Combat treatise

Martial arts manuals are instructions, with or without illustrations, specifically designed to be learnt from a book. Many books detailing specific techniques of martial arts are often erroneously called manuals but were written as treatises.

Prose descriptions of martial arts techniques appear late within the history of literature, due to the inherent difficulties of describing a technique rather than just demonstrating it.

The earliest extant manuscript on armed combat (as opposed to unarmed wrestling) is Royal Armouries Ms. I.33 ("I.33"), written in Franconia around 1300.

Not within the scope of this article are books on military strategy such as Sun Tzu's The Art of War (before 100 BC) or Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus' De Re Militari (4th century), or military technology, such as De rebus bellicis (4th to 5th century).

Some early testimonies of historical martial arts consist of series of images only. The earliest example is a fresco in tomb 15 at Beni Hasan, showing illustrations of wrestling techniques dating to the 20th century BCE. Similar depictions of wrestling techniques are found on Attic vases dating to Classical Greece.

The only known instance of a book from classical antiquity is Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 466 from the 2nd century, detailing Greek wrestling techniques. There are some examples in the Chinese classics that may predate the turn of the Common Era: the Records of the Grand Historian by Sima Qian (c. 100 BC) documents wrestling, referring to earlier how-to manuals" of the Western Han (2nd century BC), which have however not survived. An extant Chinese text on wrestling is "Six Chapters of Hand Fighting" included in the 1st century Book of Han.

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