History of Sport

by

Harvey Abrams, BS, MAT, Ph.d/abd.

As a physical education teacher I am also an Olympic Games & sport historian. My intention in creating these pages is to promote the knowledge and understanding of the History of Sport to a wide audience via the world wide web.

I will assume that the average reader knows very little about this subject and I offer comments and notes within the text to help clarify the meaning. At this time these pages will be in English only, but in the future I will try to translate them into German and French. I invite comments and critique from everyone - middle school students, high school students, academics and other Sport historians. Anything that will improve these pages is welcome!

Please return often to find historical & educational resources on History of Sport, Physical Education, Sports & Athletics, Wrestling, Fencing, the Olympic Games and numerous sports subjects with lots of links.

Created on Sunday, April 12, 2003
Latest additions & corrections on February 20, 2008
These pages are dedicated to K & A.

A Brief Overview of the History of Sport

Sport in the Ancient Era

The Ancient Olympic Games

The Olympic Games of the ancient Greeks ("Hellenes" in Greek) are covered on a separate page - click here.

Historical Research and the Evidence to study Sport History.

The literature (books) on Sport history, both ancient and modern, comes from historians, travelers, journalists, participants who wrote their memoirs, observers who watched the events, amateur historians who simply love sport as a hobby, and writers who use all these sources to re-write new books on various sport subjects. The quality of books varies from outstanding academic research of the highest quality to some really bad stuff that is good for potty paper. You have to use care in deciding which source material you use for your own research -- so read as much as you can about your topic!

There are two types of sources of information in historical research: PRIMARY sources and SECONDARY sources.

PRIMARY sources are original sources, the best sources, such as eyewitness accounts, films or videotapes of an event, sound recordings, personal memoirs of the participants or the observers. In the legal terminology - the witnesses. But there were no cameras in ancient Sumeria, Greece Rome and Egypt. Witnesses may have recorded their stories on papyrus but these records vanished 2500 years ago. Some events of the ancients were painted on walls -- ancient "photos". Some words were carved (engraved) into stone, or made in relief (raised letters) and these are useful as primary sources. Other primary sources can be pieces of ancient art that were created as statuary, vase paintings, jewelry and funeral offerings.

But even with images problems can arise!

An image painted on an Etruscan tomb wall showing two wrestlers is a primary source of information about those two wrestlers. But what we see is only part of the story, and we will never know the whole story unless we talk to the artist or the wrestlers themselves -- but they are dead (this might even be their tomb). We cannot determine the rules by which they wrestled by looking at the picture. We don't know who won. We don't know what happened moments before the painting was made, nor what came after the painting. It is a simple moment in time - and we may try to create a full story from it.

If you visit the tomb and take a picture with your camera of the two wrestlers, it becomes a secondary source of information because it is not original. Your picture is a copy of the original. Imagine that you print the picture in a book and tell me what the picture is, but the editor, publisher or printer makes a printing mistake. You are the only one who knows the truth - and thousands of books find their way to library shelves with the error. This is actually very common in Sports literature. Books are full of such mistakes -- so always use more than one source for your information.

Secondary sources are books, magazine articles, newspaper articles written by people who do research and write about the subject, but were not witnesses to the actual event. The author of a book in 1930 who wrote about the ancient Olympic Games is famous today as a great classical historian. He used many primary sources to write his book (ancient inscriptions on stone, vase paintings, etc.). If I use his book for my research today - his book is a secondary source for me - and if he made any mistakes, or the printer mistyped a paragraph - I will repeat that mistake without knowing it. I need to go back to use all the same primary sources that he used if I want to improve upon his work. This can be a problem - the primary sources that he used in 1930 may no longer exist.

Go to visitor's questions page with answers by Harvey Abrams, Olympic Historian.Questions & Answers

Go to my page on ancient Olympic Games sources & links.
Ancient Olympic Games Sources & Links

Latest updates on February 20, 2008

Copyright © 2000, 2003, 2008 Harvey Abrams. All rights reserved. No part of this text may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the expressed written permission of the author. Or the wrath of Zeus will be upon you.