The Ancient Greeks and Romans are recognized to played many ball games, some of which involved the use of the feet. The Roman game harpastum is believed to have been adapted from a Greek team game called “?,p,?,s,?,?,?,?,?,” Episkyros or “f,a,?,?,?,?,d,a,” phaininda, which is mentioned by a Greek playwright, Antiphanes 388311 BC and afterward referred to by the Christian theologian Clement of Alexandria c. 150 c. 215 AD. These games seem to resembled rugby football. The Roman politician Cicero 10643 BC describes the case of a man who has been killed whilst having a shave when a ball has been kicked into a barber’s shop. Roman ball games already knew the air filled ball, the follis. Episkyros is recognised as an early form of football by FIFA. A Chinese game called Cuju ?,?,, Tsu’ Chu, or Zuqiu ?,?, was recognised by FIFA as the 1st variant of the game with regular rules. It existed throughout the Han Dynasty, the second and 3rd centuries BC. The Japanese variant of cuju is kemari ?,?,, and was worked on throughout the Asuka period. This is recognized to have been played inside the Japanese imperial court in Kyoto from about 600 AD. In kemari some number of people stand in a circle and kick a ball to each other, trying not to let the ball drop to the ground much like keepie uppie. The game seems to died out sometime before the mid-19th century. It has been revived in 1903 and is played at some festivals. There are some references to conventional, ancient, or prehistoric ball games, played by indigenous peoples in various parts of the world. as an example, in 1586, men from a ship commanded by an English explorer named John Davis, went ashore to play a form of football with Inuit Eskimo people in Greenland. There are afterward accounts of an Inuit game played on ice, called Aqsaqtuk. Each match began with two teams facing each other in parallel lines, before attempting to kick the ball through each other team’s line , then at a goal. In 1610, William Strachey, a colonist at Jamestown, Virginia recorded a game played by Native Americans, called Pahsaheman. On the Australian continent some number of tribes of indigenous people played kicking and catching games with full balls which have been generalised by historians as Marn Grook Djab Wurrung for “game ball”. The earliest historical account is an anecdote from the 1878 book by Robert Brough Smyth, The Aborigines of Victoria, in which a man called Richard Thomas is quoted as saying, in about 1841 in Victoria, Australia, that he had saw Aboriginal people playing the game: “Mr Thomas describes how the primary player will drop kick a ball made from the skin of a possum and how other players leap into the air to catch it.” Some historians theorised that Marn Grook was one of the origin of Australian rules football. The Ma,ori in New Zealand played a game called Ki o-rahi composed of teams of seven players play on a round field divided into zones, and score points by touching the ‘pou’ boundary markers and hitting a central 'tupu’ or target. Games played in Mesoamerica with rubber balls by indigenous peoples are documented as present since before this time, but these had more similarities to basketball or volleyball, and no links have been found between such games and modern football sports. Northeastern American Indians, particularly the Iroquois Confederation, played a game which made use of net racquets to throw and catch a small ball, but, though it’s a ball goal foot game, lacrosse as its modern descendant is called is likewise not typically classed as a form of “football.”
(Source: football.enquisition.com)
