the statue of Kumkang-Yuksa at Sokkuram, which is often cited as the figure of an ancient warrior practicing taekwondo, is in fact a Buddhist guardian figure found throughout East Asia, and thus cannot be said to be unique to Korea either.' (1997 paper.) Stanley Henning's 2000 JAMA article `Traditional Korean Martial Arts' echoes this observation, noting that

these guardians are in the style common to contemporary Tang China (618–907), on which they were most assuredly modeled. Even some reputable Korean sources refer to these figures as `wrestlers' rather than `boxers', but they are most commonly called `strong men' (lishi in Chinese or ryuksa in Korean).' ​

(p.10; my emphasis). The problems these historians have exposed with the interpretation of the physical evidence involved are general in nature: how do you know what's being depicted? Consider the fact that it's not only the WTF claiming this physical evidence on behalf of the art it promotes and to a large extent controls; we also find exactly the same archæological artefacts invoked by Kang Uk Kee (Tang Soo Do: The Ultimate Guide to the Korean Martial Art, Orange, CA: Unique Publications, 1998, pp.8–12) on behalf of Tang Soo Do, and by Hui Son Choe (Hapkido: The Korean Martial Art of Self Defense, Thousand Oaks, CA: Hui Son Choe Publishing, p.8) on behalf of Hapkido!!. You can imagine TKD and TSD claiming the same physical evidence—they're fraternal if not identical twins, split from the same Moo Duk Kwan in the mid/late 1950s, but Hapkido?? But that's the point: the physical evidence doesn't support the claims of TKD, or TSD, or HKD, against either of the others; in fact the same evidence could be equally plausibly invoked for any empty-hand combat system or, as Burdick's evidence actually suggests, `none of the above.' It seems far too easy to retrofit current practice into ancient depictions of human activities and imagine that you're seeing representations of these activities. I'm not really so much interested in the problems with this kind of view of the KMAs here as I am in the more general problem these bits of pseudoevidence for KMA history raise: how do you actually know what you're looking at?

So then, just what kind of evidence is going to make the plausibility case here for the interpretation of the images you reproduced as instances of a systematic combat activity? Are there texts associated with these images that make it clear that we actually do have a visual instructional guide to wrestling techniques? What kind of supporting evidence is there?

 

[Steel Tiger]

Just to get some hunches on the table, I suggest we start off with a little bit of deduction here.

First of all, we know that even as late as the Mesolithic period in Europe, Asia and Africa, human populations were relatively extremely low, with very spare population/territory ratios. Anthropological studies of human groups (in places like the (sub)Arctic, Tierra del Fuego, the Great Basin and other areas strongly suggest that under these conditions, territoriality is not a social trait, and this is particularly true in hunter/gathering societies. Aggression directed inward is dangerous for such groups, and outward aggression rarely gets a chance to develop because of the infrequency of contact; moreover, in the absence of fixed resources, such groups, even under conditions of relative abundance, tend to find their food supplies by roaming, exhausting the resources available in one area before moving on. Defending a fixed territory would be pointless even if there were someone nearby to defend it against, that sort of thing. So such groups are almost certainly low-violence groups, and it seems very unlikely that there would be the systematized comprehensive combat systems covered by the term `martial art' = (comprehensive) combat skill set.

Because populations are moving to take advantage of seasonal resources they have no incentive to oppose a more powerful group, they just move somewhere else. Of course, the low population level means a low density so there is less resource competition.

Interestingly when you examine tool assemblages for the Mesolithic those artefacts that could be characterised as weapons fall into two broad categories: small hand-held and missile.

The hand-held artefacts tend towards small blades and points which are not very handy as weapons really, and are more suited to dressing a carcass or working skin.

Missile weapons tend toward small wieldy weapons like javelins and darts, with small sharp points, and not larger spear-like weapons that might be used in HTH. There are some large points and blades but it is generally believed that they are ceremonial as they are difficult to produce and rather fragile (Don't be fooled by caveman movies with foot-long points on spears. Stone points that big just don't last long).

We find territoriality coming in under two conditions:

(i) in contexts favorable to agriculture, the Neolithic Revolution leads to both fixed territories occupied by groups who can count on, and must therefore defend, fertile land which can yield dependable harvests year after year; these same dependable harvests increase the likelihood of survival for more individuals. More people, fixed land translate to both territoriality and pressure on the carrying capacity of the fixed territory. Since this is happening across the board in a give larger area, we wind up with a bunch of increasingly large groups struggling to accomodate their growing populations and increasingly turning to aggression against other such groups in order to occupy additional desirable areas.​

(ii) in certain unusual contexts where agriculture is not known but game is abundant and predictable, e.g., the North Pacific coast and the the high plains of preagricultural western North America, reliable heavy runs of fish or regular migratory movements of buffalo or similar resources yield a similar effect: territoriality and serious armed intergroup conflict. These do not appear to lead to full-scale protracted conflicts that we would want to label war, but they do put a premium on skills with weapons.​

Yes, it is quite clear that these factors contribute to the development of a territorial attitude. Once a population stops seasonal drifting over long distances, they have a vested interest in maintaining strong, if not absolute, control over their chosen territory. It doesn't matter if the resouces are natural or manmade.​

An interesting point about the Great Plains is that they are likely to have had strong influences from an agrarian culture in the Adena and the later Mississippian. Large agricultural groups with an interest in maintaining their territory.​

As population densities increase, social stratification becomes more evident; there are many arguments amongst anthropologists as to why (or at least there used to be, way back when some of my best friends were anthopologists :wink1. The point is that somewhere in the course of things, increased population, competition for resources within as well as between groups and improved technology for weapons production to support this intergroup conflict leads to higher levels of violence requiring systematic training in the use of weapons and the maintenance of both standing armed forces and law enforcement personnel.

I have a feeling that stratification may result from a desire to have power over others. This combined with a natural desire to have ones offspring well provided for would create hereditary hierarchical system.​

An important point of stratification is that it creates 'free time' for some elements of society. This is important in the context of martial arts as it is vital for the development of such systems. If one is working all day (10 to 14 hours) one cannot devoted any time to developing a martial art.​

The first great cities we know about—those in the Valley of Mexico and the Andean high plateau, in the Indus Valley, on the Yangtze, on the Nile and the Tigris-Euphrates Valley—all seem to be the culmination of cycles of conquest that begin along the lines I've been sketching; it's likely that they represent several thousand years of increasingly dense societies forcibly constructed by waves of intergroup fighting. One reasonable place to start one's quest for the oldest martial art would be somewhere between the full-blown Neolithic Revolution on the one hand and the appearance of the first great cities and fully stratified societies supporting professional armies as a necessary condition for their own survival in the face of attacks by other such cities.

My thoughts exactly.

That means that, on this scenario, you are looking at a time frame somewhere between, say, 11,000 years ago at the lower end and maybe 8,000 years back for the most ancient cities in the Middle East. This is all of course a bit rough. But it probably gives the right order of magnitude.?

I think these numbers are quite reasonable. Jericho is the oldest city we currently know of and it is about 8000 years old. Unfortunately there is no good evidence for martial endeavours from Jericho. Time may tell though.

I also strongly suspect that the first martial arts were weapons-based, and that empty-handed fighting systems arose as extensions of weapons-based systems. We know that this has happened in at least one instance: as Iain Abernethy points out,

many of the Minimoto samurai took Okinawan wives and remained upon the island for the rest of their days. The bujitsu of the Minimoto samurai had a large influence on the fighting methods employed by the Okinawan nobles. One part of Minimoto bujitsu that had an influence on the development of karate was the idea that all motion is essentially the same. Whether striking, grappling or wielding a weapon, the Minamoto samurai taught that all combative methods relied upon similar physical movements... the results of this combat philosophy can still be seen in modern day karate.​

(Bunkai-jutsu: the Practical Application of Karate Kata, p.6.) My guess would be that military systems of weapons applications preceded civilian empty hand systems, that the latter arise only under rather more specialized circumstances than the former (enforced occupation by a colonial power in the era preceding firearms) and that something along the lines that Abernethy sketches for the relationship between weapon and empty-handed jutsu systems may well be involved in the evolution of unarmed martial arts.

It's difficult to argue with this point. Martial arts at their earliest must have involved weapons as that is the manner of combat for the time. I stated in an earlier post that the earliest martial art was probably wrestling/grappling, but that would be in the terms we currently used to define a martial art.

There is very good relief evidence of what is probably wrestling from Mesopotamia about 4500 to 5000 years ago. Slideyfoot has provided some excellent images of these. But it is likely that what is being depicted was wrestling less for combat than for exercise or competition. A way to keep the soldiery strong and fit for when they had to take up weapons to defend the city.

Interestingly there is some very intriguing evidence from Egypt about martial arts. There is something called Sebek Kha. It has been suggested that it might actually be the oldest named martial art, being perhaps 4000 years old. It is likely that, like the wrestling Nintu, it was not a fighting art as we know them but a conditioning system.

So these are my hunches. And before they can be defended even seriously, they need to be subject to the most stringent investigation against the available evidence, to the extent that we can find any. If we can't, then they remain unsupported speculations without the faintest claim on anyone's belief; all one can say on their behalf is that they comport well with various ethnological and archaeological data and show goodness of fit with known historical events. But they remain nothing but hunches. Still, you have to have a hunch to start with if you want to get any further, eh?

11000 to 8000 years ago? I think it is quite reasonable really. Archeaology takes us back to about 5000 years ago and there we are seeing what we would call systematised combative techniques (whether they were used that way or not doesn't really matter). So, taking modern martial arts as an example and looking at their evolution, it is not unreasonable to suggest that systems might develop over thousands of years. Agriculture and urban development have got to be the keys to the earliest martial arts. They give time and cause for conventionalised combat systems to come into being.

Nice piece of analysis.:ultracool

 

[Steel Tiger]

The absurdity of this kind of long post-hoc rationale for such claims emerges especially clearly when one learns that, according to Burdick `the martial arts depicted in Koguryo tomb murals closely resemble those in the tomb murals of the Eastern Han, located in what is now eastern China. This suggests that the form of Koguryo era martial arts emerged because of Chinese cultural influence, rather than independent development by the future Koreans'. (See Burdick's 1997 version of this paper, `People and events of Taekwondo's formative years' in the Journal of Asian Martial Arts)

Of the second-most-often cited piece of material evidence bearing on the existence of an ancient Korean combat system which contributed tothe current MAs TKD/TSD, Burdick comments that `the statue of Kumkang-Yuksa at Sokkuram, which is often cited as the figure of an ancient warrior practicing taekwondo, is in fact a Buddhist guardian figure found throughout East Asia, and thus cannot be said to be unique to Korea either.' (1997 paper.) Stanley Henning's 2000 JAMA article `Traditional Korean Martial Arts' echoes this observation, noting that

these guardians are in the style common to contemporary Tang China (618–907), on which they were most assuredly modeled. Even some reputable Korean sources refer to these figures as `wrestlers' rather than `boxers', but they are most commonly called `strong men' (lishi in Chinese or ryuksa in Korean).' ​

​

I cannot see how or why three small states cannot have been influenced by such a large cohesive state as China was. We are talking about Han and Tang China here, huge expansionist states with, in the case of Tang, links as far as Southeast Asia. It is also quite clear that militarism has been of great importance to China somit holds that it would have some, and probably a lot of, influence in this matter.

The situation is Korea reminds me of military developments in Greece. At the end of the Classical period the state of Thebes defeated Sparta in two battles using a new tactic, an extremely heavy right side to take advantage of the natural turn and drift of a phalanx. It wasn't long before everyone was doing it, including the Spartans. Later, the various states that arose from Alexander's empire all used the phalanx system developed by Philip and so effectively used by his son.

Moving to Mexico. In the time of both Teotihuacan and Tenochtitlan they were the largest states in Mexico with powerful military machines. It should be no surprise that their military models were copied by the neighbouring states.

It seems clear to me that states will copy military systems from larger neighbours or that have been proven. in the case of Korea and China we have a large, expanding, stable state and three small, potentially vulnerable, ones. Why wouldn't they adopt Chinese military systems?

 

[exile]

I cannot see how or why three small states cannot have been influenced by such a large cohesive state as China was. We are talking about Han and Tang China here, huge expansionist states with, in the case of Tang, links as far as Southeast Asia. It is also quite clear that militarism has been of great importance to China somit holds that it would have some, and probably a lot of, influence in this matter.

Exactly. Burdick's point is essentially a very tough counter to claims that the Three Kingdoms fighting methods represented some specifically indigenous Korean `native' fighting art. The various bits of physical evidence which he reviews critically, as per my citations, were intended by partisans of the latter view to constitute substantial evidence for this unique, specifically peninsular Korean art. The great irony is that what follows from Burdick's and Henning's detailed, areally well-informed analyses is that what this physical evidence actually point to is the overwhelming influence of China on Korean combat practice—an influence which good evidence strongly suggests persisted for more than a millenium and a half, until the Chinese influence was replaced by Japanese and then Okinawan/Japanese practice.

The situation is Korea reminds me of military developments in Greece. At the end of the Classical period the state of Thebes defeated Sparta in two battles using a new tactic, an extremely heavy right side to take advantage of the natural turn and drift of a phalanx. It wasn't long before everyone was doing it, including the Spartans. Later, the various states that arose from Alexander's empire all used the phalanx system developed by Philip and so effectively used by his son.

Moving to Mexico. In the time of both Teotihuacan and Tenochtitlan they were the largest states in Mexico with powerful military machines. It should be no surprise that their military models were copied by the neighbouring states.

It seems clear to me that states will copy military systems from larger neighbours or that have been proven. in the case of Korea and China we have a large, expanding, stable state and three small, potentially vulnerable, ones. Why wouldn't they adopt Chinese military systems?

And that seems to be exactly what they did. Which makes the claims from various MAists that the cited archaeological material supports the uniquely Korean identity of various modern KMAs a bit, well, embarrassing.

I think it is quite reasonable really. Archeaology takes us back to about 5000 years ago and there we are seeing what we would call systematised combative techniques (whether they were used that way or not doesn't really matter). So, taking modern martial arts as an example and looking at their evolution, it is not unreasonable to suggest that systems might develop over thousands of years. Agriculture and urban development have got to be the keys to the earliest martial arts. They give time and cause for conventionalised combat systems to come into being.

Great summary of what I think is the logic for the best-case `hunch' for the origins of martial arts, S_T! I doubt that we'll ever be able to work out what the `oldest' MA is, because we lack a written record for those times which would give us unequivocal evidence that what we were seeing was a codified, comprehensive fighting system. But who knows? Archaelogy and philology have surprised us before in terms of what we can legitimately infer about the past...

 

[Steel Tiger]

Great summary of what I think is the logic for the best-case `hunch' for the origins of martial arts, S_T! I doubt that we'll ever be able to work out what the `oldest' MA is, because we lack a written record for those times which would give us unequivocal evidence that what we were seeing was a codified, comprehensive fighting system. But who knows? Archaelogy and philology have surprised us before in terms of what we can legitimately infer about the past...

If some cunning fellow can work out how to read hieroglyphs by using the Rosetta Stone and phonemes from an existing language and som other chap can work out how to read Linear A with even less, then I think it may be possible to find evidence of martial arts from maybe 5000 to 6000 years ago. Beyond that writing systems and associated archaeology get pretty scant with regard to the conditions that are most likely to result in a codified fighting system.

I would have to bank on one of the 'big three' zones - Nile Valley, Mesopotamia, and Indus Valley, as having the earliest combat systems. Of course, one can never count China out. The true age of Chinese civilisation is still to be determined.

 

[kaizasosei]

for me the answer is simple yet maybe somewhat unfullfilling because i think that martial arts beyond the scope of time.
it always depends on the people and their experiences as well as the arts.
even in the animal kingdom this is the case. also with animals the skill levels of various relative creatures can vary greatly.

the oldest martial art is obviously a puppy dog playing...the first martial games that animals and often also humans will perform.
dogs are great to watch as they are so lovingly playful and careful in their chewing on things and pawing away at each other.

 

[slideyfoot]

But I always get a little uncomfortable with this kind of graphic-image interpretation unless it's backed up with some kind of corroborating text. Issues of this sort have arisen in the course of attempts to use physical evidence to defend `ancient' forms of KMA.

That's a fair point, and the Korean example is certainly a good one: I suppose its at least possible with most representations of physical activity that they could be some kind of dance or other form of ritual, though to my mind the wrestling interpretation is a sensible one. In the case of the Beni Hasan murals, I'd say its a more than reasonable conclusion that the intention was to demonstrate wrestling manouevres. I wouldn't have thought there are too many interpretations of those images other than an instructional depiction of wrestling technique, but perhaps you'd disagree?

There may well be corroborating textual evidence, but I'm no archaeologist. Still, would be interesting to find out.

But it is likely that what is being depicted was wrestling less for combat than for exercise or competition. A way to keep the soldiery strong and fit for when they had to take up weapons to defend the city.

The idea that they were simply conditioning exercises or a method of competition in peacetime is also plausible, although the distinction between 'sport' and actual combat in a military setting is not necessarily that clear. I'd cite the following quote from Josephus, taken from 'The Jewish War', Book III, Chapter V (written in the 1st century AD), as an example:

...their military exercises differ not at all from the real use of their arms, but every soldier is every day exercised, and that with great diligence, as if it were in time of war, which is the reason why they bear the fatigue of battles so easily; for neither can any disorder remove them from their usual regularity, nor can fear affright them out of it, nor can labor tire them; which firmness of conduct makes them always to overcome those that have not the same firmness; nor would he be mistaken that should call those their exercises unbloody battles, and their battles bloody exercises...

From that we can judge that the Romans at least tended to treat exercise as interchangeable with battle itself - an 'unbloody battle'. This matches the idea that you should 'fight like you train', very much the methodology of what today is called MMA (arguably a descendant of something the Roman's would have recognised, pankration). Today's military has incorporated martial arts like BJJ into Modern Army Combatives, partly due to their recognition that competition is a useful tool in military training. But it would of course be merely speculation on my part to suggest that the Sumerians or indeed Romans might have used wrestling in a similar manner.

Although interestingly enough, this site has a caption for the Beni Hasan mural which reads 'Wrestling - military training'. Another image of the same mural here.

 

[exile]

That's a fair point, and the Korean example is certainly a good one: I suppose its at least possible with most representations of physical activity that they could be some kind of dance or other form of ritual, though to my mind the wrestling interpretation is a sensible one. In the case of the Beni Hasan murals, I'd say its a more than reasonable conclusion that the intention was to demonstrate wrestling manouevres. I wouldn't have thought there are too many interpretations of those images other than an instructional depiction of wrestling technique, but perhaps you'd disagree?

There may well be corroborating textual evidence, but I'm no archaeologist. Still, would be interesting to find out.



The idea that they were simply conditioning exercises or a method of competition in peacetime is also plausible, although the distinction between 'sport' and actual combat in a military setting is not necessarily that clear. I'd cite the following quote from Josephus, taken from 'The Jewish War', Book III, Chapter V (written in the 1st century AD), as an example:



From that we can judge that the Romans at least tended to treat exercise as interchangeable with battle itself - an 'unbloody battle'. This matches the idea that you should 'fight like you train', very much the methodology of what today is called MMA (arguably a descendant of something the Roman's would have recognised, pankration). Today's military has incorporated martial arts like BJJ into Modern Army Combatives, partly due to their recognition that competition is a useful tool in military training. But it would of course be merely speculation on my part to suggest that the Sumerians or indeed Romans might have used wrestling in a similar manner.

Although interestingly enough, this site has a caption for the Beni Hasan mural which reads 'Wrestling - military training'. Another image of the same mural here.

Good observations, slideyfoot. What would be worth its weight in gold—way more, actually—would be some kind of decipherable inscription in the graphic work itself that philologists could plausibly translate as a clear reference to training for competion and/or combat (though I suspect that most of the training those chaps received would have been oriented towards weapons). This is one of the things that makes the search for origins so frustrating: as you go further back in time, the evidence base gets sparser and it requires enormous luck to stumble across that kind of corroborating evidence. And at one point of course you get beyond the historical range in which writing systems existed, and then things get extremely difficult...

Thanks much for bringing this material to everyone's attention—I'd no idea about these images—they certainly are tantalizing to anyone who's interested in tracking down really ancient martial arts/combat practices.

If some cunning fellow can work out how to read hieroglyphs by using the Rosetta Stone and phonemes from an existing language and som other chap can work out how to read Linear A with even less, then I think it may be possible to find evidence of martial arts from maybe 5000 to 6000 years ago. Beyond that writing systems and associated archaeology get pretty scant with regard to the conditions that are most likely to result in a codified fighting system.

I agree, there is reason to hope, though again, a lot of luck will have to be involved. The problem is a general one with trying to develop a sound, empirically plausible picture of ancient knowledge systems. A good indication of the problem is looking at the state of the KMAs between the end of WWII and the late 1950s, the Kwan era. We still don't have any very good, detailed picture of what training practices were like, or how the transition from the Kwan founders' karate training during the 1930s to the post-occupation form of KMA took place. There are hints in interviews, and casual references to specific techniques or `sparring', but we still don't really know in any kind of historically precise detail what went on in the Kwans. Doug Cook, in his most recent book Traditional Taekwondo, makes the interesting observation that

Compiling an accurate history of this [Kwan-era] period, when taekwondo was in its formative stages, is difficult at best given the erratic nature of its documentation. Major occurrences were seldom committed to paper, and when they were, risked destruction at the hands of opposing forces. To this day, aside from articles appearing on the worldwide web, in academic articles and in magazines, history and tradition continues to to be transmitted by word of mouth... At the center of this chronological confusion is the creation of the various martial arts chools that evolved during the chaotic 1940s and 1950s. These schools came to be known as the kwans and the story of their similarities, differences, founders and politics, is pivotal to the birth of traditional taekwondo. It is a story few know in totality and even fewer have researched sufficiently to document accurately​

(p. 19). Now here we're talking about something that started little more than a half century ago! You have to wonder, given this state of affairs for a recent phase of a very popular martial art, in a fully literate era with every kind of information recording technology available, where we actually know the names of the people involved and much about their histories (though far from everything we need to know)—how come the history of this era is so bloody fuzzy?? Now extrapolate that fuzziness back over, decades or even centuries, but millenia—lots of millenia—and things start looking a bit grim, as far as a detailed picture of who was doing what how, and when. One of the problems with a lot of speculation about MA history is that it simply fails to take into account the enormous difficulty of meeting `burden of proof' requirements on specific claims about such a picture for any given time period. So at the time depths involved, we are going to need to be lucky indeed to come across the evidence we need to meet that burden of proof...

I would have to bank on one of the 'big three' zones - Nile Valley, Mesopotamia, and Indus Valley, as having the earliest combat systems. Of course, one can never count China out. The true age of Chinese civilisation is still to be determined.

Yes, I'd bet everything I own that those are the places to look for the Ür-MAs. If only we had time machines, eh?