Vincent Price and Boris Karloff wizard duel to the death

Well, answering that query fully would probably require something the length of a doctoral thesis. 😅

Let's get a bit into the etymology first, so that we all know what we're talking about.

The word itself, in English anyway, is relatively new (and only goes back to the mid- to late 1400s.). It's a compound constructed from the Old English word for "wise" and the -ard ending (a conditional possessive/associative suffix that usually means "to have a specific quality"—see the entry over here at EtymOnline for some discussion of this). A lot of the earliest uses of this suffix that have come down to us are pejorative (i.e. dotard, dullard, etc...), and the arguments about just why this should be can get pretty heated: so let's not go there just now. But the inherent conflict between the "wise" part of the word and the "-ard" part is interesting.

In English, then, the concept just starts out as meaning "wise person". (From the OED:)

(Pausing here to note that I wasn't expecting to see the words "Vulcan" and "wizard" come up in the same passage today.) 😏

...But after that something interesting happens, and the word starts attracting occult associations. And not just occult ones, either: Biblical ones.

This meaning is mostly still with us, and gives us something moderately solid to hang our mythologers' and folkorists' hats on. The interesting thing here is that the 1550-ish connection to the Magi points in its turn back to much older stories about powerful people (usually male) who were associated with some kind of priesthood or official (usually governmental) structure.

The stories of those wizards go back thousands of years. They can be found in such ancient resources as the Egyptian Westcar Papyrus, which tells stories of a number of magic-workers (some named, some anonymous civil-servant scribes). The Papyrus itself is dated back to between the 16th and 18th centuries BC, and the stories in it are supposed to date back to the 26th century BC.

That's pushing five thousand years ago. So wizards (in terms of being folks who people tell stories about) plainly have some staying power. Merlin is a mere babe in arms compared to these guys.

One of these wizard-scribes discovers that his wife is cheating on him, and teaches her paramour a lesson by creating a wax crocodile that drags him to the bottom of a nearby lake. (I'm afraid neither of the "cheaters" survive the events that then follow.) In another story, after one of a king's barge-rowing maidens loses an amulet overboard and the whole rowing team goes on strike until it's found, the king's scribe Djadjaemankh performs a spell that piles one half of the lake's water on top of the other half, revealing the lost amulet. A third story tells of the wizard Dedi, who (besides being a big eater and drinker) is really good at reattaching severed heads to animals, and possesses various other types of secret knowledge...

You get the picture. The Papyrus is famed for the complexity of its language, for its contents, and their age... and leaves us wondering, "How many other stories like these were out there and were simply never found?" ...No telling.

It wasn't just the Egyptians who had wizard-stories like these, either. The Mesopotamians had two clearly described classes of priestly magic-workers: one group (baru) who were diviners and visionaries, and another class (esipu) whose title is usually translated as "wizards," and who specialized in exorcism and the removal of taboos and evil spells.

For me, the interesting thread here is that these classes of magic-workers were all theoretically under some higher authority's command. In this regard, the concept of Gandalf as being in Middle-Earth on the business of the Valar is sort of an unexpected connection to these older traditions.

...But there's a dark flip side to this very ancient approach. Mesopotamian freelance witches and wizards—practitioners functioning outside of their cultures' "approved" supervisory structures—routinely came from disadvantaged and marginalized groups (foreigners, peddlers, actors, women...) and were equally routinely persecuted and killed by the authorities. ...So it becomes obvious that some of the uglier tropes surrounding wizardry go way back.

...Anyway: wizardry as a concept, and wizards (under various names) as characters, are old: far older than our own last millennium or two. What I've referenced above is just a smattering of what the ancient world has to offer on the subject. (If I started in on China alone, we'd be here for the rest of the month...)