The History

The sport of handball as it is played today certainly has a chequered history. The very fact that man has always been more adept at using his hands than his feet lends credibility to the claim made by famous sports historians that he started playing handball much earlier than, say, football (soccer). And, it has been speculated that an early form of team handball was one of the original Olympic disciplines.

Ancient forms of handball The games that were precursors of handball can only said to be distantly related to it in terms of their structure and rules of play. Nonetheless, the games of "Urania" played by the Ancient Greeks (and described by Homer in the Odyssey) and "Harpaston" played by the Romans (and described by the Roman doctor Claudius Galenus in 130 to 200 A.D.) as well as in the "Fangballspiel" (or 'catch ball game') featured in the songs of the German lyrical poet Walther von der Vogelweide (1170-1230) all contained certain features that can be described as ancient forms of handball.

In France, Rabelais (1494-1533) described a form of handball: "They play ball using the palm of their hand." Furthermore, in 1793 the Inuit people living in Greenland described and made illustrations of a ball game played using the hands.

Meanwhile, in 1848 the Danish sports administrator Holger Nielsen gave permission for a "handball game" to be played in Ortrup secondary school and promptly laid down the corresponding rules for it.

Modern Team Handball: Team handball, as it's played now, was first played towards the end of the 19th century. The founding fathers of field handball, the earliest version of modern team handball, were German physical education experts who gained recognition for field handball as a separate sport at the turn of the century, based on the games of "Raffball" ('snatch ball') and "Königsbergerball" (Konrad Koch 1846-1911).