Article suitable for older students

Oh balls!

13th Dec 2008

Ballgame illustration by Covarrubias

The Aztecs called the game itself (the action of hitting the ball with the hips or buttocks) ‘ullamaliztli’ and the ballcourt ‘tlachtli’, but the Mesoamerican ballgame can be traced back some 3,500 years - the oldest recorded ball game in the world - to Mexico’s mother culture, the Olmec (‘the people of rubber’)... (Written/compiled by Ian Mursell/Mexicolore)

All the great ancient Mexican civilisations played this ritual game. It’s probably the oldest known team sport played with a ball in the world.

Most experts agree that the movement of the ball across the court represented, at least on one level, the movement of the sun in the the sky - it was vital to keep the ball moving throughout the game*. The Spanish conquerors had never seen a rubber ball before - imagine their utter amazement...! More than likely they thought it was a being ‘possessed’ by a strange spirit, or, in one word, magic.

At the height of the Aztec empire, the annual tribute demand to Tenochtitlan in rubber balls totalled 16,000! They came - exclusively - from the lowland coastal province, far south-east from Tenochtitlan of Tochtepec - Olmec land. The province was rich in resources: gold, cotton, cacao, fish, birds, and... rubber!
In one of the most richly illustrated tribute pages of the famous Codex Mendoza we fnd recorded (Pic3) the glyphs for 2 x 8,000 (incense bags) = 16,000 rubber balls. This is a huge increase on the 2,000 balls demanded annually in tribute by the original conqueror of the region (Nezahualcoyotl of Texcoco) just a few decades earlier. According to one researcher (see The Ball by John Fox) it would have taken about 1,300 acres of land and over 400 full-time rubber tappers to meet that sort of level of annual rubber ball ‘tax’!

Over 2,500 ballcourts have been discovered throughout Mesoamerica, the largest (at Chichén Itzá) some 6x bigger than the smallest (at Tikal, Guatemala).

*Notice how the glyph for ‘movement’ in the Codex Borgia (Pic 5) looks strikingly like the two elements passing through the rings of the ballcourt shown in the Codex Zouche-Nuttall (Pic 6)!

Incidentally, the Florentine Codex tells us that rubber was also highly regarded as a curative for a wide range of ailments.

For a really authoritative article about this athletic, dangerous, symbolic and ancient game (pity there are no pictures, though!), read ‘The Mesoamerican ballgame’ by Jane Stevenson Day, retired Chief Curator of the Denver Museum of Natural History (link below) -

- or visit the splendid website that supported an entire exhibition on the Mesoamerican ballgame (‘The Sport of Life and Death’) at the Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte, North Carolina, USA in 2001 (sadly this seems to have been taken down, 2020).

Ode to the ritual ballgame (Aztec limerick no. 10) -
The great ritual sport known as tlachtli
Was the word for the COURT itself, actually.
This game of such fame
That could leave players lame
Was ullamaliztli - well, naturally!

‘The mother of all ballgames’‘The Road to El Dorado (2000) - Play Ball! Scene’: watch out for the armadillo!‘The Mesoamerican Ballgame’ (PDF)A few more resources on the ballgame...Study a rattle in the form of a ball player

Comments (2)

Bernard Ortiz de Montelllano

1st Jun 2010

The banning of the ball game after the conquest is not because the ball was “possessed”, but because the ball game was intimately involved with the Aztec religion. This is also the reason why the growing of amaranth. which used to be an important food item for the Aztecs, was forbidden.

tecpaocelotl

6th Mar 2010

I do believe the Spanish thought the ball was “possessed” since they banned the game after the conquest.

Ballgame illustration by Covarrubias