Being an avid handball player and an amateur historian, I have been intrigued by recent articles concerning the origin of handball. I always suspected, but historical fact never confirmed, that the ancient civilizations of Mexico played handball hundreds, perhaps thousands of years ago.

In 1968, Mexico hosted the Olympics. I was fascinated to see the figure that was inscribed on the 25 peso commemorative silver coin that was minted by the Mexican Treasury to honour the 19th Olympic Games. On one side of the coin was the national symbol, the eagle devouring the serpent. Engraved on the flip side of the coin was an ornately dressed, muscular Astec athlete elegantly striking a ball with his open right hand.

The Aztecs ruled Mexico from the Twelfth to the Fifteenth Century and built the great pyramids outside Mexico City. But an older civilisation, the Olmecs, flourished in Mexico at the same time that the Greeks reigned supreme during the Golden Age of Athens. The Olmec culture ruled Mexico from approximately 1500 BC to 500 BC.

My suspicions were confirmed when I read about artefacts which were recently discovered by archaeologists commissioned by Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History. The November, 1993, issue of National Geographic Magazine documents that the Olmecs originated the "oldest American ball game." The archaeologists pulled a rubber ball, about the size of a softball, from the springs at El Manati, a village about 200 miles south of Veracruz. The article described the ball and stated: "Though more than 3,000 years old, it still has the smell of latex." (I wonder how it compared to our Spalding Aces from Mexico.) The article also stated that "No one knows who invented the ball game but the Olmec lived in a rubber-producing region, their name in the Aztec language means "rubber people".

The Olmec carved intricate statues out of basalt limestone. The article included a photograph of a stone sculpture that was found at a nearby village of Dainzu. The elaborately detailed carving depicted a "masked ball player, raising his left arm and grasping the ball in his right hand". (No doubt the player was preparing to serve a slider down the right side of the court.) I can only assume that the mask was used to hide the true identity of the kill-shot artist.

The article concluded that "within the past decade scientists have begun to sketch in more of the details of a complex society that engaged in ritual sacrifice and played a ceremonial ball game - all characteristics of the great civilization that came much later." Much later indeed. During the Twentieth Century, and rapidly approaching the Twenty-First Century, we still adhere to the noble tenet of "ritual sacrifice" in playing, in ceremonial fashion, our great game -- Handball.

F.P.A.

Handball: 3,000 Years Old by F P Aguirre
Created 4th June 2003
efa@etonfives.co.uk

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