MMA Origins: Exploring Fight Sport's Ancient Roots

AFAIK, crushed trachea. Since gouging was legal in most matches, they would strangle a guy by hooking their thumbs on either side of a dude’s trachea – you know, wrapping your hands around his throat but digging your thumbs on either side of the trachea – and squeezing and tearing.

I think it’s more likely that the subject was a pankratist because of the cauliflower ear.

The top fighter may be doing some striking, but it looks like his main goal is a position wrestler’s guillotine which can be used to submit (ADCC rules) or pin the opponent (folk wrestling). It is also known as the twister thanks to Eddie Bravo, although usual Eddie’s setup is not the cross body ride, but rather his “twister side control.”

The top fighter is in a position called a cross body ride. You can see his left leg hooked around his opponent’s left leg, and his hips pushing into his opponent’s back to keep him from standing up. If you’ve never seen a wrestler’s guillotine, there are plenty of competition videos on Youtube that show the setup from a cross body ride..

Strikes can be executed from this position, but in order to generate rotational power for a strong strike, the top fighter would need to let go of the right arm. Hammerlocks are also an option, but it’s more efficient to change his gripping hand to his right momentarily to get better leverage. Finally, the top fighter could also go for a calf slicer by hooking his left instep behind his opponent’s left calf (right now his left foot is below his opponent’s left shin instead), let go of the right arm, sit down and pull on the opponent’s left foot. Note that all of these (except for weak strikes) require the top fighter to let go of the right arm.

It’s really hard to make clothing with Bronze Age technology, so athletic competitions — which tended to be rough on clothes – were held naked.

The Greeks loved athletic competitions that fit neatly into our modern conception of what sports are supposed to look like. This is largely because our sense of how sports are supposed to operate is a conscious re-adoption (dating back to the late 19th and early 20th century) of ancient Greek forms of competition (wrestling, running, etc.) and its organizational structures, most notably the Olympic Games.
A note on the military: ancient Greek poleis (with the exceptions of Sparta, whose citizens were banned from competing in pankration, and to some extent Thebes) didn’t have a military in the sense that we understand the term, they had citizen militias. Any dichotomy between the civilian and “military” is simply false.

I should have picked up on that.