Physical contests pursued for the goals and challenges they entail. Sports are part of every

Sports of the ancient Mediterranean world
Egypt
Sports were unquestionably common in ancient Egypt, where pharaohs used their hunting prowess and exhibitions of strength and skill in archery to demonstrate their fitness to rule. In such exhibitions, pharaohs such as Amenhotep II (ruled 1426–1400 BCE) never competed against anyone else, however, and there is reason to suspect that their extraordinary achievements were scribal fictions. Nonetheless, Egyptians with less claim to divinity wrestled, jumped, and engaged in ball games and stick fights. In paintings found at Beni Hassan, in a tomb dating from the Middle Kingdom (1938–c. 1630 BCE), there are studies of 406 pairs of wrestlers demonstrating their skill.
Crete and Greece
Since Minoan script still baffles scholars, it is uncertain whether images of Cretan boys and girls testing their acrobatic skills against bulls depict sport, religious ritual, or both. That the feats of the Cretans may have been both sport and ritual is suggested by evidence from Greece, where sports had a cultural significance unequaled anywhere else before the rise of modern sports. Secular and religious motives mingle in history’s first extensive “sports report,” found in Book XXIII of Homer’s Iliad in the form of funeral games for the dead Patroclus. These games were part of Greek religion and were not, therefore, autotelic; the contests in the Odyssey, on the other hand, were essentially secular. Odysseus was challenged by the Phaeacians to demonstrate his prowess as an athlete. In general, Greek culture included both cultic sports, such as the Olympic Games honouring Zeus, and secular contests.
The most famous association of sports and religion was certainly the Olympic Games, which Greek tradition dates from 776 BCE. In the course of time, the earth goddess Gaea, originally worshiped at Olympia, was supplanted in importance by the sky god Zeus, in whose honour priestly officials conducted quadrennial athletic contests. Sacred games also were held at Delphi (in honour of Apollo), Corinth, and Nemea. These four events were known as the periodos, and great athletes, such as Theagenes of Thasos, prided themselves on victories at all four sites. Although most of the events contested at Greek sacred games remain familiar, the most important competition was the chariot race. The extraordinary prestige accorded athletic triumphs brought with it not only literary accolades (as in the odes of Pindar) and visual commemoration (in the form of statues of the victors) but also material benefits, contrary to the amateur myth propagated by 19th-century philhellenists. Since the Greeks were devoted to secular sports as well as to sacred games, no polis, or city-state, was considered a proper community if it lacked a gymnasium where, as the word gymnos indicates, naked male athletes trained and competed. Except in militaristic Sparta, Greek women rarely participated in sports of any kind. They were excluded from the Olympic Games even as spectators (except for the priestess of Demeter). The 2nd-century-CE traveler Pausanias wrote of races for girls at Olympia, but these events in honour of Hera were of minor importance.
Rome
Although chariot races were among the most popular sports spectacles of the Roman and Byzantine eras, as they had been in Greek times, the Romans of the republic and the early empire were quite selectively enthusiastic about Greek athletic contests. Emphasizing physical exercises for military preparedness, an important motive in all ancient civilizations, the Romans preferred boxing, wrestling, and hurling the javelin to running footraces and throwing the discus. The historian Livy wrote of Greek athletes’ appearing in Rome as early as 186 BCE; however, the contestants’ nudity shocked Roman moralists. The emperor Augustus instituted the Actian Games in 27 BCE to celebrate his victory over Antony and Cleopatra, and several of his successors began similar games, but it was not until the later empire, especially during the reign of Hadrian (117–138 CE), that many of the Roman elite developed an enthusiasm for Greek athletics.
Greater numbers flocked to the chariot races held in Rome’s Circus Maximus. They were watched by as many as 250,000 spectators, five times the number that crowded into the Colosseum to enjoy gladiatorial combat. Nevertheless, there is some evidence that the latter contests were actually more popular than the former. Indeed, the munera, which pitted man against man, and the venationes, which set men against animals, became popular even in the Greek-speaking Eastern Empire, which historians once thought immune from the lust for blood. The greater frequency of chariot races can be explained in part by the fact that they were relatively inexpensive compared with the enormous costs of gladiatorial combat. The editor who staged the games usually rented the gladiators from a lanista (the manager of a troupe of gladiators) and was required to reimburse him for losers executed in response to a “thumbs down” sign. Brutal as these combats were, many of the gladiators were free men who volunteered to fight, an obvious sign of intrinsic motivation. Indeed, imperial edicts were needed to discourage the aristocracy’s participation. During the reign of Nero (54–68), female gladiators were introduced into the arena.
The Roman circus and the Byzantine hippodrome continued to provide chariot racing long after Christian protests (and heavy economic costs) ended the gladiatorial games, probably early in the 5th century. In many ways the chariot races were quite modern. The charioteers were divided into bureaucratically organized factions (e.g., the “Blues” and the “Greens”), which excited the loyalties of fans from Britain to Mesopotamia. Charioteers boasted of the number of their victories as modern athletes brag about their “stats,” indicating, perhaps, some incipient awareness of what in modern times are called sports records. The gladiatorial games, however, like the Greek games before them, had a powerful religious dimension. The first Roman combats, in 264 BCE, were probably derived from Etruscan funeral games in which mortal combat provided companions for the deceased. It was the idolatry of the games, even more than their brutality, that horrified Christian protesters. The less-obtrusive pagan religious associations of the chariot races helped them survive for centuries after Constantine’s conversion to Christianity in 337 CE.