What is your understanding of martial arts history?

What is your understanding of martial arts history, in general? OR in your particular art of choice, in particular? (VERY IMPORTANT: Cite your web, authoritative historical university-level scholarly sources highly desired, but not required)

What is your understanding of martial arts history?
Read A History of Warfare by John Keegan to get the idea about how to view the martial tradition. Once you do this, pick various historical books on individual styles, regions, and conflicts that shaped the way that mankind wages war. Even today, the ways that individuals fight has changed to a degree due to equipment (on the battlefield), weapons, and the legal risks we incur when we fight in "civilized" society.
Reply:IT SUCKZ!!!!
Reply:karate is very old, it means empty hand loaded mind
Reply:Do your own homework you lazy bastard!





here are some interesting sources for WMA I studied.





I really don't care much about CMA history. I read romance of the three kingdoms. I think thats as close as I'll get.





george silver





codex wallerstien





I:33





fiore de liberi





hans talhoffer





sigmund ringeck





ott the jew





johannes leichtenhaur (spelling is off)





Joachim meyer (spelling)





Enjoy. You just might learn something and have info from actual fechtbooks rather than spouting lore and national pride beliefs that you find in many asian martial arts origin stories many of which are conflicting due to "lineage wars" and other stuff that detracts from training. (who cares who had the original, can it work TODAY, is all that matters)
Reply:ouch, that's a rough one. Well for the most parts there are lotsa legends. There's the one of Bodidharma going from India to China to spread Buddhism and bringing "vajaramushti" with him (an old form of indian martial arts from which, what the legend says, kung fu evolved. Even as far as the historical facts that are proven, such as the use of boxing, wrestling and pankratium (anything goes) by the ancient Greeks, there are the objections of those who believe that the Greeks acquired these skills from the Egyptian who aquired them from the Africans and so on...
Reply:wikipedia is a good place to start. They usually have a clutter free distillation to work from. My personal understanding is far from the best, but I'd get a Phd. if they gave them.
Reply:given its 2000 year martial arts heritage, there is understandably a number of chinsese fighting systems, there were over 400 fighting systems extant in chinese history, which makes it improbable to know how many systems exist in chinese martial arts. virtual explosion of the martial arts occurred during the feudal era of japan where some 725 japanese fighting systems were documented
Reply:I'm going to answer this from an Eastern History. In the West we have the wrestling styles of Athens moving toward the Roman Gladatorial bouts, which heavily effected the fighting styles in Africa (especially Northern Africa) and Europe. In the East, the Bodidharma created exercise sets (Lohan) off of the fighting styles he learned as a kid in India. These evolved over the years to become Kung Fu (Chuan Fa) which emigrated to the Fukien Province (Fouzhou Shaolin Temple) and then to Okinawa (mixing with old Okinawan Di) which always had many Chinese immigrants in the city of Naha. Karate, prior to WWII then went to mainland Japan (which also had Jujitsu, based on other Chinese Monks travelling to Japan centuries before) and to Korea (Tang Soo Do... Chinese-kara, Hand-Te) where it was again synthesized with old kicking techniques (Taekwon) to create the Korean styles. American servicement after WWII then brought styles from China, Japan, Korea and (mostly) Okinawan Karate to America in the 1950s and 60's. America added the aspect of "sport" to karate, and so we have MMA, UFC, Tournament Karate and other sports fit for 20 year olds.