-700c.1
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First Known Written Depiction of Ball Play?
| Salience | Noteworthy |
|---|---|
| Tags | Females, Pre-modern RulesFemales, Pre-modern Rules |
| Location | |
| City/State/Country: | [[]] |
| Modern Address | |
| Game | |
| Immediacy of Report | Retrospective |
| Age of Players | AdultAdult |
| Holiday | |
| Notables | |
| 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."
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| 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.
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| 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. Edit with form to add a comment |
| Query | Edit with form to add a query |
| Source Image | [[Image:|left|thumb]] |
| External Number | |
| Submitted by | Protoball Functionary |
| Submission Note | Email from David Block, 9/16/2020 |
| Has Supplemental Text |
-700c.1 First Known Written Depiction of Ball Play?"
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