Rat City Sports

Revealing the History of Bowling

Even though we all have a tendency to assume that bowling is a fairly modern sport, the truth of the matter is, that the history bowling reveals is varied a lot and it appears to have independently developed in different places around the globe. Even though the people that were participating in bowling didn’t always speak our modern language or wear the same clothes that we did, when it all boiled down to the actual use of a ball that was being rolled in order to knock over the pins that were standing upright, now that is something that many of them would definitely be able to recognize.

Among the very first places that bowling can be traced back to is ancient Egypt. There was a version of the bowling ball and pins that were all sized for a child that was found that was very primitive, that were discovered along with a couple of artifacts that could actually be dated back to thirty two hundred BC deliberately, something that will make all of them well over five thousand years old.

However, this isn’t the only suggestion that have been made referring to the fact that bowling could be quiet ancient. There were some individuals that claimed that the ball and the pins represented a totally different game completely and stated that bowling originated within Germany only about two thousand years ago.

Among the very first mentions of bowling from what we can tell is known to involve one of the English King’s outlawing it because of the fact that all of his troops were bowling instead of participating in their archery practice. So, this would place bowling in England during the thirteen hundreds. However, because of its depictions in literature and art, we can tell that it was legal and popular once again just a very short time later. But this time around, there were some different variations of bowling, which from one country to the next, varied in the number of pins and the size of the balls that were used.

At the time that the very first European settlers came into America, bowling was brought along with them. In America, the very first mention of the term bowling is related to Rip Van Winkle, a very famous story in the Washington Carver that was published during eighteen twelve.

This story reflects the main character meeting men that are strangely dressed which are enjoying the game known as ninepins. As you can tell, this differs a little from the modern game we have, which is known to consist of ten pins, and the story hiding behind the addition of the tenth pin is a very interesting one.

Due to bowling being very popular among gamblers and criminals, bowling as a game suffered from a shady reputation and in several places there were laws passed which actually forbidden the owning of any bowling establishments. In order to get around all of this, there were many establishments that simply decide to add another pin to the bowling set and claimed that they were actually playing a totally different game.

Tags: bowling, Egypt, Rip Van Winkle