Records of boxing are dated back to the Summer era of the 3rd millennium BC and the Egyptian era of the 2nd millennium BC making it the oldest sport in the history of time, subsequently fighting with fists the most natural form of combat to man. Boxing then moved on to ancient Greece, where barbarians would sit face to face and punch each other until one of them was dead at times spikes and the like were used to quicken the process and most of the time the opponents were naked with the exception of wrappings to protect their arms.

Fortunately, around 688 B.C., this form of boxing passed and boxers soon were practicing on punching bags and were allowed to wear leather straps and breastplates to protect their arms and chests. Boxing then took on many forms, depending on the country in which it grew popular. For example, China merged boxing with wrestling during the Zhou Dynasty and utilized a combination of attacks, including throws and pressure point attacks. Ancient Buddhist history also mentions a form of boxing particularly, a boxing match between Buddha’s cousin and half-brother.

In the Buddharata Sutra, a martial art form of boxing was written about and this particular form of boxing was known as Vajra Mushti. Boxing also took its place in ancient Rome, being more popular among prisoners attempting to win their freedom by winning a boxing match. Boxing did not last long in Rome, however, although it gained so much popularity that even free men and nobles fought in matches. In 500 A.D. Theodoric the Great prohibited boxing in any form.

Boxing took off in London, however, and early fighting around the year 1743 didn’t have any weight limits or really, any rules of any kind. Many boxers fought with bare knuckles and this made for a very brutal sport thankfully, rules such as “no blows below the belt” were enforced and the sport began to morph into the martial art that we know today. Olympic boxing and women’s boxing also gained in popularity, however, the two have not generally mixed well.

Generally the majority of people have make assumptions that the whole boxing glove was made to protect the person being hit. The bones in the hand however are small and incredibly fragile so the padding providing the gloves is as much as protecting the person being clobbered and person doing the clobbering – fighting, martial arts and boxing are pretty much two way – you cannot fight with yourself!

Following the end of the Greeks, we saw the Romans pick up on boxing as form of entertainment, a form of a sport – the passion died down though when it was turned into a life and death type sport in the gladiator empires. They did however continue to use leather strips as gloves – being Romans though, they decided to take it another level – metal studs, spikes, were attached to the metal as replacement from the leather strips, resulting in boxing match matches that had the losing fighter ending up dead or completely torn apart with injuries, scars and terrible long lasting effects.

In the year 30 BC boxing was made illegal by Romans in all Roman cities and provinces. The distaste for boxing was so passionate that entire Roman Empire had it banned, resulting in all Western civilization following this concept for nearly 1500 years.

Towards the start of the 1700s and the late 1600s boxing started to reappear. It was mostly however bare knuckled and boned fighting, this did not last long though, in fact during this development we slowly saw the adding of padding and safety was consider.

Jack Broughton was the first British boxing champion – the first icon you could reference in British Boxing history in the early 1700s. He is considered by many to the inventor of the modern day boxing gloves – not forgetting that during his time in pioneering boxing (the development of gloves and boxing equipment slowly developed after padding) that the major public eye fights were still non glove assigned fighters and were fighting bare knuckled – going all out.

Due to the amount of casualties and deaths in these matches, a decision was made and boxing fans and communities started to apply rules – in the year 1866, bare knuckle fighting was over and boxing gloves were put in to practice. There were a lot of fanatics out there, who did not like the idea and were still passionate about the raw fighting.