The Roots of The Ring: Artifact & Myth
- Milaun Murry
- Jan 7
- 4 min read
Updated: 7 days ago
Conversations about professional wrestling history often begin with a familiar refrain: wrestling is ancient. Older than the Romans. Older than the Greeks. And that claim is true, but incomplete. Wrestling is not only one of the oldest organized athletic practices in human history; it is one of the earliest ways societies expressed strength, competition, ritual, and storytelling through the human body.
While the historical record of wrestling is fragmentary, it is far from silent. Across carved reliefs, sculpted figures, and surviving myth, wrestling emerges as both sport and symbol. From artifacts housed in institutions like the British Museum to legendary contests woven into ancient mythology, the roots of the ring reveal a practice that predates modern entertainment while already carrying the DNA of modern wrestling.
Power has always shaped human history. Before it was codified in law or measured in armies, strength was proven directly, physically, and in public view. To demonstrate dominance was to demonstrate survival, and few methods expressed that truth more clearly than wrestling. Across early civilizations, grappling became a way to test the limits of the human body and to determine who could endure, control, and overcome another.
In ancient Babylonia, this concept appears in both text and legend. The Epic of Gilgamesh describes trials of strength in which wrestling serves as a decisive measure of worth, not merely to establish victory, but to reveal character and equality between rivals. In ancient Egypt, wrestling was woven into daily life, depicted in tombs and reliefs as both athletic discipline and military preparation. Young men were expected to train their bodies through grappling, developing balance, endurance, and control without the aid of weapons.
In both cultures, wrestling required little beyond the body itself, yet carried immense cultural weight. It functioned simultaneously as competition, preparation, and proof. Long before written rulebooks or recorded champions, wrestling stood as a universal language of strength, spoken wherever power needed to be demonstrated and understood.
If you want to understand a person’s power, you wrestle them.
Many of the surviving records of ancient wrestling are visual rather than written. These artifacts rely on imagery to communicate form, movement, and physical engagement, capturing moments of athletic contest through carved stone, painted surfaces, and woven textiles. While these depictions leave room for interpretation, they nonetheless offer valuable insight into how wrestling functioned within a society. From the prominence of the human body to the repeated portrayal of specific holds and stances, these images suggest wrestling’s cultural importance and the social visibility of those who practiced it.
The British Museum holds one of the most extensive publicly accessible collections of wrestling-related artifacts spanning ancient and pre-modern civilizations. Its digital archive provides access to a wide range of materials, including amphorae, reliefs, and textile prints, allowing patterns to emerge across time and geography. Despite the significant differences between the cultures represented, striking similarities appear in how wrestling is depicted, reinforcing the idea that certain physical expressions of the sport transcend cultural boundaries.
Pictured here are five artifacts spanning three regions: two from Greece, two from Rome, and one from Egypt. In each example, the wrestlers are depicted nude or nearly nude, a deliberate artistic choice that places emphasis on the human body itself. Strength, balance, and physical control are communicated through carefully rendered musculature and posture, underscoring the athletic nature of the contest.
Each scene captures a moment of action, often illustrating holds or throws that remain recognizable in wrestling and grappling practices today. Several of the images include an additional figure positioned at the edge of the contest, likely representing a trainer, judge, or officiant overseeing the bout. Variations of these wrestling scenes appear across multiple media, including amphorae, coinage, and carved gemstones, suggesting both the popularity of the subject and its cultural resonance across different contexts.
These visual artifacts reveal much of the physical truth that existed around wrestling. The artform and the direct relation to strength. But it’s the oral narratives, and later recorded myths, that reveal the moral and emotional connections that helped make the sport significant. It wasn’t just a test of strength in the case of myths and folklore. It was a test of worth.
In the Epic of Gilgamesh, wrestling serves as a pivotal turning point rather than a simple test of strength. Gilgamesh, criticized for his treatment of the people of Uruk, is confronted by Enkidu, a figure created by the gods to challenge his authority. Their encounter takes the form of a wrestling contest, intended to establish dominance and force change. Although Gilgamesh ultimately prevails, the bout does not result in submission or punishment. Instead, it produces mutual recognition, transforming rivals into allies, and reshaping the narrative that follows. The epic continues with the shared exploits of the two figures, culminating in Enkidu’s death and Gilgamesh’s subsequent search for immortality.
A similar use of wrestling as narrative resolution appears in Greek mythology through the encounter between Heracles and Antaeus, the son of Poseidon. Antaeus is portrayed as a formidable wrestler who derives strength from contact with the earth through his mother, Gaia, making him effectively invincible in traditional combat. Rather than overpowering him through force alone, Heracles adapts his approach, lifting Antaeus from the ground and severing the source of his strength. The bout concludes with Antaeus’s defeat, reinforcing wrestling’s role in myth as a contest of strategy and understanding as much as physical power.
Wrestling’s endurance is not an accident of history but a reflection of its function. Across civilizations, it served as training, ritual, contest, and story. The artifacts that remain and the myths that survived do not simply show us how ancient people wrestled; they reveal why they did. Long before ropes or rings, wrestling was already a language spoken through the body, understood by both participants and spectators alike. In tracing these early expressions, we begin to see professional wrestling not as a modern invention, but as the latest chapter in one of humanity’s oldest traditions.
Follow Experience Wrestling as we continue or exploration of the Roots of the Ring.
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