*The following is a compilation of information gathered from books, magazine articles, and papers.  Not all opinions presented are duplicated in all sources, especially in the ancient history's.

    An accurate history of the martial arts is probably impossible.  there are many reasons for this.  First, nearly every country has its own native style of fighting.  Tradition has it that Chinese kung fu began in China in 2,700 B.C.  Judo and jujutsu are native to Japan.  From Okinawa comes karate, Korea, taekwondo, France, savate, and even Russia, sambo.
    Another enormous problem in dealing with the history of the martial arts is that there is little written evidence to examine at least in pre-20th century history.  Martial arts techniques have resisted examination in great part because they have traditionally been considered secret, and therefore nothing has been written down.  Martial arts practitioners over the centuries have refused to communicate their knowledge to outsiders.  This was because of their deadly potential, an edge that required knowledge to be restricted to members of one religion, one school of fighting, one political point of view, or one social class.
    Masutatsu Oyama, believed that the origin of modern karate was to be found in the most popular - and brutal- of Greek Olympic games: pankration.  Although pankration was a sport, introduced into the Olympics in 648B.C., it was also a martial art like those of the Orient in that it began as training and recreation for soldiers.
    In fact, sports were initially encouraged in ancient Greece precisely because the very safety and survival of the Greek city-state depended on the athletic and military skills of the citizens.  The Spartans allowed every technique in their style of pankration because they used it to prepare for war.  In Olympic pankration, two men competed in unarmed combat using all their powers until one gave up, with surrender indicated by the raising of one hand as in the gladiatorial combat of the later Roman arena.  A man could kick, punch, use locks and throws - anything, in fact, except bite or gouge the soft parts of the body such as the eyes, throat and genitals.  Also like the later roman gladiatorial situation, a trainer would stand by with a club or whip to ensure that those few rules were not violated.  The Greeks also prepared for this martial art by practicing blows against a large skin filled with seeds, grain or sand, just as modern karate practitioners use a heavy bag.  Another similarity between Greek boxing and modern martial arts is that the Greeks used the open hand, an almost universal trait in the Oriental martial arts.
    Additional similarities between the Greek and Oriental martial arts can be noted in the dance-like movements used by practitioners.  Around 500B.C. in Athens, the Greeks performed a gymnastic dance called pyrrhic.  It was regarded as an important means to develop agility and prepare young men for actual combat.  These dances were often done to music, with the performers sometimes using weapons as part of their dance.  Oyama saw a moral and spiritual connection, as well as a practical relationship of timing and rhythm, between music and karate.
    This description matches exactly the modern karate and kung fu kata - a dance like series of prearranged movements meant to demonstrate the proper form used in a particular martial art defense and attack..  Just as with pyrrhic, kata are intended to develop agility and prepare practitioners for actual combat.  In both pyrrhic and kata, weapons are sometimes used and the dance is often done to music.  finally, there were frequent competitions among the dancers of pyrrhic, just as there are among karate practitioners who perform kata.
    The midpoint in tracing the mainline history of the martial arts from Greece to the Orient to the United States is India.   India serves as the transition point that explains the transmission of Greek martial sport to the East.  This movement of the martial arts from Greece through  India to the Far East to America has some support from evidence found in signs and symbols.  The symbol for Okinawan karate, for example, is the mirror image of a common sign used in ancient Greece: a three-legged figure called the triskelion.  The triskelion is also an Indian symbol of the Hindu trinity as well as the Buddhist tongue of Kumarajiva.
    Besides this sketchy symbolic connection, there is historical evidence that the mainstream of martial arts swung eastward from Greece with the armies of Alexander the Great in the fourth century B.C.  Alexander's conquests brought Greek civilization as far east as northern India in 327.
    Like Napoleon in Egypt 2,000 years later, Alexander brought his native culture with him and introduced it to the conquered peoples.  As a result, he carried Greek athletics, including pankration, to India.  In India, pankration may have combined with a native Indian form of unarmed combat, called vajramushti, to form an early style of karate.  Evidence for an Indian form of karate comes only indirectly from the statues of Japanese noi, or Bodhisattva, temple guardians that are replicas of Indian Buddhist prototypes.
    A link between Hellenistic culture and athletics, and the early development of karate-like combat in India and China, may also be found in Buddhism.  The Indian king Asoka, an ally of Alexander the Great, spread Buddhism throughout India - a Buddhism strongly influenced by Greek culture.  Asoka's Gandharan kingdom, in  fact, acted as "a Hellenic filter" that brought Greek influence not only to India but to all of Asia on the wings of Buddhism.  It was this Gandharan art that created the human image of Buddha.  Just as the Indian Buddhists introduced Greek-style statuary, called Gandharan, into China, it was an Indian Buddhist monk named Bodhidharma (Daruma) who introduced Zen Buddhism and an early form of karate into China around 520A.D.
    There are conflicting accounts in the form of legends as to why Bodhidharma left India for China, but they all agree that he took with him a knowledge of the martial arts.  Although it is speculation, it is not without reason to suspect that the Indian Buddhist monk was familiar with Greek culture and athletics, more particularly with the pankration brought by Alexander to India.  Bodhidharma was also an aristocrat and was therefore almost certainly familiar with the Indian martial art vajramushti.  At any rate, he took up residence in China at the Buddhist Shaolin Temple at Sung Shan in Henan (Hunan) Province.  Here, he taught the monks his system of Zen Buddhism as well as his skill in empty-hand fighting - a style that most likely contained elements of Greek pankration and Indian vajramushti.
    Bodhidharma's motivations apparently were two:  First, Zen required extremely long periods of meditation.  Practice of the martial arts would, therefore, improve the monks' capacity for the difficult physical and mental discipline needed to meditate until they attained enlightenment.  Second, the monks, once they had grown skillful in unarmed fighting, could follow Buddha's moral teachings by defending themselves without weapons.
    The Shaolin priests spread their Zen teachings and their knowledge of the martial arts outside the monastery.  Perhaps they taught both Buddhism and karate to the Chinese peasantry who at that time were preyed on by bandits.  Whatever the reason, this knowledge spread outside the monastery, where it combined with native Chinese kung fu forms that imitated animals and insects and had already been practiced in China for 3,000 years.  The soldiers of the legendary Yellow Emperor of China, Huang Ti, as early as 2,700 B.C. imitated the actions of tigers, eagles, praying mantises and monkeys.  Bodhidharma's influence may be seen today in the kung fu styles that take a linear approach, as opposed to the circular styles that probably existed before his arrival.  Until recently, little has been known of kung fu (called Chinese boxing by uninitiated Westerners) because the groups practicing these techniques have been traditionally anti-government and, since the 17th century, anti-Western.
    From China, the mainstream again moved East.  Between 600 and 900 A.D., shaolin kung fu, or Shorin-ji Kempo,  was introduced into the Ryukyu Islands and developed into Okinawa-te.  (Modern karate may be a product of this kung fu and the native Okinawan style of unarmed combat known as tode).
    What gave the development of Okinawan karate great impetus were the great Okinawan weapons confiscations that occurred before and during the 17th century conquest of the island by Japan.
    As early as 1429, the Okinawan king, Sho Hashi, prohibited the use of weapons as contrary to his emphasis on high culture and fine arts.  All of the citizens' weapons were collected and taken to the arsenal at the city of Shuri.  Again, shortly after the Japanese conquest of 1609, all weapons were banned, this time by the victorious Satsuma clan to ease the task of the Japanese occupation forces.  (There had been a great "sword hunt" within Japan itself in 1588, which the Japanese hegemon Hideyoshi ordered to ensure samurai dominance over the Japanese peasantry.)  Okinawans, at this point, were united in their hatred and fear of the Japanese, so they created a deadly form of unarmed combat called te, a combination of Chinese kung fu (chuan-fa) and native tode.  The Okinawans also developed their own fighting techniques with common farm implements.  These tools are known today as the nunchaku, sai, kama, tonfa, and bo.  Since then, several competing styles of te (by the late 19th century called kara-te, or "empty hand") have developed.  The introduction of karate itself into Japan was delayed until the 20th century because the Okinawan martial arts groups were, as in China, secret societies and hostile to the ruling foreign dynasty.  By 1875 the Satsuma occupation ended, and Okinawa became an official part of the Japanese empire.
    So, surprisingly, Okinawan karate was not taught in Japan until between 1904 and 1915.  As had been the case in India, China and Okinawa, there were pre-existing forms of native weaponless combat, among them sumo and jujutsu.  Just as jujutsu had been he exclusive knowledge of the Japanese aristocrats, the samurai, so in Japan instruction in karate was first limited to the elite of society.
    In 1936, the world's first karate dojo was constructed with funds donated by karate-ka all across Japan.  A plaque hung over its doorway reading "shoto-kan" under which Funakoshi was the first to pass at the age of 68.  Gichin Funakoshi, the Okinawan college professor who introduced karate into Japan, refused to teach his skill to the average Japanese; he instructed only the Japanese military and university students.  Not until 1947 did widespread popular interest in karate develop in Japan.  In that year, United States occupation forces lifted the ban on karate instruction on the islands.  And so, ironically, the widespread instruction of karate occurred among Japanese and Americans at about the same time.
    It was primarily because of the American occupation of Japan, Okinawa and Korea after the war in the Pacific that the Oriental martial arts spread to the United States.  Even though there had been an influx of Chinese skilled in kung fu into Hawaii and the West Coast of the United States in the 19th century, their knowledge had been successfully kept secret from Americans as most experts were reluctant to teach their art to non-Japanese.
    It is generally regarded that Seishiro Okazaki, who changed his name to Henry after converting to Christianity, was the first Japanese to accept non-Japanese students in his dojo.  He developed a style of jujutsu while living in Hawaii and named it danzen ryu.  The art is similar to judo but lacks the sport emphasis.  In 1927, Kensu Yabu gave the first public demonstration of karate in the west at the Nuuana YMCA in Hawaii.  Chojun Miyagi, at the request of an Okinawan newspaper editor in Hawaii, taught karate in Hawaii for eight months but returned to Okinawa in 1935.  James Mitose opened the Official Self-Defense Club at Betetania Mission in Honolulu in 1942.
    Instructors of judo and later aikido were not so picky about their students.  Although judo was still heavily restricted to Japanese communities in the United States, Americans slowly learned about and developed an interest in the art.  President Theodore Roosevelt was taught judo in the White House and may have attained the rank of brown or black belt.  Actor James Cagney earned a black belt.
    Robert Trias, "father of American karate," opened the first school on the mainland in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1946.  He was trained in hsing-i and shuri-tode ryu.  In 1948, Trias founded the United States Karate Association.
    Tsutomu Oshima opened a shotokan karate school in Los Angeles at the Konku Shinto Church.  He was a direct student of Funakoshi and was the first to introduce a purely Japanese style of karate to America.
    But because of the Far East occupation, hundreds of American soldiers were exposed to the martial arts when American military commanders allowed instruction to take place on their bases.  In the early 1950's, the Air Force sponsored karate instruction for personnel in Japan and the United States, and Japanese karate experts toured the United States demonstrating the power of their techniques.  Oyama, for example, toured in 1952 as a kind of wrestler.  Later in the '50s and '60s karate schools began to take hold in the United States, schools almost exclusively headed by veterans of the occupation forces.  Without this military impetus, the introduction of karate into the West would have been greatly delayed.
    Adriano D. Emperado and the Black Belt Society, founded Kajukenbo karate, with Emperado opening the first school in the Palama Settlement Gym in Honolulu in 1950.
    Edmund Parker, "father of American kenpo," began teaching at Brigham Young University in 1954.  Parker traveled to California and became the instructor of many movie personalities, including Darren McGavin, Blake Edwards, Robert Culp, and Elvis Presley.  Martial arts were then written into the scripts of television shows.  These included "The Avengers," "The Wild Wild West," "Kung Fu," and the "Green Hornet."
    Bruce Lee demonstrated his own unique style of jeet kune do, "way of the intercepting fist," in his several movies which grossed in the hundreds of millions at the box office.  This began the "kung fu" craze of the 70's.

Links:
Rec.  Martial-Arts Moderated


Bibliography for this and all history links:
Adriano Emperado, The Force Behind Kajukenbo by John Bishop, Inside Kung Fu, 1994
Amazing Stories From the Shaolin Temple by Jeffrey J. Kelly, Black Belt, 1994
From Ancient Greece to the Modern United States by Robert Michael. Black Belt ,1996
History of Karate by Rob Gasperiak, 1986
James Mitose's Untold Story by Jane Hallander, Black Belt, 1992
Kajukenbo, A Brief Overview of America's Martial Art by John Bishop, Black Belt, 1998
Karate Histories for Te to Z, Andy Pruim, Black Belt 1990
Karate The Art of "Empty Hand" Fighting by Hidetaka Nishiyama & Richard C. Brown, 1960
Karate-Do Kyohan, The Master Text by Gichin Funakoshi, 1973
Kenpo Evolves! by Prof. Vince Black, Kungfu Magazine, 1992
Milestones in the Japanese Grappling Arts by Clay Morgan, Black Belt, 1996
The Kenpo Warriors by John Bishop, Martial Arts, the Master Series, 1993
The Hawaiians' Role In Martial Arts History by John Bishop, Inside Kung-Fu, 1995
The Life and Times of James Mitose by William Durbin, Black Belt 1991