TABULA: A FIRST CENTURY GAME



A Wall Carving of Tabula Players

Hello My Friend and Welcome.

Today we return to our series on the Games People Played and take a look at the ancient Roman game of Tabula. The game dates back to several centuries BC and was originally known as Alea, meaning gambling. It eventually came to be called Tabula, meaning board or table, since it was played on a board or, more often than not, on a table which had been inscribed with the game’s outline.

THE DERIVATION OF TABULA

Alea, or Tabula, seems to have been derived from the game Duodecim Scriptorum, known as the game of twelve lines. Duodecim Scriptorum, in turn, bears a striking similarity to the Egyptian game Senet, which can be dated to at least 3,000 BC. For more information see our earlier post on Duodecim Scriptorum.

SPREADING THROUGHOUT THE EMPIRE AND BEYOND

Tabula was particularly popular with the soldiers of Rome’s Legions. Going with them wherever they went, it was gradually spread throughout the Empire. Tabula moved into Persia, Asia Minor, Syria and Palestine with Pompey’s victories in the early First Century BC. Rome’s influence spread into Egypt, Arabia and North Africa following the defeat of Antony and Cleopatra by Octavian’s general, Agrippa, in the Battle of Actium in 31 BC.

Ancient Playing Grid Etched into a Step

Tabula moved across Europe with the Roman Army, spawning a variety of games throughout the area. The games of Ad Elta Stelpur in Iceland, Taefle and Fayles in England, Sixe-Ace in Spain, and Tourne-case in France all trace their origin back to Tabula. The Arabian game Nard also appears to be a slightly modified version of Tabula combined with aspects of the Egyptian Senet.

Nard spread to the Far East, probably via spice and silk traders, in the early Third Century where it became extremely popular. Chinese tradition attributes the invention of Nard to western India. The considerable diversity of this genre of games, called race games, all of which incorporate a common mode of play. Because of this and the resulting sharing of ideas and innovations, it is sometimes impossible to trace the development of a specific game with absolute certainty.

The similarities between Tabula and modern Backgammon are readily apparent, just as the relationship between Duodecim Scriptorum and Tabula is easily recognized. The primary difference between the latter two is the expanded board of Tabula which allows the playing pieces to be set alongside each other rather than stacked. This change in the board’s dimensions may have been driven by practical necessity.  The typical bone playing pieces were most probably unevenly cut and, therefore, not easy to stack.

A GAME OF HISTORICAL PROPORTIONS

Our detailed knowledge of the rules of Tabula comes from the record of a game played by the emperor Zeno in the year 480. The position of the playing pieces is illustrated below.  Zeno’s defeat was so sudden and unexpected that the details of the game were preserved for posterity. Zeno, playing white, threw a 2, 5 and 6 with the dice, forcing him to break up his three pairs. This left all of his men blocked. Since no other moves were possible, this single throw of dice constituted a game-ending move.

Tabula appears to have been the game of preference for many Emperors. Claudius was particularly fond of the game and, around the year 50AD wrote a history of the game. Though the event is recorded, the document itself has been lost to history. Claudius even had the imperial carriage outfitted with an alveus, or Tabula playing board, so that he could play while traveling. Exactly how Claudius managed to keep the game pieces from sliding around in a rocking carriage is never addressed. This was, after all, well before the introduction of magnetic game boards for use while traveling.

Tabula is primarily responsible for the gambling mania that swept Rome prior to its being declared illegal. During the time in which Rome was a Republic, open gambling was banned except during the winter Saturnalia Festival. Although the ban was weakly and sporadically enforced, gambling carried a fine of four times the stakes.

Tabula players used the same bone roundels used in board games such as Duodecim Scriptorum and Calculi. The colors seem to have been mostly black and white, or blue and white, but other colors have been found. At the high end of the scale, the very rich might use custom-made colored glass pieces instead.

THE RULES OF THE GAME

Each player has 15 playing pieces.
All pieces enter from square 1 and travel counterclockwise.
Three dice are thrown. The count of the dice can be applied to one, two, or three men, but the count on the faces of any of the dice cannot be split.
Any part of a throw which cannot be used is lost, but a player must use the whole value of the throw if possible. (Zeno's fatal situation resulted from this rule.)
If a player’s piece lands on a point with one enemy piece, the enemy piece is removed and must re-enter the game on the next throw.
If a player has 2 or more men on a point, that position is closed to the enemy and the men cannot be captured.
No player may enter the second half of the board until all men have entered the board.
No player may exit the board until all pieces have entered the last quarter. This means that if a single man is hit, the remaining pieces are frozen in the last quarter until that piece re-enters and catches up with them again.

Re-enactors and Histroians with Tabula Game

If you would like to try a game of tabula, you can easily create the board with only a piece of posterboard, a ruler and pen. (Some people skip this step and use a backgammon board instead.) Checkers or poker chips make great game pieces.

Until next time, we wish you Peace and Blessings

ANCIENT GAMES — DICE

A Mosaic of Gamblers Playing Dice

Hello My Friend and Welcome.

“God does not play dice with the universe,”- Albert Einstein. “God not only plays dice, He also sometimes throws the dice where they cannot be seen,”- Stephen Hawking. Do we sense a difference of opinion here? 

Today we’ll be taking a look at Roman dice and dice games, or Tesserae. We have already done previous posts on the Roman game of Hounds and Jackals, the chess-like game, Latrunculi and most recently the line game known as Calculi that you may enjoy.  

We must always keep in mind that the early Christians lived in a world dominated by Roman culture. Paraphrasing the old maxim, one could say, “When in the Roman Empire do as the Romans do.” And, in matters other than faith, that’s most likely what they did.  

In Biblical terms, the rolling of the dice is known as casting lots. It’s a rather popular term, appearing in Leviticus, Numbers, Joshua, 1 Samuel, 1 Kings, 1 Chronicles, Nehemiah, Esther, Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ezekiel, Joel, Obadiah, Jonah, Nahum, 2 Esdras, all four of the Passion narratives, and, finally, in Acts where the Apostles must choose a replacement for Judas. The Biblical view of dice is probably best expressed in Proverbs 16:33, “The lot is cast into the lap, but the decision is wholly from the Lord.”

A Shaker Cup and a Pair of Dice

In addition to using dice to settle disputes or distribute goods impartially, they were also used for entertainment and gambling. One popular game was Tali. Like the familiar dice game Yahtzee, the count of the dice was scored like poker hands. No special board was needed. If you didn’t have dice, you used animal bones. A round consists of each player throwing and the winner of that round was the one with the best hand. Multiple hands could be added for a total score to determine the winner. A Venus was the highest hand and consisted of a one, three, four, and six. A Senio was a six with any combination of other numbers. Vultures were all the same numbers and the worst score you could get Dogs, was all ones.

Like the dice we use today, opposite sides of the ancient Roman dice always added up to seven.  (In case it’s been a while since you played Monopoly, the opposite sides of our dice are one and six, three and four, and two and five.) Dice were shaken in a cup then tossed, as croupiers do today. Bets were placed in much the same manner as they are today.  

Dice games were played in taverns as well as gambling houses, brothels and on the street. The emperor Commodus, who was especially fond of gambling with dice, turned the Imperial Palace into a brothel and gambling house to raise money for the treasury when he bankrupted the Empire.  

Gambling with dice was forbidden in the streets of Rome and Roman soldiers often fined the gamblers or made them move inside. Under Roman law, games of chance played for money were forbidden with the penalty being a fine of four times the value of the stakes. This led to the invention of another Los Vegas staple, gambling chips. Now the gamblers weren’t playing for money; they were playing for chips. That the chips were marked with specific symbols indicating their value didn’t seem to bother the authorities.

These chips, called roundels, have been found throughout the Roman Empire. They were made by turning and grinding sections of bone on a lathe, and then slicing it into discs. They carried numerical markings on one side, most commonly X, V and I. Many of the chips marked with an X have an extra vertical line through the middle, symbolizing a denarius. Chips have also been found labeled remittam libenter —I will gladly repay— the Roman equivalent of an I.O.U. Presumably, the repayment would have been made to or from the tavern or gambling club, much the same as is done with gambling tokens in Las Vegas today.  

In a final aside, the Romans flipped coins just as we do. Coin tossing was known as capita aut navia, which means heads or tails. Early Roman coins always had a portrait of the Emperor on the face and ship on the tail side. Recall the words of Jesus when asked about the legality of paying taxes in Matthew 22:19-21.

“Show me the coin used for paying the tax.” They brought him a denarius, and he asked them, “Whose image is this? And whose inscription?”

“Caesar’s,” they replied.

Then he said to them, “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.”

 Next time we’ll return to Foods of the First Century for a study entitled Fish and Fowl.

Until then, we wish you Peace and Blessings

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ANCIENT GAMES - CALCULI

A Game of Calculi in Progress

Hello My Friend and Welcome. 

Today we extended our study of the Games People Played in the First Century with the Roman game of Five-in-a-Row, often referred to as Calculi. Just as the attack game of Latrunculi is often called Roman Chess, people sometimes refer to Calculi as Roman checkers. This is done, in part, to differentiate it from Latrunculi. Just as checkers is chess’ kinder, gentler cousin, Calculi similarly lacks the war-like strategy of Latrunculi. If you missed the previous posts in this series, you can find Latrunculi HERE, and Hounds and Jackals HERE. 

POPULARITY OF ANCIENT BOARD GAMES

In a world without iPods, Game Boys, X-Boxes, Cable TV and all of the other electronic distractions of 21^st Century life, women as well as men played board games.  

Pliny mentions Ummidia Quadratilla in his letters. The grandmother of one of his friends, she lived to be eighty and amused herself playing ludus calculorum, or games of stones. Nearly all board games of the era employed polished stones or glass discs as game pieces, so it remains unclear which of them she preferred.   

Another Roman writer, Martial, says,  “A tavern-keeper, a butcher, a bath, a barber, and a game board with stones, and a few books... warrant these to me, Rufus, and keep to yourself Nero's warm baths.” 

THE GAME KNOWN AS CALCULI

As we learned from Pliny, ludus calculorum was a catch-all term. Calculi is a term that has come to be used for specific games of stones in which the object is to arrange five of your playing pieces in a vertical, horizontal or diagonal row. This prevents the game from being confused with other games that also utilized stone game pieces such as Latrunculi, Duodecim Scripa, and Tabula, among others.

Ancient Glass Playing Piece

 The ancient Greeks also played a similar game that required players to align five gaming pieces. While Calculi can be played on the Latrunculi board of 8 x 8 squares, something larger…say 8 x 12, allows for more flexibility and strategy. Calculi also requires more playing pieces than Latrunculi. Particularly when the size of the board increases since there will be more blocked attempts.  

HOW THE GAME IS PLAYED

The rules of Calculi are rather simple.

1.     Players each have an unlimited number of playing pieces.
2.     Black usually starts the game.
3.     The first person to make a vertical, horizontal, or diagonal line of five playing pieces wins.
4.     If the board becomes filled, the game is a draw.

There is a qualifying restriction. A double open-ended row of three is illegal unless a player is forced to make the play. This refers to a row of three that simultaneously goes in two directions, forming a cross, an X or a T. Once constructed, such an alignment makes for an easy win.  

This rule leads to a strategy in which players try to combine a line of three with a line of four. Then, if the opposing player moves to block the row of four — which they must do to prevent a win  their opponent adds to the row of three, making it four. No matter which end of the row their opponent blocks, adding a piece to the opposite end now yields a win.

A standard checker board is an easy way to get a taste of Calculi. Keep in mind, additional checkers will be required, or something like pennies or poker chips can be substituted. Lacking that, the modern game of Connect Four makes an acceptable substitute. 

Next time we’ll examine the some of the largest ships of the ancient world - the Roman Stone Carriers. 

Until then, we wish you Peace and Blessings. 

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LATRUNCULI — AN ANCIENT GAME

Hello My Friend and Welcome.

Way back in October we began a series of posts on Games of the Ancient world when we examined the game of Hounds and Jackals. Things got shunted aside to make way for the Christmas posts, but we’ll be back on track throughout January and the first half of February when we’ll pause to do an in-depth study of Lent and Easter. By the way, if you missed the Hounds and Jackals post, you can start at the beginning by going HERE.

A GAME OF BRIGANDS

Today, we’ll look at another popular Roman game, Ludus latrunculorum, more commonly called simply Latrunculi...the game of brigands. It was a game of military tactics and strategy, favored by the thinking man. Its name derives from the Latin word latrunculus: mercenary or highwayman. It’s aptly named since the play involved military-like strategy, feints, attacks and capture of the opponent’s men.

A Relief of Latrunculi Players and Onlookers

 In case you’re wondering, our interest in these games grew while doing research for my book, Disciple. There’s a scene that takes place in Antioch, in which Rivkah and Shemu’el encounter his old friend, Atticus. Atticus is now Primus Medicus… supervisor of the medical staff serving the four Legions stationed in Antioch. Needless to say, he is a man of power and wealth. Atticus invites his old friend and family to come to his home for dinner. The chapter in question deals with his home, dining customs of that era, and mentions the children playing Hounds & Jackals and Latrunculi after dinner. It also contains back story on Atticus and his wife, Marcelina, as well as their subsequent conversion to Christianity. If you’re interested, you can read it HERE.

NOW BACK TO LATRUCNCULI

An Ancient Gameboard Found in a Dig

In its earliest version, Latrunculi was played with small stones. This made the game very portable and an obvious favorite of the soldiers. Working with whatever might be at hand, players could scratch the grid into a board, table, rock, or even etch it in the dirt. Give each player a handful of pebbles and they were off and running.

Over time, the game has been described alternately as having either one type of playing piece or two. Archeological finds in Italy and Britain suggest that at least in the later Empire, Latrunculi had two playing pieces. All the pieces except one were flat, smooth stones or discs, representing the footmen or pawns. the Dux, a piece that today we might call the King, was made as a four-sided piece to differentiate it from the rest of the men.

By the way, dux (plural: duces) is Latin for leader…from the verb ducere, to lead. The word eventually found its way into Italian. We all remember Benito Mussolini being referred to as Il Duce…the Leader.

GREEK ORIGINS

Latrunculi is clearly a variant of the earlier Greek game known as Petteia, which means pebbles. Plato tells us that Petteia originally came from Egypt. In the pictures from Greek amphorae we see Ajax and Achilles playing Petteia. These vases predated Roman boards.

In the Onomasticon, a book by the Greek writer Pollux, he describes Petteia as follows:

“The game, played with many pieces, is a board with spaces disposed among lines. The board is called the city and each piece is called a dog; the pieces are of two colors, and the art of the game consists in taking a piece of one color by enclosing it between two of the other color.”

That Latrunculi is a precursor to chess is pretty much a given. When chess came to Germany, the terms for Chess and Check (which had originated in Persian) entered the German language as Schach. But Schach was already a native German word for robbery. As a result, ludus latrunculorum was often used as a medieval Latin name for chess.

A Stone Board with Divots for Playing Pieces

PLAYING BY THE RULES

So, suppose you’re now itching to play a round or two of Latrunculi? That might be a little difficult since no one knows the exact rules. Several people have, however, developed a presumed set of rules.

What follows is known as Kowalski’s Conjectural Rules:

A)   The board has eight ranks and twelve files. Each player has twelve men plus a dux. One side is black, the other white. In the starting array the men fill the first rank and the dux stands on the second, on the square just to the right of the center line (from each player's point of view). On a board of ten squares by eleven, the dux starts in the center of the back row, flanked by five men on each side. Black moves first.

B)    Each piece may move any unobstructed distance along a rank or file similar to the rook in chess.

C)    A man is captured if the enemy places a piece adjacent to it on each side, forming an orthogonal (perpendicular) line.  I read this to mean that you have one man beside your opponent’s man and the other either immediately above or below the man being captured. Thus, they form a right angle…from the Greek orthos, meaning straight, and gonia, meaning angle.

D)   If a piece is moved voluntarily between two enemy pieces, it is not captured, but the player so moving should point out the fact to avoid later disputes.

E)    A man in a corner is captured if the opponent places his men on the two squares adjacent to the corner.

F)    Repeated sequences of moves are not allowed. If the same position occurs three times, the player must vary his attack.

G)   The dux cannot be captured. It is immobilized if blocked on all four sides. A player who immobilizes the enemy's dux wins the game, even if some of the obstruction is by the dux's own men.

H)   Play continues until one player cannot move, and thus loses. This sounds a lot like the rule of checkmate, where a King cannot move into check in a chess match.

 

So there you have it. There were, of course, many other Roman games. Some involved pitting a bull against a bear. Others pitted man against man, or man against beast. The latter is the best remembered since during various persecutions that man happened to be a Christian. We’ll continue visiting other table Games of the Ancient World in future posts.

Next time, we’ll resume our posts on Metals of the Ancient World with a look at Copper.

Until then, we wish you Peace and Blessings.

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HOUNDS & JACKALS — AN ANCIENT GAME

The Playing Board for the Ancient Game of Hounds and Jackals

Hello My Friend, and Welcome.

HOUNDS CHASING THE JACKALS

Today we begin a series of post on Games of the Ancient World. Board games are among the oldest known games. Extremely popular throughout the Roman Empire, they were played by both children and adults. The game we’re talking about today originated in Egypt around 1,300 BC. Its Egyptian name is lost in antiquity, and is known today by Egyptologists simply as the Hounds & Jackals game because of its unique hound and jackal- headed playing pieces.

It is a race game between a team of five Jackals and a team of five Hounds (originally peg playing pieces) around a palm tree or an oasis along a peculiar shaped 'Track' (originally a series of peg holes in a playing board). The game required strategy in the face of chance, the chance coming from the throw of two knucklebones which were an ancient form of dice. The object of the game was to get your five pieces around the track and onto the Shen hieroglyph. The Shen hieroglyph is typically associated with concepts such as eternal…universal…the infinite.

Hounds & Jackals is probably one of the most easily recognized of ancient games not only because of the distinctive look of the game pieces, but also because Hollywood has immortalized it in movies. For instance, here Pharaoah Seti (Cedric Hardwicke)  and Nefertari (Anne Baxter) - off camera on the right -   are seen playing the game in the Cecile B DeMille classic, The Ten Commandments. The man approaching from the rear is Minister Jannes (Douglas Dumbrille).

HOUND AND JACKAL PETROGLYPHSAll was well until 2003 when a group of archeologists presented an article about some Stone Age rock carvings they found in Azerbaijan. They dated these ancient petroglyphs they’d found to about 2,000 BC and their meaning, or use, remains a mystery.

Some of the rock carvings found were regular in appearance and had repeating geometric patterns. This suggests they had a specific function most likely involving counting, and unlike the other mysterious rock carvings which defy interpretation, it was suspected that meaning could be extracted from the geometric arrays. The first thought was that perhaps they were some sort of calendar. Then someone noticed their horseshoe shape was nearly identical to the board used in Hounds and Jackals.

The Azeri Petroglyph With Its Familiar Horseshoe-Shaped
Hounds and Jackals Playing Surface

The points of similarity between the Egyptian board and the carved arrays at the stone circle are remarkable. Clearly the two are closely related. Inspection of a board found at Thebes shows a larger hole at the top of the board, which is not generally counted with the others. This in effect would give it 58 +1 holes. The Azeri rock carvings have 60+1 holes. Other features in common between the two besides the central enlarged hole are a horseshoe or U-shaped outer series, two parallel straight inner lines, a similar total of dots, and interconnecting channels between the holes.

The exact rules of Hounds and Jackals have been lost to history. However, the presence of the Shen hieroglyph with its implications of eternity seem to imply that the object of the game was to metaphorically achieve some sort of immortality, or higher plain of existence.

FROM HOUNDS TO SNAKES - FROM JACKALS TO LADDERS

This line of reasoning leads us to the ancient race game of India known as Snakes and Ladders.  Interestingly enough, the evil force in this game is represented (Shades of Eden) as a snake. It is a game of morality with the bases of the ladders located on squares representing various types of good. The squares of virtue in the original game are Faith, Reliability, Generosity, Knowledge, and Asceticism. The more numerous snakes coming from these squares represent various forms of evil.  The original squares of evil are Disobedience, Vanity, Vulgarity, Theft, Lying, Drunkenness, Debt, Rage, Greed, Pride, Murder, and Lust.  The game taught Hindu children that the good squares allowed a player to ascend higher in the league of life whereas evil reduced a player back through reincarnation to lower tiers of life. Presumably the last square, 100, represented Nirvana. During the British Raj, the game made its way to England. The morality of the game appealed to Victorians who took to the game when it was published in England in1892.  Still called Snakes and Ladders, the game play was pretty much the same except that the vices and virtues were renamed according to Victorian ideals.  So Penitence, Thrift and Industry elevated a player up a ladder to squares labeled Grace, Fulfillment and Success while Indolence, Indulgence and Disobedience slid a player down to Poverty, Illness and Disgrace.  The number of ladders and snakes on the playing board were now equal. The Modern Version of  Snakes and Ladders THE GAMES COMES TO AMERICA The game was introduced in the United States by Milton Bradley in 1943 with several important modifications. First, the moral overtones of the game disappeared. Now the object was not to achieve moral virtue, but simply to beat your opponents to the top. Without the moral message, the snakes became unnecessary and were replaced with the more kid-friendly image of playground slides, or chutes. So the Christmas favorite, Chtues and Ladders, has its origins in ancient games played by children and adults over 4,000 years ago. Until next time, we wish you Peace and Blessings