Boxing, sport, both
amateur and professional, involving attack and defense with the fists. Boxers
usually wear padded gloves and generally observe the code set forth in the marquess of
Queensberry rules. Matched in weight and ability, boxing contestants try to
land blows hard and often with their fists, each attempting to avoid the blows
of the opponent. A boxer wins a match either by outscoring the opponent—points
can be tallied in several ways—or by rendering the opponent incapable of
continuing the match. Bouts range from 3 to 12 rounds, each round normally lasting three
minutes.
The terms pugilism and prizefighting in modern usage are practically
synonymous with boxing, although the first term indicates the ancient
origins of the sport in its derivation from the Latin pugil, “a boxer,”
related to the Latin pugnus, “fist,” and derived in turn from the Greek pyx, “with clenched
fist.” The term prizefighting emphasizes pursuit of the sport for monetary gain, which began in England in
the 17th century.
Early years
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Boxing first appeared as a formal Olympic event
in the 23rd Olympiad (688 BCE), but
fist-fighting contests must certainly have had their origin in mankind’s
prehistory. The earliest visual evidence for boxing appears in Sumerian relief
carvings from the 3rd millennium BCE. A relief
sculpturefrom Egyptian Thebes (c. 1350 BCE) shows both
boxers and spectators. The few extant Middle Eastern and Egyptian
depictions are of bare-fisted contests with, at most, a simple band supporting
the wrist; the earliest evidence of the use of gloves or hand coverings in boxing is a
carved vase from Minoan Crete (c. 1500 BCE) that shows
helmeted boxers wearing a stiff plate strapped to the fist.
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