Belt Wrestling, the Oldest Sport - International Belt Wrestling ...

A Historical Overview
A bronze statuette of belt wrestling circa 6,000 years ago found at Kyafaje, near Baghdad
Despite its modern northern stronghold, belt wrestling has been at the very heart of human civilisation
for many centuries. Six thousand years ago, when the world‟s first civilisation evolved in Sumer in
Mesopotamia, the earliest account of wrestling in Western literature (about a challenge match), was
written in cuneiform, the oldest known form of writing, Gilgamesh, the king of Uruk, proved himself to
his people as a leader by wrestling with the savage wild man Enkidu. The wild man had challenged
him and, in the tale, mythology is used to assert the higher values of civilization. When Enkidu
acknowledged the sovereignty of Gilgamesh the tablet has him say,
“Thy head is exalted above (all other) men;
The kingship over the people
Enlil has decreed for thee.”
In 1938 the American archaeologist Dr S.A. Speiser, from the University of Pennsylvania, found a
10cm. high bronze statuette of two belt wrestlers, (at Kyafaje near Baghdad) in the ruins of the temple
of the Sumerian goddess Nintu, the statuette was created between 4,000 and 2800 BC. The other early
civilization from that area, Akkadia, who were a Semitic people, founded the world‟s first empire.
Their king, Sargon, founded the city of Agade about 2,300 B.C. and eventually ruled over most of
Mesopotamia; their language is the oldest Semitic dialect still preserved. A tablet, written in this
language in Mari 3,700 years ago, is one of the earliest in Western history to mention wrestling. The
king in rebuking his son for laziness says,
“You think of tricks to beat your enemy and to manoeuvre for position against him; but your enemy
similarly tries to think up tricks to manoeuvre for position against you, just as wrestlers use tricks
against each other.”
No wrestling style is described but it seems reasonable to assume that it could have been a form of belt
wrestling as the cultures of Uruk and Akkadia were closely connected.
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