Roll the Dice: Iron Age II Gameboards and Playing Pieces from Tel Gezer, eds. I. Shai, J.R. Chadwick, L. Hitchcock, A. Dagan, C. McKinny and J. Uziel. Pp. 956-965, color plates pp. 1092-3. (original) (raw)
Game-Boards and Gaming-Pieces in Funerary Contexts in the Northern European Iron Age
Nordlit, 2006
Gaming-pieces, dice, and game-boards are found in connection withburials at various times and places from an early date. For instance, inEgypt there was a clear association between the game known as Senetand burials from the time of the Old Kingdom (Pusch 1979; Piccione1984). Dice are not uncommonly found in Greek, Etruscan, and Romantombs (Vermeule 1979, 80; Pallottino 1955, fig. 95; Egidi 1983). It canreasonably be assumed that the playing of board games was seen as apleasurable pastime which one could hopefully continue to pursue inthe Afterlife. However, it can in some cases be argued that gamingequipment in burial contexts was related to the social status of the deceased or to religious beliefs and therefore had a more complex significance. In this article I will look at the occurrence of gaming-pieces,dice, and game-boards in burials in the northern European Iron Age.
XII Scripta And Two Excavated Game Boards From Kibyra
SOMA 2013. Proceedings of the 17th Symposium on Mediterranean Archaeology, 2013
Two ‘duodecim scripta’ boards have been found in the on-going excavations of the ancient city of Kibyra, located in the city of Burdur’s Gölhisar district. The first one is of limestone. Like the other examples, this board was curved as to be a shallow pool. The second board was found in the 2014 excavations of the Agora’s first Terrace Street. The table had been reused in the base of a fountain which was constructed around the 5th - 6th centuries AD In this article, from these examples from the Kibyra excavations, comparisons are drawn with other examples and an inquiry is made concerning ‘duodecim scripta’.
Strange Games: Some Iron Age examples of a four-player board game? [2016]
From Cardboard to Keyboard: Proceedings of the XVII Annual Colloquium of the International Board Game Studies Association. UCS Ipswich 21-24 May 2014, 2016
A late Iron Age cremation grave, dated to the second half of the first century BC, excavated from a site in Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire, contains an apparently unique set of glass gaming pieces. The gaming pieces are visually striking because of their distinctive appearance: the twenty-four opaque or semi-translucent coloured glass domes (six white pieces, six yellow, six red and six green), each with adorned with decorative spiral motifs, seem to comprise a complete set of game pieces for what may be an unknown four-player game. They were found in a rich burial containing five Dressel 1B wine amphorae and an Italian silver cup, along with other grave goods. Some account of the pieces is given by Donald Harden in Stead’s archaeological report (Stead, 1967), along with a scientific analysis by Tony Werner and Mavis Bimson, based on spectrographic and X-ray examination. Harden describes the game pieces as being “of the greatest interest and rarity,” noting “not only is there is no comparable set extant; there is not even a single gaming piece of the same form and decoration which can be cited as a parallel, whether contemporary or not” (Stead, 1967 p. 15). Harden goes on to suggest “the places where we could most reasonably expect to find parallels to these pieces are eastern and southern Gaul, the Alpine region and the upper Rhineland, and the Po valley, and it is likely that in time parallels to them in or more of those areas will turn up” (Stead, 1967 p. 16). While Harden’s account of the glass pieces emphasises their unique significance for the double-spiral motif, and Werner and Bimson’s analysis suggests the yellow pieces show the earliest example of the use of lead and tin as an opacifying agent, the pieces are also thought to represent a unique example of a game for four players, described by Stead as “similar to a game played in India on a board with cruciform marking. This game was [...] patented with the name ‘ludo”’ (Stead 1967, p. 19). Footnotes in Stead suggest that other examples of what could also be glass gaming pieces for a four player game – or at least incomplete sets of glass gaming pieces that can be organised into four groups by design or colour – have also been found in a number of Italian locations, including sites in the Po Valley. This paper will seek to present several examples of Iron Age Italian gaming pieces, and to offer some comparison to the Welwyn Garden City pieces in order to draw attention to what may be examples of a hitherto overlooked four-player game. (A version of this paper, without the note on game boards, appears in the Board Game Studies Journal 9 (2015) pp. 17-40.)
Board Game Studies Journal, 2015
A late Iron Age cremation grave, dated to the second half of the first century BC, excavated from a site in Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire, contains an apparently unique set of glass gaming pieces. The gaming pieces are visually striking because of their distinctive appearance: the twenty-four opaque or semi-translucent coloured glass domes (six white pieces, six yellow, six red and six green), each with adorned with decorative spiral motifs, seem to comprise a complete set of game pieces for what may be an unknown four-player game. They were found in a rich burial containing five Dressel 1B wine amphorae and an Italian silver cup, along with other grave goods. Some account of the pieces is given by Donald Harden in Stead's archaeological report (Stead, 1967), along with a scientific analysis by Tony Werner and Mavis Bimson, based on spectrographic and X-ray examination. While Harden's account of the glass pieces emphasizes their unique significance for the double-spiral motif, and Werner and Bimson's analysis suggests the yellow pieces show the earliest example of the use of lead and tin as an opacifying agent, the pieces are also thought to represent a unique example of a game for four players, described by Stead as "similar to a game played in India on a board with cruciform marking. This game was [...] patented with the name 'ludo'" (Stead, 1967, p. 19). Footnotes in Stead suggest that other examples of what could also be glass gaming pieces for a four player game---or at least incomplete sets of glass gaming pieces that can be organized into four groups by design or colour---have also been found in a number of Italian locations, including sites in the Po Valley. This paper presents several examples of Iron Age Italian gaming pieces, and offers some comparison to the Welwyn Garden City pieces in order to draw attention to what may be examples of a hitherto overlooked four-player game.
Early mancala and tāb boards found in Israel (and in some other countries)
Board Game Studies Journal, 18, 2024
Excavations in Israel of Byzantine and early Islamic sites have yielded some interesting gaming boards that are not always understood by the archaeologists who found them. Because they are organised in parallel rows of 'holes', most are presented as 'mancala' gameboards-which some may be, indeed; however, boards offering three or four rows of squares or depressions cannot reasonably be mancalas, nor can they be held as 'senet', the Egyptian game. So, what are they? Reviewing the relevant literature, this article will try in this article to disentangle these finds, the more so as they are often well dated to periods which have rarely been looked into.
Applied Sciences, 2022
An interesting assemblage of ancient ceramic materials connected or potentially connected with gaming activities has been characterized from the archaeometric point of view. The materials (washer-like pieces, small spheres, and cubic dice, with and without inscriptions) were found in the Villa del Foro excavation (Alessandria, Italy). They are related to the early Ligurian population of the site and their frequent contacts with Etruscan both in Etruria and in the Po Valley, in a period spanning the early VI century BC till the first half of the V century BC. Starting from the materials evidence, hypotheses are proposed concerning their possible use and cultural meaning. The studied cubic dice are discussed in the wider context of the pre-Roman diffusion of these objects.
In the Romanian archaeological literature, games and toys from the medieval period have hardly been subjects of study and analysis, perhaps due to the rarity of such artefacts that can be connected to leisure time. The artefacts analysed on this occasion come from archaeological excavations carried out on sites from the northwestern part of Romania, more precisely from the Sylvanian Basin, a geographical area that lies within the administrative territory of the county of Sălaj. Artefacts that may have multiple functionalities often appear within archaeological inventories discovered in settlements. The limitations of the research mean that in many cases it is impossible to establish the functionality of some objects with certainty, cases in which we can only make assumptions/proposals. In the case of the geographical area under analysis (the Sylvanian Basin) we also note the existence of early medieval artefacts whose possible function as toys or as components of games can only be hypothesized.