-700c.1

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First Known Written Depiction of Ball Play?

Salience Noteworthy
Tags Females, Pre-modern Rules
Immediacy of Report Retrospective
Age of Players Adult
Text

[A] "There is a famous scene in the Odyssey where a princess named Nausicaa goes down to the river bank with her attending maidens to wash come clothes.  As their garments are drying in the sun, and while Ulysses is sleeping nearby in the bushes, the women engage in a game of ball.  For eons, writers have cited this scene as the earliest literary reference to humans playing with a ball." 

[B]  ". . . Nausicaa/ With other virgins, did at stool-ball play;/ . . ./  The Queene now (for the upstroke) strooke the ball/Quite wide of the other maids; and made it fall/Amidst the whirlpooles.  At which, out shriekt all;/And with the shrieke, did wise Ulysses wake."

 

 

Sources

[A] David Block, Pastime Lost (U Nebraska Press, 2019), pp 53-54. See also pp 55-56.

[B] George Chapman (translator), The Whole Works of Homer, (London, 1606), p. 89.

Note: For one recent review of knowledge of very early ball play by humans, see John Fox, The Ball: Discovering the Object of the Game (Harper, 2012), pp. 30-47. 

 

Warning

The date of the Odyssey, given here as circa 700 BCE, is not even generally agreed to by scholars.  Don't take it literally; it is presented only because formatted chronology listings need to place an entry somewhere, or otherwise omit them entirely 

Comment

See also chronology entry 1788.3 for a later translation that uses "baste ball" instead of stool-ball as the game played by the women.

Non-written depictions of ball play also exist in various ancient art forms.

Some writers see the Odyssey verse as describing a game resembling dodgeball.

 

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Submitted by Protoball Functionary
Submission Note Email from David Block, 9/16/2020



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