BOXING

Boxing (sometimes also known as "Western boxing" or "pugilism is a combat sport where two participants, generally of similar weight, fight each other with their fists. Boxing is supervised by a referee and is typically engaged in during a series of one to three-minute intervals called rounds. Victory is achieved if the opponent is knocked down and unable to get up before the referee counts to ten seconds (a Knockout, or KO) or if the opponent is deemed too injured to continue (a Technical Knockout, or TKO). If there is no stoppage of the fight before an agreed number of rounds, a winner is determined either by the referee's decision or by judges' scorecards.


Although fighting with fists comes naturally to people, evidence of fist-fighting contests first appear on ancient Sumerian, Egyptian and Minoan reliefs. The ancient Greeks provide us our first historical records of boxing as a formal sport; they codified a set of rules and staged tournaments with professionals. The birth hour of boxing as a sport may be its acceptance as an Olympic game as early as 688 BC. Modern boxing evolved in Europe, particularly Great Britain.

In some countries with their own fighting sports, the sport is referred to as "English Boxing" (e.g. in France to contrast with French boxing, or in Burma with Burmese boxing and in Thailand with Thai boxing). There are numerous different styles of boxing practised around the world.

Fist fighting is depicted in Sumerian relief carvings from the 3rd millennium BC, while an ancient Egyptian relief from the 2nd millenium BC depicts both fist-fighters and spectators Both depictions show bare-fisted contests. In 1927 Dr. E. A. Speiser, an archaeologist, discovered a Mesopotamian stone tablet in Baghdad, Iraq depicting two men getting ready for a prize fight. The tablet is believed to be 7,000 years old. Fist-fighting or boxing is also described in several ancient Indian texts such as the Vedas, Ramayana and . Evidence was also found in excavations at the Indus Valley cities of Mohenjadaro and Harappa. The earliest evidence for fist fighting with a kind of gloves can be found on Minoan Crete (c. 1500-900 BC), and on Sardinia, if we consider the boxing statues of Prama mountains (c. 2000-1000 BC The lebo and the Etruscans called boxing pugilism (a term now synonymous with boxing). The Greeks and Etruscans were not the first to give rules to the sport, if we consider Mediterranean peoples who preceded them, such as the Shardana and the Egyptians.