Ancient dice weren’t as fair as they are today

While we expect modern dice to be fair, with each number having an equal probability of being rolled, that hasn’t always been the case, with the long, shifting history of dice reflecting changing ideas about the role of “chance” in life, new research suggests.

“Standardizing the attributes of a die…may have been one method to decrease the likelihood that an unscrupulous player had manipulated the dice…”

In Roman times, for instance, many dice were visibly lopsided, unlike today’s perfect cubes. In early medieval times, dice were often “unbalanced” in the arrangement of numbers, where 1 appears opposite 2, 3 opposite 4, and 5 opposite 6.

It didn’t matter what the objects were made of (metal, clay, bone, antler, or ivory), or whether they were precisely symmetrical or consistent in size or shape, because, like the weather, rolls were predetermined by gods or other supernatural elements.

All that began to change around 1450, when dice makers and players seemingly figured out that form affected function, explains Jelmer Eerkens, professor of anthropology at University of California, Davis and lead author of the study that appears in Acta Archaeologica.

“A new worldview was emerging—the Renaissance. People like Galileo and Blaise Pascal were developing ideas about chance and probability, and we know from written records in some cases they were actually consulting with gamblers,” Eerkens says. “We think users of dice also adopted new ideas about fairness, and chance or probability in games.”

“Standardizing the attributes of a die, like symmetry and the arrangement of numbers, may have been one method to decrease the likelihood that an unscrupulous player had manipulated the dice to change the odds of a particular roll,” he says.

Dice are not common finds in archaeological sites. They are typically found in garbage, domestic areas, or cemeteries, and frequently are recovered as lone objects in a site, Eerkens says. Many are not accurately dated.

After looking at hundreds of dice in dozens of museums and archaeological depots across the Netherlands, Eerkens and coauthor, Alex de Voogt of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, were able to assemble and analyze a set of 110 carefully dated, cube-shaped dice.

The researchers found that:

Dice made before 400, or in Roman times, are highly variable in shape, size, material, and configuration of numbers.
Dice are very rare between 400 and 1100, corresponding to the Dark Ages.
When dice reappear around 1100, they are predominantly in the “primes” configuration, where opposite numbers tally to prime numbers (1-2, 3-4, 5-6), a numbering style that was also popular in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt. Early medieval dice also tend to be quite small relative to their Roman predecessors.
Around 1450 the numbering system quickly changed to “sevens” where opposite sides add up to seven (6-1, 5-2, 3-4). Dice also became highly standardized in shape, and also were made larger again. Standardization may be, in part, a byproduct of mass production.

Eerkens says he studied dice because they are a convenient item in which to isolate the function from the style, as opposed to other artifacts found in archaeological sites, such as arrowheads, a functional item used for hunting. “A lot of artifacts we study as archaeologists conflate the two…. We know for dice they are purely stylistic.”

The study also shows that dice, like many material objects, reflect a lot about people’s changing worldviews, Eerkens says.

“In this case, we believe it follows changing ideas about chance and fate,” he says.

The researchers conclude in their article, “Gamblers may have seen dice throws as no longer determined by fate, but instead as randomizing objects governed by chance.”

Source: UC Davis

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