Did you ever wonder where the heck dice came from?
I mean, think about it: in what scenario did someone decide that they needed to throw some kind of marked little square in order to determine an outcome? Were dinosaurs shooting Craps back in the Cretaceous Period, snapping their fingers and calling for Lucky 7 to come up? Did cavemen have their cave girlfriends blowing on primitive dice for luck at the early casino Chuck A Luck Tables?
Well, no. At least it’s not likely (more on that at the end).
But the origins of dice do go back much farther than you might expect. Some estimations put the origins of dice as far back as 5000 years. Dungeons and Dragons and Yahtzee weren’t the first games to use dice. However, I will mention that the exact origins of dice are a bit of a mystery.
A couple of different ancient civilizations take credit for inventing early iterations of dice. The Greek playwright, Sophocles claimed that dice were invented by another Greek named Palamedes. Palamedes came up with the notion of dice during the siege of Troy.
Meanwhile, another Greek historian named Herodotus claimed that a civilization called the Lydians are the true inventors of the idea. The truth is that both of these men were wrong, as archeological findings place dice in times much other than either of these points in history.
Although the exact origins of dice are somewhat of a gray area, the common consensus of why dice were created finds a little more common ground.
Rolling dice had more to do with delving into supernatural forces. Fortune-telling back in the day involved using an early form of dice called knucklebones. Knucklebones literally were the anklebones of animals like sheep or buffalo, four-sided, with markings on each of the four faces.
In the days of ancient Rome, dice were created in different shapes, particularly longer and flatter than a typical cube. In this sense, the outcome of the dice was a bit more predictable when rolled (a long flat die roll was far more likely to end up on its flat side).
However, it seems that the belief was that the dice roll was not necessarily biased. The belief was that Divine Intervention was what caused the roll to come up as it did. And if you truly believed that, you wouldn’t mind rolling dice that are more slanted to a particular outcome.
Biblical references often mention activities involving dice, particularly when individuals were charged with “casting lots.” The notion of rolling dice in some sense was mentioned at least seven times in the Bible, and the underlying point was that whatever lot was cast, God knows what’s best in the end.
The planes, dots, and surfaces all were meaningful. Depending on the culture, certain arrangements of the dots, along with their colors, were considered either lucky or unlucky.
Even the cube shape represents a deity or perfection for some. Because many believed that dice were controlled by the will of the Gods, games played with dice were often considered sacred. The participants believed that rolling dice was a way to scare off evil spirits.
Beliefs around the divinity of dice diverged widely from culture to culture, and over the course of time. Some believed a proper roll meant virtue. Others believed that a proper roll (or improper roll) was connected to the activities of the devil. People lost their souls to the devil because they sought quick riches. Still, in other cultures, a roll of the dice could symbolize misfortune or even death.
Although the origins of dice appear to point to connections with dabbling in the supernatural or the spiritual, dice in association with playing games also date back to millennia before Christ.
An early form of Backgammon was played using dice, and that dates back to 2800 BCE. A game called Senet, which was played in Egypt using two-sided flat throwsticks, was recorded as early as 3000 B.C. Bone dice, first discovered in Scotland, was used as early as 3100 BCE. It should also be noted that Roman soldiers, during the crucifixion of Christ, used dice to decide who among them would get Christ’s robes.
Today dice are mostly connected with number generation due to the randomness with which the user tosses them. Everything from board games to casino games relies on the randomness of shooting a handful of dice.
I didn’t know this years ago, but dice come in a number of different shapes. Besides the traditional cube shape, dice can be 4-sided (which is triangle-shaped), 8-sided, 10-sided, 12-sided, and 20-sided. As a lifetime player of Dungeons and Dragons, I know that all six of these dice variations become necessary in the game if you are a hardcore follower of the rules.
Side Note: Because dice can be fixed to land on a particular side more often (commonly called loaded dice), casinos and other places tend to use transparent dice. Stories of loaded dice being used in illegal street games of craps have been told in movies and in real life. Some stories end with very profitable results for the shooter, and stories sometimes end with very woeful results (someone literally gets shot). Either way, if you carry around a pair of your own “lucky dice,” be prepared to face opposition to using them from your potential opponents.
In conclusion, I mentioned that dice appeared in history as far back as 5000 years, but not necessarily as far back as the Cretaceous Period. One might automatically assume that dinosaurs weren’t shooting craps back then. I would just say this: I didn’t once find any piece of research that said Dinos DIDN’T shoot craps, so maybe you should give it some thought.
That’s a joke.