5 awesome dice from Ancient Egypt
Dice are objects used to generate randomness when they are thrown or rolled, with random numbers or results determined by the side facing upwards after the object has landed on a surface. Numerous dice have been used for various purposes by mankind since immemorial times. One of the oldest and most classic uses of dice has been, of course, games. In this article, you’ll learn more about 5 dice used in one of the greatest and more fascinating ancient civilizations, and also home for some of the oldest board games known — Ancient Egypt.
- Throw sticks
Throw sticks were the most popular form of dice throughout most of the history of Ancient Egypt. These sticks could be made of wood, ivory, or other materials. They consist of an elongated shape, and two flattened sides, with one of the sides being marked or carved. Often the ends were also carved in the shape of some animal or some human parts like fingers.
Based on sets of game pieces and throw sticks found in tombs, egyptologists connect the numerous throw sticks found to boards of the games played in ancient Egypt. As early as the Old Kingdom, the tomb of Hesy-Re shows us an illustration of 4 throw sticks next to a Senet board, the same game found in Tutankhamun’s tomb. Based on these and other findings, there is no doubt that such sticks were used to play Senet, and also games like Mehen and Hounds and Jackals, both popular in ancient Egypt during the Old and Middle Kingdom, respectively, since at a time no other forms of dice were in use in Egypt.
Today, sticks similar to the archaeological finds of antiquity continue to be used in the Arab world, for example, in the game Tâb, played until this day throughout the Middle East. The use of these objects today can give us a clue as to how they were used in the past. These throw sticks are used essentially as binary dice, with one side being named as the “black” side, while the opposite side was named the “white” side. A score is given for each side, for example, 1 point to the black side and 0 points to the white side. When throwing multiple sticks at once, the score is obtained by adding the points from each side facing upwards.
2. Four-sided dice from The Royal Game of Ur
This one might look quite familiar to RPG players. But this four-sided dice was not really a d4, it was actually used as a binary dice in the Royal Game of Ur, making it technically a d2, similarly to the throw sticks.
The Royal Game of Ur is a two-player strategy race board game that was first played in ancient Mesopotamia during the early third millennium BC. It has this name because it was first rediscovered by the English archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley during his excavations of the Royal Cemetery at Ur between 1922 and 1934. The most interesting thing about this game is that its rules as it was played in the second century BC have been preserved on a Babylonian clay tablet and reconstructed by British Museum curator Irving Finkel.
Movements in the game are determined by rolling a set of four dice, like the one in the image. Two of the four corners of each die are marked and the other two are not, giving each die an equal chance of landing with a marked or unmarked corner facing up. The number of marked ends facing upwards after a roll of the dice indicates how many spaces a player may move during that turn.
The Royal Game of Ur was fairly common in ancient Egypt as well, where it was known as Aseb, and it was usually played with the same game set of Senet, using a wooden box with the Senet board on one side and the Aseb board on the other, making it perhaps the first multi-game box to be created. As they used the same game set for both games, the Aseb version was played with throw sticks, rather than with the pyramid-shaped dice.
3. d20 from Ptolemaic Egypt
Another familiar shape for RPG players, 20-sided polyhedra were frequent in the Hellenistic and Roman periods of Egypt. Several examples of artifacts like this one are now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. As we can see from the image, the faces are inscribed with Greek letters from Alpha to Ypsilon, each can be seen as representing one number from 1 to 20.
Nothing specific about the use of these polyhedra is preserved, but some clues provided by some variant examples may link them to throws of the astragals (knucklebones), so they might have been used as dice. Another possibility is the use in divination — seeking advice about the unknown from the supernatural. The Greek letters may be associated with Greek oracle books that had ready-prepared oracle questions and responses based on the result of a throwing object. Some rare finds also contain Egyptian god names written in Demotic, also indicating the use in divination.
4. Knucklebones
The “knucklebone”, actually the ankle bone or astragalus of a sheep or other hoofed animals is also an ancient form of dice. The game we know today, knucklebones or jacks, is one of the oldest games that played to this day.
Although not exactly from ancient Egypt, the Ancient Greek version of the game was introduced later in Egypt, just like Aseb. As they used the astragalus of sheep as playing pieces, the game was known in Greek as Astrogaloi. When used as dice, these approximately tetrahedral bones will land on one of its four unique sides with, unlike modern dice, unequal probabilities.
5. d6 from Roman Egypt
These beautiful cubic dice made in serpentine was found in Egypt by a missionary at the turn of the XX century. The original pieces are now part of the Met Museum collection.
Cubic dice have been in use in the Near East since the third millennium B.C., with different systems used at different times for distributing the points. In Egypt, although some examples dating to the New Kingdom exists, it is in the Roman Period that this type of die becomes more common. The numbering of the opposite sides (1–6, 2–5, 3–4), each adding up to seven, comes into more general use only later and is not seen in this millennia-old dice. During the Greco-Roman period, cubic dice became more common and gradually replaced throwing sticks and knucklebones for use with board games.
All these artifacts were reproduced in 3D for Ancient Dice, a dice roller app based on real archeological finds. The beta version is out now for Android, so check it out on Google Play:
References:
https://www.louvre.fr/en/oeuvre-notices/three-throwsticks
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/551072
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/551068
Mortensen, Jenna (2013). Astragaloi: Greco-Roman Dice Oracles. https://ladyofbones.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/astragaloi-handout.pdf
Botermans, Jack (2008). The book of games: strategy, tactics & history. Fankbonner, Edgar Loy. New York: Sterling. pp. 712–20. ISBN 9781402742217. OCLC 86069181.
Bell, Robert Charles (1979). Board and table games from many civilizations (Revised ed.). New York: Dover Publications. pp. 16, 17, 21, 25. ISBN 1306356377. OCLC 868966489.
