What is the origin of hockey?

The origin of hockey is unknown.
There are graphic records of rudimentary forms of hockey in many parts of the world.
There is a figure from 1272 BC in Ireland.
In Ancient Greece, there is an image of several men playing naked pushing a ball with curved (or horned) sticks.
The word hockey possibly comes from the Middle French hoquet ('shepherd's curved stick'), a diminutive of the Old French hoc ('hook').
It is possible that several centuries later, when British imperialists invaded India in 1757, they adopted a game similar to hockey and brought it to Europe.
Similar to hockey are hurling and shinty.
In the 16th century, the Mapuche Amerindian people (in southern Chile and Argentina) played a sport with a ball that they had to control with sticks, called 'Chueca' or 'Palín'.
A game similar to modern hockey was apparently played in English public schools in the early 19th century.
The first hockey club was the Blackheath Football and Hockey Club in London, founded around 1861.
In 1871, the Teddington Hockey Club was formed and in 1875 the English Hockey Association.
In the 1890s, international matches were played and hockey was included in the 1908 Olympic Games.
The first field hockey association was formed at the end of the 19th century.
The Indian and Pakistani national teams were the great world dominators of this sport for many decades.
In 1924, the International Hockey Federation (FIH) was created.
In 1982, the men's and women's games were unified under the auspices of the FIH, which in the 1990s had more than one hundred member countries.
The sport has long been dominated by India and Pakistan, who have won all Olympic tournaments from 1928 to 1968, but later teams from other countries have emerged that have broken the hegemony that Indians and Pakistanis have had.