Ancient Board Games: Duodecim Scripta & Tabula [2016] (original) (raw)
Related papers
Appendix I. Games in the Ancient World
Games in the Ancient World: Places, Spaces, Accessories, 2024
A list of ALL games from ancient Greece and Rome for which at least one source (written, material ot iconographical) is known to us, accompanied by major references.
Board games are often used as a plot motif in modern genre fiction, especially in detective and adventure stories. In these types of narrative a well-known pattern of storytelling or literary structure (e.g. the treasure hunt, the detection of serial crimes, the iniatory course, or the medieval tale collection) is reworked and adapted to the rules and phases of a board game such as chess, jeu de l’oie, or the tarot card pack. This literary practice is very ancient and may be traced back to a number of novelistic compositions of the ancient Near East, dating from the first millennium B.C. to late antiquity. In the Demotic Egyptian Tale of Setne Khaemwaset, from the Saite period, the protagonist Setne plays a board game (probably senet) with the mummy of a long dead and buried magician, in order to gain a powerful book of spells. The widespread Near-Eastern story-pattern of the magical competition is here superimposed on the procedure of a celebrated Egyptian game. In a late Hellenistic Greek novella inspired by the Odyssey (Apion of Alexandria, FGrH 616 F36) Penelope’s suitors play an elaborate game of marbles (petteia) in order to determine which one of them will marry the queen. This is a playful rewriting of the famous bow contest of the Homeric epic. A Sasanian novelistic work, the Wizārišn ī čatrang, adapts the age-old legend of the riddle contest of kings; the riddles are replaced with board games (chess and backgammon), which the opponents invent and propose to each other as difficult puzzles for solution. In all these texts the board game becomes a central symbol of the transformative and innovative power of literary narrative.
Caré, B., Dasen, V., Schädler, U. (eds), Back to the Game: Reframing Play and Games in Context. XXI Board Game Studies Annual Colloquium,, Lisbon, Associação Ludus, 2021, 227-271 (= Board Games Studies Journal, 16, 1, 2022, 251-307, https://sciendo.com/it/article/10.2478/bgs-2022-0009
A late 5th century BC funerary altar from the necropolis of Krannon (Central Greece) depicts a bearded man and a boy on either side of a board with five lines carved on a block. The fact that the man is seated and the horizontal position of the board reveal important information about Greek education and the history of Greek numeracy. This paper analyses the iconography of the relief, the link between the Five Lines game (Pente grammai) and abaci, examines the possible identification of the man as a "pebble arithmetician", of the boy as a student, and suggests a new reconstruction of the reckoning system operated on an abacus composed of five horizontal lines. A special practical function is proposed for the half-circle at one end of the abacus. This five lines pattern and the related material, especially counters, are considered from a wider perspective, a system of cultural practices associated with boards and counters throughout the Greek world.
“Ancient Greek Board Games and How to Play Them”
1999
HE PAULY-WISSOWA ARTICLE on ancient board games ("lusoria tabula") is over a thousand columns long. It meticulously catalogues the literary and archaeological evidence, details the shapes of boards and pieces, and reconstructs the forms of play.1 As such, it is a monument to nineteenth-century Wissenschaft-different in scale but not in kind from most of the scholarly research done on ancient board games. My title (which is tongue-in-cheek) gestures towards precisely this kind of antiquarian endeavor-the reconstruction of ancient Realia for their own sake. After all, what could be more trivial than games, both for the ancients and for the scholarly reconstruction?
Archaic Greek Terracotta Gaming Tables Revisited
Pallas, 2022
The subject of this contribution is five terracotta gaming tables from the archaic period, which are grouped for discussion for the first time. The reason being that in addition to the three previously known gaming tables of this type – one in the National Museum in Copenhagen from the Athenian art market, along with an example from the necropolis of Anagyrous (Vari) to be found in the National Museum in Athens and the third from the Kerameikos necropolis in the Kerameikos Museum – it is only recently that attention has been drawn to two more similar gaming tables. One in the Brauron Museum comes from the necropolis of ancient Myrrhinous, modern Markopoulo, Merenda, and was initially briefly described in the publication of the excavations. The fifth table was recently acquired by the Swiss Museum of Games (La Tour-de-Peilz) from the art market.
The doctor’s game – new light on the history of ancient board games
Philip Crummy et.al., Stanway: An Elite burial site at Camulodunum, Britannia Monograph Series No. 24, London 2007, 359-375, 2007
Dr Schädler also makes the point that, as far as can be gauged, rectangular boards like the one in the Doctor's burial, with its width to length ratio of about 2:3 or more, were not latticed. However, all three boards which he cites from Britain as having measurable dimensions (i.e. the Doctor's burial at Stanway, Grave 117 at King Harry Lane (Stead and Rigby 1989, 109) and Burial 6 at Baldock (Stead and Rigby 1986, 68-9)) are likely to have been broadly of the same type and may even be from the same workshop, thereby opening up the possibility that they represent a type of board and game not recognised before. Although these boards were not identical (they did not all have metal corner pieces and handles), various features bind them together as a group, i.e. a) all three were hinged, b) at least two (Stanway and Baldock) were made of maple, the wood of the third being unidentified, c) Baldock and Stanway were very similar in size and shape, and King Harry Lane could have been the same (same length as the other two but of indeterminate width), and d) leather traces were found on the boards at Stanway and King Harry Lane. All three were found in the territory of the Catuvellauni (and we include Camulodunum in this), although this relatively tight distribution might simply be the result of chance. Thus the three boards, plus those in the Warrior's burial and in Chamber BF6 (pp. 126, 186-90) and the possible board in Grave 309 at King Harry Lane (Stead and Rigby 1989, 109-10, figs 108, 152), could have been part of a distinctive British body of artefacts linked to a specific game popular among a group of Britons in the south-east of the country with strong connections with the nearby Romanised Continent. The case for fidhcheall needs to be balanced against the fact that Roman counters and boards in the possession of Romanised Britons provides strong evidence in favour of the playing of a Roman game of some sort.
Some misconceptions about ancient Roman games
Board Game Studies Journal, 2021
We discuss in particular the "game boards" inscribed into the roof of the Seti temple at el-Qurna, the problem of the "dux" piece in the Roman Latrunculi game, the presumed Roman origin of hopscotch, and the identification of those 26-sided dice with presumed Latin abbreviations.
Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, 2023
Archaeologists and computer scientists have both studied board games since the early days of their fields. Early archaeologists had an interest in identifying ways of playing the games of antiquity, and they applied diffusionist models fashionable at the time to trace the development of games from antiquity to the games played in nineteenth century Europe and North America. In time, a huge amount of data on ancient games was collected, and in the last thirty years archaeologists have studied games as they relate to social processes. In parallel to this, artificial intelligence (AI) research has utilized board games, primarily as testbeds for developing AI techniques, but also as an application domain. Archaeological and AI methods are combined in the Digital Ludeme Project, which documents the preserved knowledge of ancient games and uses computational techniques to evaluate research questions that can be addressed through AI playouts of proposed rulesets for games.