ABSTRACT
The use of chance devices and the drawing of lots for purposes of sortilege and divination were common to many cultures of antiquity. Classical Greek literature contains numerous references to games of chance at least as early as the Trojan wars, and there is evidence to suggest that such games were known in Egypt and elsewhere long before then. One of the earliest known written documents about the use of chance devices in gaming is in the Vedic poems of the Rgveda Samhita. “Written in Sanskrit circa 1000 B.C., this poem or song, called the ‘Lament of the Gambler,’ is a monologue by a gambler whose gambling obsession has destroyed his happy household and driven away his devoted wife” (Bennett, 1998, p. 34). Gambling had become a sufficiently common form of recreation in Europe by the time of the Roman Empire that laws forbidding it were passed-and largely ignored. The emperor Caesar Augustus (63 B.C.-14 A.D.) was an avid roller of the bones. The bones, in this context, were probably astragali, a form of dice made from the heel bones of running animals. The astragalus, sometimes referred to as a talus, huckle-bone, or knuckle-bone, was shaped in such a way that, when tossed, it could come to rest with any of four sides facing up, the other two sides being somewhat rounded. It is known to have been used in the playing of board games at least as early as 3500 B.C.Dice, which presumably are evolutionary descendants of astragali, are known to
have existed in the Middle East as early as the third millennium B.C. According to Bennett (1998), the earliest known six-sided die was made of baked clay around 2750 B.C. and was found in what was once Mesopotamia and is now Northern Iraq.
