▶ sports and recreation
introduction
Th e word recreation suggests the idea of “re-creating,” or
“creating again.” In turn, this suggests that recreation serves
to reinvigorate and strengthen people so that they can face
life’s trials. Sports and recreation in the ancient world were in
many senses forms of “re-creation.” Sports, for example, oft en
served ceremonial purposes. Sporting events were frequently
held in conjunction with religious festivals. Sometimes these
events were staged to symbolize the creative powers of the
gods. In other cases they reaffi rmed the power and authority
of a ruler and reinvigorated him to continue his rule. In some
cultures, sporting events were held in connection with funer-
als as a way of honoring the dead. In the ancient Americas a
ball game that bore characteristics of soccer and basketball
held a ceremonial purpose. Th e participating teams were en-
gaged in a literal life-and-death struggle, for the losing team
might be ritually sacrifi ced to the gods.
While cultures throughout the world used balls for
games, the ancient Americans, having discovered rubber,
were the only ones to use rubber balls. In other parts of the
world, balls were typically either stone or made by wrapping
an animal skin around straw or a similar material. Th e an-
cient Chinese developed a game in which balls were hit with
sticks into holes in the ground, a precursor of golf.
Sports and recreation were also regarded as a way of
training a person for such activities as hunting and military
service. Th e ancients knew what modern people know: that
running, rowing, and other strenuous activities build muscle
and increase endurance. Running, for example, was a nec-
essary part of the training of couriers, who carried news of
the progress of battles to commanders. Indeed, the modern
26.2-mile marathon recreates the legend (which is probably
untrue) that an Athenian ran 26 miles to carry the news from
Marathon to Athens that the Greeks had defeated the Per-
sians in the Battle of Marathon in 490 b.c.e. In many cultures
young men being initiated into the adult community had to
prove their mettle by taking part in long races and similar
challenging activities.
Some ancient cultures developed the concept of the specta-
tor sport—that is, a sporting event people watched but in which
they did not participate. In this regard the Romans led the way.
In the Roman Empire people gathered in arenas that closely
resemble modern football stadiums to watch mock hunts, con-
tests between gladiators, chariot racing, animal exhibitions,
and even brutal executions of criminals (suggested by the com-
mon phrase “throwing him to the lions”). For private recre-
ation ancient Roman and Egyptian men went to gyms, oft en
with the chief purpose of associating with other men.
Common sports in the ancient world included horse rac-
ing, boat racing, wrestling, track-and-fi eld events (such as
foot races and discus and javelin throwing), boxing, and ar-
chery. People who lived near bodies of water swam for sport
and recreation. Other forms of entertainment included boardgames, dice, gambling, dancing, and bathing at public baths,
where people could relax in the company of others.AFRICA
BY KIRK H. BEETZ
In ancient Africa sports and games seem to have been impor-
tant. What is known about African sports in earlier centuries,
however, can be gleaned only from tenuous hints, some of
which linger in the customs of modern Africans. For exam-
ple, wrestling seems to have been a favorite pastime for some
ancient Africans, because old wrestling traditions survive
into modern times among some Bantu-speaking peoples.
How prevalent wrestling was in ancient Africa and how im-
portant it was to society probably cannot be known. Still, it is
apparent that young men in some places tried to prove their
strength and social worthiness by grappling with others. Like
ancient African warfare, wrestling matches could be very
stylized events, with opponents moving as if choreographed
by a set of rules designed to display their skills. Blood prob-
ably was rarely shed, and pinning an opponent’s shoulders to
the ground was enough for victory. It is possible that some
groups—particularly those in which women chose their
mates—used ritualized wrestling to show off marriageable
men to marriageable women.
Racing was possibly a sport in ancient Africa; in North
Africa especially, racing horses, camels, and elephants might
have been popular. Among the ruins of ancient Kush, a king-
dom along the Nile River south of Egypt, there is a large
complex of buildings that may have housed elephants. Th e el-
ephants would have been a type more easily trained than the
African elephants from farther south. Near the ruined build-
ings is an area where these elephants may have been raced.
Most ancient African games involved numbers. Trad-
ers and nomads of North Africa, in the Sahara and along the
steppes south of the desert, seem to have had games involv-
ing guesses at how long it would take to reach a certain place
and word games involving the counting of words, perhaps to
form a particular phrase. Number systems and number pat-
terns were sometimes used in rituals for foretelling the fu-
ture, and number and word games may have been played for
the amusement of seeing what sort of predictions could be
made with them.
Most ancient African games that modern people know
anything about involved mathematics. Th ere seems to have
been a general cross-cultural fascination with mathematics
that attracted people from all sorts of walks of life in almost
all parts of Africa. Other sorts of games probably existed,
but of those only game boards without rules remain, and it
is possible that even boards that do not imply mathemati-
cal contests nonetheless involved mathematics. Boards from
Kush and Axum are sometimes beautifully inlaid with ivory
and variously colored woods. An interesting aspect of these
boards is that even though their rules are long forgotten, the
tradition of gaming with boards is so deep within modernsports and recreation: Africa 10470895-1194_Soc&Culturev4(s-z).i1047 1047 10/10/07 2:30:52 PM