Single combat

So instead, each side sends out its best man, the two of them fight, the gods reveal their verdict through the outcome, and everybody else gets to go home.

The Greeks came to call this kind of arrangement monomachia, or in English, the single fight or single combat.

For a concept built on such clean logic, it had a spectacular tendency to fall apart in practice.

The oldest detailed account of a duel like this doesn't come from Greece at all.

It comes from ancient Egypt.

The tale of Sinuhe, composed around 1900 BC, follows an Egyptian courtier who flees his homeland after a palace crisis and rises to wealth among the tribes of the Levant.

His success attracts a challenger, a local strongman who wants his herds and announces he'll take them in single combat.

The whole tribe turns out to watch.