Professional wrestling as a sport didn’t become popular in Great Britain until the 1900s, with the real boom not coming until the dust had settled and the country began to rebuild following the Second World War.
However, the history and origins of the sport go back well before that. Not just years, or decades, or even centuries. Thousands of years before Big Daddy bounced his vast belly off Giant Haystacks at Wembley Arena, warriors were battling it out in the sport of wrestling all across the globe.
It has been literally thousands of years since fighters wrestled for a living, with their livelihoods on the line in a battle of who was the toughest man in the ring.
Professional wrestling, as the name would suggest, is a derivative of the actual sport of wrestling. This battle of two men rolling around on the group until one of them gives up is one of the oldest sports in the world.
Football was first played in some form as far back as 300 BC, in ancient China (although Association Football as we know it today was created in England in the mid-1800s). Gymnastics was first practised by the ancient Greeks during the Greek Hellenistic period. Even swimming is only noted to have been a part of human recreation for around the past 8000 years. Meanwhile, wrestling is in a league of its own.
As far back as human history goes, people have been wrestling one another for sport. In fact, it goes beyond history.
The term “history” is what we consider the beginning of written history. As soon as humans could put pen to paper, or smaller stones hit bigger stones until something vaguely resembling letters appeared, historians considered that time period their jurisdiction, and anything else before that was down to the archaeologists.
Written history is generally considered to have begun at around 3,500 BCE. The first written records were discovered in Egypt, over 5,000 years ago, with reeds, cut to an angle, used to mark clay to create the shapes that we know as hieroglyphics.
These would go on to be baked to harden them up, thus preserving the rudimentary writings for modern-day archaeologists to discover. Chronologically, the earliest writings we’ve found so far are the Scorpion I’s Tomb Hieroglyphs, which feature the first-known instances of hieroglyphics ever recorded.
If this is where history begins. Anything before that is considered pre-history. Hence the term “prehistoric” is used so often when discussing dinosaurs, and other creatures that would have struggled to hold a pen.
Prehistory is simply anything before writing’s birth when art like drawings or cave paintings were used to convey messages and tell stories.
Wrestling goes back into pre-history, although the actual timeframe is complicated. While they weren’t wearing colourful tights and bouncing off crudely-made ropes made of vines, hitting a “this many fingers” splash onto an unsuspecting caveman, wrestling as a sport goes back a long, long way.
Lascaux Cave, Early Wrestling in Algeria, Etc
Many dubious sources claim that the first recorded instance of human wrestling dates back to nearly 15,000 BC.
This was supposedly in a cave painting in the Lascaux caves in France, which depicted early man trading wrestling holds in these crudely drawn artworks. This would put wrestling among archery and running as the earliest sports man ever took part in, and would have been a huge discovery.
Wrestling in this instance is defined as a sport that sees two men competing to throw the other to the ground using a variety of holds or grappling moves, of which multiple varieties and strategies evolved over the years.
However, upon further research, I am unable to find any primary sources or reputable research that makes that claim. The paintings mainly depict animals, hunting, and symbolic or ritualistic human figures, with scholars and historians not agreeing that wrestling is what is being shown in these cave paintings.
It is more likely that they are related to shamanistic rituals, hunting practices, or symbolic expressions of human and animal interactions, as opposed to Stig of the Dump hitting a Brainbuster on an unsuspecting woolly mammoth.
Read more about the Myth of the Lascaux Cave wrestlers
Saying that wrestling is still really, really old. Ignoring the claims that would be the biggest thing to happen to wrestling in France since André The Giant (or André le Géant, as they probably called him), the earliest potential recording of wrestling from prehistory comes from the Tassili n’Ajjer in what is modern-day Algeria.
These paintings show what are likely depictions of two men, naked with their hands up in a boxing stance. A third man stands behind and watches, while an indistinguishable animal also spectates the action.
Fabrizio Mori, a pioneer in Tassili rock art studies, viewed these figures as drawings of two men competing in combat or sport. Perhaps even one and the same, as he suggests it could be depicting the pair engaging in what is the first wrestling match ever recorded.
The artworks are estimated to have been created around 5000 BC, making them the earliest depiction of two human wrestling ever discovered.
The First Fixed Professional Wrestling Match Took Place In Ancient Greece
Much more obvious evidence has been found in Greek and Roman pottery. We know that wrestling was a big part of their society, and was one of the earliest sports included in their Olympics.
You’ve probably noticed that “real wrestling” and “professional wrestling” are slightly different. Even in their most simple forms, there is one stark difference: professional wrestling is fixed!
Well, they’re not as different as you might think, because wrestling has been fixed as long as humans figured out that you can bet on who was going to win a fight, and swindle as many people as possible out of their hard-earned gold.
The ancient Greeks and ancient Egyptians figured that out thousands of years ago, with the earliest instance of a fixed fight discovered in AD 267.
The year was 267 AD, and Rome was in the 14th year of the reign of Emperor Gallienus. In the city of Antinoöpolis, games were held in honour of Antinous, a lover of the Emperor Hadrian who was deified following his untimely death at the age of twenty.
Hadrian founded the city of Antinoöpolis near where he died, while also creating the games that bore his name to be held across both Antinoöpolis and Athens. It’s fair to say that Hadrian was quite the fan of Antinous, and was devastated when he passed away as young as he did.
Nearly 150 years later, Gallienus continued the tradition of The Megala Antinoeia, with wrestling matches of course on the menu. They had been a fixture of the Olympics since 708 BC, and was a popular sport throughout the Roman Empire.
The wrestlers fought to get their opponent onto the ground, and unlike their Greek counterparts, the goal was to get their adversary to give up, rather than pinning his shoulders to the mat. They usually practised Orthia Pale, or “standing wrestling”, which had slightly different rules than the traditional Greco-Roman wrestling we know today.
Nicantinous and Demetrius were two teenagers who practised the art of wrestling. They competed in the 267 AD Antinoöpolis games in wrestling and were paired up as opponents. In these games, the winner would be awarded the purse.
Athletes were revered in those times as they are today, with fame, a pension and sponsorships awarded to the wrestler who stood tall at the end of the fight. Billboards and posters were used to advertise fights and products, with the top stars more like modern-day footballers than what you imagine from the ancient world.
However, the loser of the fight wasn’t so lucky. A loss would bring shame upon his city, and all his hard work would be for nought when his opponent get the winner’s purse. Victory was uncertain, so it was sometimes in one’s best interest to take a smaller share of the silver to throw the fight.
This would also help to keep fights more interesting, whether in the wrestling ring or the gladiatorial arena. Fixing fights helped keep the most famous stars on top, encouraging the fans to pay their hard-earned gold to come and see them compete. Not much has changed in the thousands of years since.
Knowing that he may not win the match, Demetrius signed a contract with the father of Nicantinous as both the boys prepared to compete in the final of the games. They agreed that Nicantinous would take home the victory, and in impressive fashion in front of an excited crowd.
The contract stipulated that “when competing in the competition for the boy [wrestlers], to fall three times and yield,” and in return would receive “three thousand eight hundred drachmas of silver of old coinage”.
This has been said to have been quite a paltry sum, being just enough to afford a donkey in the days of the Roman Empire. However, had he lost without throwing the fight, Demetrius would have walked away on foot, without his newly bought to carry him away as the disgraced loser.
If both competitors were evenly matched and the wrestling match could go either way, it may have been in his best interest to take the guaranteed money and avoid leaving him penniless, as well as disgraced.
The agreement, which was written on papyrus and discovered in the early 20th century, also stipulated that Demetrius would still be paid even if the judges recognised the fix that was taking place.
It seemed a no-brainer for him to take the deal, and likely cost Nicantinous a fraction of his eventual winnings. However, it should be noted that match-fixing was illegal, so it’s not clear what legal recourse Demetrius would have had if his opponent had refused to pay up once the match was over.
This is the earliest discovery of fights being fixed, which would be the entire point of professional wrestling throughout its history.
Now of course, that isn’t the same professional wrestling we see today, as the sport has evolved from a way to swindle customers out of their hard-earned money to a worldwide entertainment format more similar to pantomime than real sporting competition.
However, it is impossible to deny that the roots of professional wrestling come from amateur wrestling, like the Catch-as-catch-can wrestlers in Lancashire in the 1800s. The early professional wrestlers absolutely pretended as if the fights were real and it was a true competition, which is no different to what these two men were doing in Ancient Greece in AD 267.
To me, that is the first professional wrestling match to ever take place (that we have records of). To learn how the art continued to develop into what we know it today, click this link about the complete history of wrestling.
