Why ancient Romans used sketchy, lopsided dice to gamble and play board games

People have been rolling dice for a long, long time. The first dice were made from sheep knucklebones more than 5,000 years ago in ancient Sumer, and you won if it landed on the right one of the four flat sides. Around 3,000 years ago, somebody from modern-day Iraq and Iran sculpted bits of wood and ivory into the familiar six-sided dice, with different numbers of spots on each side from one to six.

People all over the world adopted this configuration long before Arabic numerals were invented. But few people of the ancient world loved to play dice as much as the Romans did.

The Romans called their 6-sided dice tesserae, and they often used them to move the pieces on a game board or for gambling, with the highest number providing the win. Since hard cash was on the line, one would expect these dice to be “fair”, or equally likely to land on any of their six sides.

However, most of them were actually lopsided, with some sides obviously much larger than others, making them more likely to land on them. These Roman-era dice were a total mess when it came to their shape, with no two sides shaped entirely alike.

Why would the Romans make their dice so asymmetrical? It’s not like the builders of great aqueducts and roads weren’t capable of carving a uniform cube, after all.

At first glance, it would seem like tesserae was made this way as a form of cheating, in order to increase the probability of showing a certain side. The vast majority of Roman dice were biased towards the numbers one and six. However, this doesn’t explain why virtually all Roman dice were designed this way. Did all the players cheat? The games would have collapsed if that were the case, and people would stop using them if cheating was done on purpose. This all suggests that the lumpy and lopsided design is a feature, not a bug.

The die has been cast — and that is the will of the gods

In a new study, archaeologist Jelmer Eerkens, a professor of anthropology at the University of California Davis, and Alex de Voogt, a professor at the department of economics and business of Drew University in New Jersey, present a different perspective: the asymmetrical features of the dice were related to the way the ancient Romans viewed the role of fate and the gods in the world.

In a previous study, the two researchers showed that over 90% of Roman dice found in the archaeological record are visibly asymmetrical, meaning one of their sides differs in size from the others by at least 5%. In their new work, the pair of scientists analyzed a sample of 28 dice from the Roman era excavated in the Netherlands. Unsurprisingly, 24 of the 28 objects made from clay, metal, and bone were visibly asymmetrical.

The larger the difference in size between the six sides of a dice, the greater the odds of rolling the number opposite the side with the largest surface area. In a perfect cube, there should be a 1 in 6 chance of rolling any number, but the odds of landing on the largest side of a Roman dice could be as high as 1 in 2.4. Surely, these kinds of visible biases couldn’t have been missed, especially by the hardcore gamblers playing for hours at end in Rome’s slums.

To get a better understanding of what the ancient Romans were thinking when they made their lopsided dice, Eerkens and de Voogt enlisted 23 psychology majors for an experiment.

Like today, Roman dice were numbered in the ‘sevens’ configuration, meaning the pips (little holes or divots) on opposite sides to each other add up to the number 7, so 1 is opposite to 6, 2 is opposite to 5, and 3 is opposite to 4.

The students were handed reproductions of Roman dice and were asked to place pips on the sides. Other than having to respect the sevens configuration, the participants were given no further instructions and were virtually oblivious to the purpose of the experiment.

Most of the students placed the one and six pips on the largest opposing surfaces of the lopsided dice — that’s exactly how the Romans chose to number their dice. Since both ancient Romans and modern students with no interest in gambling placed pips in locations that favour a one or six suggests both groups involuntarily chose this configuration, rather than making a conscious effort to cheat and stack the odds in their favour.

When asked about what prompted them to place the pips the way they had, the students said it felt natural to place one and six on the largest sides, especially since six requires the most pips to place.

This experiment suggests that the Romans didn’t actually care that much for ‘fair’ odds, perhaps because they did not grasp the concept of probability. Instead, the ancient Romans put all their fate in the gods like Fortuna, the personification of luck. Since gods and fate played such a central role in the lives of these people, any side that rolled on the dice was the ‘right’ side — the one chosen by the gods. Of course, some experienced gamblers may have noticed the bias and used it to their advantage, but the unfair odds were likely not common knowledge at the time.

“Knowing that it makes sense that Romans probably did not think that die shape mattered because even with a non-cubic die all sides can still be thrown,” Eerkens told Haaretz. “Today we would say that, yes, each side can be thrown but with unequal probabilities – however, most people in Roman times probably would not understand that way of thinking.”

Such thinking may have persisted until well into the Middle Ages. It wasn’t until the Renaissance period that we start seeing perfectly fair cube-shaped dice, and it is perhaps no coincidence that around this time great thinkers like Galileo Galilei or Blaise Pascal were publishing papers about chance and probability, in some cases, they were actually consulting with local gamblers. These new ideas about fairness, chance, and mathematical probability may have spread among the ‘gamers’ of the time and finally led to fairer dice.

The new findings appeared in the journal Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences.

New Pompeii finds highlight middle-class life in the doomed city

A trunk with its lid left open. A wooden dishware closet, its shelves caved in. Three-legged accent tables topped by decorative bowls. These latest discoveries by archaeologists are enriching knowledge about middle-class lives in Pompeii before Mount Vesuvius’ furious eruption buried the ancient Roman city in volcanic debris.

Pompeii’s archaeological park, one of Italy’s top tourist attractions, announced the recent finds on Saturday. Its director, Gabriel Zuchtriegel, said the excavation of rooms in a “Domus,” or home, first unearthed in 2018 had revealed precious details about the domestic environment of ordinary citizens of the city, which was destroyed in 79 A.D.

In past decades, excavation largely concentrated on sumptuous, elaborately frescoed villas of Pompeii’s upper-class residents. But archaeology activity in the sprawling site, near modern-day Naples, has increasingly focused on the lives of the middle class as well as of servants and other enslaved people.

“In the Roman empire, there was an ample chunk of the population that struggled with their social status and for whom ‘daily bread,’ was anything but a given,″ Zuchtriegel said. ”

A vulnerable class during political crises and food shortages, but also ambitious about climbing the social ladder.”

The finds unveiled on Saturday include furnishings and household objects in the Domus, which was dubbed the House of the Larario for an area of a home devoted to domestic spirits known as lares. The home unearthed in 2018 has one in the courtyard.

Zuchtriegel noted that while the courtyard also had an exceptionally well-adorned cistern, “evidently, the (financial) resources weren’t enough to decorate the five rooms of the home.″ One room had unpainted walls and an earthen floor apparently used for storage.

In a bedroom, archeologists found the remains of a bed frame with a trace of fabric from the pillow.

The kind of bed is identical to three, cot-like beds unearthed last year in a tiny room in another residence that archaeologists believe doubled as a storeroom and sleeping quarters for a family of enslaved inhabitants of Pompeii.

The bedroom findings announced Saturday also included the remains of a wooden trunk with an open lid.

Although the weight of beams and ceiling panels that crashed down in the wake of the volcanic explosion heavily damaged the trunk, among the objects found inside was an oil lamp decorated with a bas relief depicting the ancient Greek deity Zeus being transformed into an eagle.

Nearby was a small, three-legged round table, similar to the accent tables in vogue today.

Exposing the storeroom revealed a wooden closet, its backboard still intact but the shelves caved in.

Archaeologists believe the closet had at least four-panel doors and held cookware and dishes for the nearby kitchen. The excavators found a hinge from the enclosure.

Other objects found in the house include a large fragment of what had been a translucent, rimmed plate in brilliant hues of cobalt blue and emerald, and a well-preserved incense burner, shaped like a cradle.

Construction in Rome Reveals Well-Preserved, 2,000-Year-Old Dog Statue

Archaeologists in Rome recently unearthed an ancient terracotta statue with a dog’s head that was buried below an urban road.

The statue, which is palm-size, shows a pointy-eared pup with long, wavy fur flowing over its head and neck. It appears to be wearing a collar dangling a small emblem over its chest, and a circular object rests between its carved paws. 

Experts with the archaeology branch of the Italian Ministry of Culture were inspecting a site at Via Luigi Tosti in the city’s Appio Latino district, in preparation for a waterway replacement project.

They discovered the dog-headed statue about 1.6 feet (0.5 meters) below street level, among other funerary artefacts dating from the first century B.C. to the first century A.D., Roma Today reported on Jan. 1.

Officials identified three mausoleums that were part of a larger burial complex on the Via Latina, an important ancient Roman road that is more than 2,000 years old.

“Once again, Rome shows important traces of the past in all its urban fabric,” representatives of the Special Superintendency of Archeology, Fine Arts and Landscape of Rome wrote on Instagram.

In addition to the dog-headed statue, archaeologists at the site also discovered an intact ceramic funerary urn containing bones and the remains of a young man who was buried “in the bare earth,” according to the post.

Charred marks in one of the tombs hinted that there had been a fire, which may have led Roman citizens to abandon the burial complex, ArtNews reported.

While the dog statue superficially resembles carved objects that were added to sloping rooftops as part of drainage systems, it lacks any kind of opening for draining water and its purpose was likely ornamental, according to Roma Today.

The Via Latina, which was built during the fourth century B.C., ran from Rome’s Porta Latina to the southeast for approximately 124 miles (200 kilometres), and it likely served as an important military highway, according to a study published in 2013 in the journal Papers of the British School at Rome. 

Other funerary buildings and catacombs that have been excavated along this once-major thoroughfare are open to the public as part of the Archaeological Park of the Tombs of the Via Latina in Rome.

Visitors can inspect underground tombs decorated with mosaic and frescoed scenes from ancient myths and legends, according to the park website.