Keith Souter - The Pocket Guide to Dice & Dice Games

Iacta alea est The die is cast

Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon

I t is unclear where dice were first used. We tend to associate them in modern times with games and gaming, yet it is highly likely that they were originally used as divinatory aids in the hands of early medicine men or women. The way that they fell would be considered under the control of a deity and the shaman, as the interpreter of the deitys answers, would be thought to have a direct line to the divine.

Almost inevitably, games would have developed using early dice, so one can think of them as the ancient worlds leisure equivalent of the television.

A tablet found in the Great Pyramid of Giza, dated to about 3000 BC , describes a game of dice played by the gods in order to add five days to the calendar. It was said that Ra, the god of all creation had decreed that Nut, the sky goddess could not produce a child on any day of the calendar, which at that time had 360 days. Thoth, the god of the night and of arithmetic, writing and medicine, usually depicted as a man with an ibis head, or as a dog-headed baboon, interceded on her behalf by playing dice with the moon. He won five days of the moons light, allowing Nut to give birth and the calendar was increased to 365 days.

Greek myth also tells of their gods dicing with a knucklebone for control of the different kingdoms. Zeus won the heavens, Poseidon won the seas and Hades won the underworld.

Sophocles (496406 BC ), the great Greek tragedian, claimed that dice had been invented to entertain and amuse the troops by Palomedes during the siege of Troy, the city at the heart of the Trojan War in about 1000 BC .

The Greek historian Herodotus of Halicarnassus (485425 BC ), wrote in his great work History , that the Lydians of Asia Minor actually invented dice as a diversion from famine during the days of King Atys.