Sport and Games Atlas
Claims this atlas currently marks as unsettled or as tested and found false. A debated fact is one scholars hold competing positions on; a debunked one has been checked against the record and found not to hold. Both are kept in view rather than quietly smoothed over, with the reasoning that put each one where it stands.
50 statements.
Shogi, Origin Year1500
Shogi, Games
Standing
Concerns Origin Year
Currently States 1500
Clear textual references to shogi in Japan date to around the sixteenth century, but archaeological finds, including shogi pieces excavated at Kofuku-ji temple in 1993 and dated to around the eleventh century, indicate an earlier and less standardized proto-shogi already existed. The game deepest ancestry traces to the Indian game chaturanga, but the route and timing by which chaturanga reached Japan, distinct from and far less documented than its westward transmission through Persia into chess, is debated among game historians.
Source A History of Chess, H.J.R. Murray
Squash, Origin Year1912
Squash, Sports
Standing
Concerns Origin Year
Currently States 1912
1912 marks the first published formal rules for squash, taken here as the sport's codified origin. The game itself is much older and undocumented in written rules: it developed informally from rackets at Harrow School around 1830, when a softer, punctured ball that squashed on wall impact produced a distinct, slower game, so squash's true beginning as an unwritten schoolboy pastime cannot be pinned to a single year.
Source Wikipedia, Squash (sport)
Swimming, Origin Year1837
Swimming, Sports
Standing
Concerns Origin Year
Currently States 1837
1837 marks the start of organized competitive swimming in London under the National Swimming Society, taken here as the sport organized origin. Swimming itself as a human activity is far older and effectively undocumented at any single origin point, practiced across many ancient cultures including Egypt, Greece and Rome, so 1837 answers only the question of when organized competition began, not when people first swam competitively.
Source Encyclopaedia Britannica
Tennis, Origin Year1874
Tennis, Sports
Standing
Concerns Origin Year
Currently States 1874
1874 is the year Major Walter Clopton Wingfield patented the modern outdoor lawn tennis game in England, taken here as the sport codified origin. The much older ancestor game, real tennis or jeu de paume, traces to French monastery courtyards around the twelfth century as a handball game, centuries before rackets or the modern lawn version existed, so which date counts as tennis true origin depends on which game is meant.
Source Encyclopaedia Britannica
US Open (Tennis), Founding Year1881
US Open (Tennis), Competitions
Standing
Concerns Founding Year
Currently States 1881
1881 is the year the men's U.S. National Singles Championship began. The women's championship followed in 1887, and the tournament did not carry its current name, the US Open, until 1968, when it opened to professional players.
Source US Open, Official History (Tennis)
Water Polo, Origin Year1870
Water Polo, Sports
Standing
Concerns Origin Year
Currently States 1870
Water polo grew informally out of Victorian swimming-club exhibitions in Scotland and England during the 1870s, credited to William Wilson at the Arlington Baths Club in Glasgow (founded 1870); no single written codification date is as sharply documented as for sports with a known rules congress, so 1870 marks the club's founding rather than a fixed codification date, and the game's early rules varied by club until national and international federations later standardized them.
Source Wikipedia, Water Polo
Whist, Origin Year1650
Whist, Games
Standing
Concerns Origin Year
Currently States 1650
Whist's exact origin is unclear; it grew out of the earlier English game Ruff and Honours and was already established by the mid seventeenth century, well before Edmond Hoyle's standardising 1742 treatise, which is a codification date rather than an origin date.
Source The Oxford Guide to Card Games
World Backgammon Championship, Founding Year1967
World Backgammon Championship, Competitions
Standing
Concerns Founding Year
Currently States 1967
Recorded results for the championship exist from 1967; the event's early history is less uniformly documented than its post-1979 Monte Carlo era.
Source Encyclopaedia Britannica
World Chess Championship, Founding Year1886
World Chess Championship, Competitions
Standing
Concerns Founding Year
Currently States 1886
1886, the year of the Steinitz versus Zukertort match, is generally regarded as the first officially recognized World Chess Championship because it was the first match organized specifically as a championship contest with an agreed stake and format. Steinitz was already regarded by many as the strongest active player from 1866, and an informal, retrospectively named succession of leading players is sometimes traced back to the mid eighteenth century, so earlier dates are sometimes cited for an unofficial lineage of championship level play. From 1993 to 2006 a rival championship lineage also existed after Garry Kasparov split from FIDE, a further complication in treating the title history as a single unbroken line.
Source The Oxford Companion to Chess, David Hooper and Kenneth Whyld
Xiangqi, Origin Year1100
Xiangqi, Games
Standing
Concerns Origin Year
Currently States 1100
The mature form with the cannon piece and the river and palace layout is documented from the Song dynasty, roughly the eleventh and twelfth centuries AD; ancestral chess like play in China is attested centuries earlier, in Tang dynasty sources.