Ancient Sport and Allen Guttmann

Five of Allen Guttmann’s eleven sport history monographs examine sport in antiquity or at least touch upon the subject. They include From Ritual to Record (1978), Sports Spectators (1986), Women’s Sport (1991), The Erotic in Sports (1996), and Sports: The First Five Millennia (2004). Ancient history is a multifaceted subject with many subfields. This essay appraises Guttmann’s work on ancient sport history and concludes that it is admirable how intensively Guttmann (an American studies scholar) has written about various ancient cultures after having nearly mastered the scholarship on the subject, which is written in several different languages.