"Let
other people play at other things — the King of Games is still
the Game of Kings"
This verse is inscribed on a stone tablet next to a polo ground in Skardu, north of Kashmir, near the fabled silk route from China to the West. In one ancient sentence, it epitomizes the feelings of many polo players today.
The word polo is Balti for ball. Polo was probably developed first in Skardu (Baltistan), Ladakh (northern Pakistan), the Kargil area of India, and in a few places of Tibet and Nepal. The earliest evidence of polo is found in a 4000-4500 year-old Balti story named 'Hilafoo Kaisaar'. In northern Pakistan, where Polo is still played in its original form (free-style), a local variant is called Chogan.
However, many scholars believe that polo originated among the Iranian tribes sometime before Darius I (521–485 BC) and his cavalry extended the Achaemenid rule to greater Persia. Certainly Persian literature and art give us the richest accounts of polo in antiquity.
Ferdowsi,
the famed Iranian poet-historian, gives a number of accounts of
royal polo tournaments in his 9th
century epic, Shahnameh (the Epic of Kings). In the earliest
account, Ferdowsi romanticizes an international match between
Turanian force and the followers of Siyâvash, a legendary
Persian prince from the earliest centuries of the Empire. The
poet is eloquent in his praise of Siyâvash's skills on the polo
field. Ferdowsi also tells of Emperor Shapur
II of the Sassanid dynasty of the 4th century, who learned
to play polo when he was only seven years old.
Wherever its precise origins, polo seems to have spread throughout the Iranian plateau, Asia Minor, China and the Indian subcontinent along with the use of light cavalry. Some people erroneously believe that the strongly equestrian Mongol hordes invented polo. However, The Mongol Empire and the rise of the Golden Horde occurred almost a full millennia after polo had been well-established in Asia and the Iranian plateau. Still, the Mongols did play a variant of polo — with the head of a goat instead of a ball.
Polo was also popular in China, where it was the royal pastime for many centuries. The Chinese probably learned the game from the Iranian nobles who sought refuge in Chinese courts after the invasion of the Iranian Empire by the Arabs. Alternatively, Indian tribes (who had been taught by the Iranians) may have taught the Chinese. The polo stick appears on Chinese royal coats of arms, and the game was part of the court life in the golden age of Chinese classical culture under Minghuang, the Radiant Emperor, who was an enthusiastic equestrian.
before modern times, no variant of polo ever appeared in the European peninsula, probably because Europe's military forces depended on heavy armored cavalry, as opposed to the light, highly mobile cavalry of that Asian armies had employed since at least Alexander's time.
Throughout Asian antiquity, from Japan to Egypt, from India to the Byzantine Empire, Polo and its variants were the nearest equivalents to a "national sport." However, as the great Eastern empires decayed and collapsed in the Middle Ages following their decimation by the Mongol hordes, so too disappeared the glittering court life of which polo was so important a part, and the game itself was preserved only in remote villages.