Egyptian Wrestling from Beni Hasan

[Alina]

These wrestling holds come from Tomb 15 (Baqet III) in the ancient Egyptian cemetery site of Beni Hasan. Here is one of the original painted images:



These line drawings were made for Hugh Leonard's 1897 wrestling manual "A Handbook of Wrestling." The manual itself is available online for free at: http://www.archive.org/details/AHand-bookOfWrestling

















Special thanks to Kirk Lawson whose post on another forum turned me onto this source.

The images are automatically cut off on the right edge by the forum, if you right click them and click "view image" you can see the full picture.

[Joeli]

The Egytptian kama sutra. I get this feeling that sources like this highlight how universally human martial art wrestling is.

Ars Ensis in Hungary has a studygroup on this this as a side project. They showed me some last summer, and it was nice stuff. With little work they could hold a class of it in some event. You have to have a broad set of wrestling skills to be able to study this source, but if you have such a group, it seemed a fun thing to play around with. To my eyes, the variety of techniques is quite remarkable.