page_title: History of martial arts
section_title: Antiquity
hierarchical_section_title: History of martial arts / Europe / Antiquity
caption_attribution_description: English: Pankratiast in fighting stance, Ancient Greek red-figure amphora, 440 BC.
context_page_description: Although the earliest evidence of martial arts goes back millennia, the true roots are difficult to reconstruct. Inherent patterns of human aggression which inspire practice of mock combat and optimization of serious close combat as cultural universals are doubtlessly inherited from the pre-human stage and were made into an "art" from the earliest emergence of that concept. Indeed, many universals of martial art are fixed by the specifics of human physiology and not dependent on a specific tradition or era.
  Specific martial traditions become identifiable in Classical Antiquity, with disciplines such as shuai jiao, Greek wrestling or those described in the Indian epics or the Spring and Autumn Annals of China.
context_section_description: European martial arts become tangible in Greek antiquity with pankration and other martially oriented disciplines of the ancient Olympic Games. Boxing became Olympic in Greece as early as 688 BCE. Detailed depictions of wrestling techniques are preserved in vase paintings of the Classical period. Homer's Iliad has a number of detailed descriptions of single combat with spear, sword and shield.
  Gladiatorial combat appears to have Etruscan roots, and is documented in Rome from the 260s BCE.
  The papyrus fragment known as P.Oxy. III 466 dating from the 2nd century gives the earliest surviving description in writing of wrestling techniques.
  In Sardinia, a Mediterranean island, a fighting style which has been called istrumpa was practised in the Bronze Age, as demonstrated by the finding of a little bronze statue (known as "Bronzetto dei lottatori" or "bronze of the fighting men"), which shows two fighters struggling with each other on the ground.
caption: Pankratiast in fighting stance, Ancient Greek red-figure amphora, 440 BC.
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