Pankration

Pankration originated in Greece and is widely held to be the forerunner of all martial arts. It is certainly the oldest art yet discovered with a corpus of recorded techniques, at least in the West. The Indian art of Kalaripayattu may well be older though an alternative theory (highlighted in the video above) is that Alexander brought the art to India from where it spread into China, Japan and Korea.

Like other events that made up the roster of games in the ancient Olympics, Pankration was a warrior skill first, used by the Greeks on the battlefields of yesteryear if, like their Asian cousins, a soldier should ever find himself without a weapon. In the Olympics (introduced as an event in 648 B.C.) it became a competitive, if brutal, sport in which highly trained competitors sought to better their peers. Apart from biting and gouging, the art was effectively a no-holds barred fighting style, though we can surmise that certainly gouging would have been part of the arsenal of techniques used against an enemy in life-or-death combat.

Many of the techniques practiced in Pankration are similar to those found in Asian fighting methods (again, note the theory that the art may have been adopted in India from where it spread to China). Whether this is because of a direct influence or the finite number of ways punches, kicks and locks can be applied, thus leading to repetition, has yet to be established. Other similarities do exist, such as the striking of weak points of the body, the importance of balance and the use of a shout to both energize the practitioner and scare the opponent. Experts were even known to publicly smash rocks to demonstrate their skill, a practice replicated in many Asian arts.

Pankration is a complete martial art in that it does not specialize in one aspect of unarmed defense but teaches techniques at all ranges, from kicking to groundwork, thus betraying its roots in classical Greek boxing and wrestling. Utilizing low kicks, vicious punches, jarring elbow strikes and sweeps, the pankratiast would hammer an opponent to the floor, attack the other in a prone position, then grapple to force a submission. On the battlefield any such strangle holds or joint locks would have been fully executed, resulting in death, paralysis or very serious injury. These skills were, and still are, developed by shadow boxing combined with heavy body conditioning and a lot of sparring. Sparring can take two forms: concentrating on striking or focussing on grappling. Training today is far less bloody and makes use of contemporary scientific knowledge to enhance training methods. That said, Pankration remains a highly effective art. The modern day version of this art is the result of academic inquiry into its origins and does not exist as the end result of being passed down from successive teacher to student relations.

There are hopes that one-day soon a sanitized form of Pankration will once more grace the list of events in the Olympic games.

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