The weird and wonderful history of dice

One thing I enjoyed most about this month’s reading club pick, Across The Board by Tim Clare, is that it made me look again at a lot of common objects and think about their origins. 

Take one example: dice.

The cubic dice we know today—six equal sides, pips marking the number, opposite sides adding up to seven—have been around for a very long time, probably formalizing around the Renaissance. 

But the history of dice goes back a lot longer, to the most ancient civilizations and beyond the reaches of recorded history. And through all that time, dice have come in all shapes and sizes, often with unusual qualities drawn from the materials at hand. There are knucklebones, which are taken from animals and bounce in unpredictable ways. There are long dice, like stretched-out extensions of the ones we know today, and roll over and over. Others are flat or cylindrical, made from wood or sticks or stones. Even a flipped coin can be considered a two-sided dice.

Since dice have such an intrinsic role in gameplay, they appear throughout Across The Board, but in chapter three Clare takes a careful look at their history and comes up with some gems. Take this section on Roman dice: which explains not just how they were addicted to such games, but how their understanding of dice shows us how they experienced the world.

Dice were a Roman obsession. This was a culture intimately acquainted with their heft and bounce, the hollow, toothy rattle of the dice box and the clatter of knucklebones on marble. Laws frequently forbade gambling except at special times, such as during the week of Saturnalia in December, and were just as frequently ignored. When Julius Caesar led his army across the Rubicon river, triggering a long civil war, he was said to have declared: “Iacta alea est”—”The die is cast.” Most infamously of all, in Matthew 27:35, immediately after nailing Jesus to the cross, Roman soldiers decide who gets his clothes by playing dice.

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Many dice dating from the Roman Empire—an entity vast in both geographical and temporal span—are asymmetrical. That is, rather than being perfectly cuboid, or evenly weighted cylinders, or some other polyhedral solid, they’re a bit crude and lumpy. Some faces are obviously larger than others. One study of twenty-eight bone, bronze and ceramic dice dug up across the Netherlands found that twenty-four were “visibly non-cubic,” significantly raising the odds of rolling the longest sides. 

One recent theory that gets shared a lot in popular articles about games suggests that these game pieces were odd shaped because the Romans didn’t think shape mattered. They believed that the gods, not physics, guided the dice. 

In fact, Clare goes on to argue that this approach is only partially correct, since it seems to assume that Romans were so in thrall to the idea of divine intervention that they would ignore the obvious potential for cheating.

“Even the most drunken legionary would be hard pressed not to notice that the die their opponent was rolling was matchbox-shaped, not cubic,” he writes, adding that while mathematical theories around probablity “were not formally elaborated to the same extent in the time of Nero. That doesn’t mean Romans were idiots.”

The beautiful expansion comes when he asks us to consider our own relationship with fate and probability. Rather than see ancient humans as different from us, Clare asks us to see the ways in which we—supposedly rational, logical, scientific people—have more in common with the superstitious Romans than we may imagine. 

There’s another problem with pleading for Roman exceptionalism when it comes to the power of fate and an ignorance of probability: It’s true of most players throughout history. It’s true of many of us today. The whole gambling industry relies on the human inability to intuitively get randomness. I can’t do the math required to solve the problem of points. I, like most dice players, show signs of irrational beliefs about how dice behave when I’m immersed in the heat of a game. That’s half their joy. Why should we get to plead special circumstances for Roman dice, when we can point to any culture throughout history and find people saying dice are lucky, weird, magic, evil, and sometimes all four?

Rolling dice offers a healthy reminder of our irrational, fallible natures. “They bend not even to the mighty’s anger: the King himself pays homage and reveres them,” says the Hindu text the Rig Veda, composed between 1500 and 1000 BCE. They’re a warning not to fool ourselves into thinking we have total control. But we can’t help ourselves.

Whatever the reason for the emergence of dice—whether it’s telling fortunes or just playing guessing games—this idea that humans have been trying to create randomness for thousands of years while still struggling to understand what randomness actually means feels both brilliant and a little comforting.

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In other news, this weekend our street had a block party and we decided to hold a Curious book sale to raise money for charity. The weather was great, the book table was a big hit, and my teenage son may have found his vocation as a bookseller!

We ended up making $300 for 826 Valencia, the youth writing program that I regularly volunteer for. 

If there’s an 826 chapter near where you live, or another kids’ writing and publishing center, then I highly recommend giving them your time and support. (You can look at the International Alliance of Youth Writing Centers for a starter list of programs.) 

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And finally before we sign off, I wanted to promote a few former Curious authors who you can hear more from. 

• On October 9 Adam Higginbotham (Challenger, our February 2025 pick) is talking at the Graves Library in Kennebunkport, Maine.

• On October 22, Bonnie Tsui (On Muscle, our pick for May 2025) is rocking up to The Clark Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts.  

• Lauren Markham (A Map of Future Ruins, which was our very first recommendation in May 2024) recently held an on-stage conversation with the legendary environmental campaigner Bill McKibben as part of the City Arts & Lectures series in San Francisco. You can hear the conversation online or via podcast.

• And congratulations to last month’s author Alexis Madrigal, who helped successfully open the “community resilience” space Local Economy in Oakland. They have lots of events coming up that you may enjoy if you are in the Bay Area. 

That’s it from me. Until next time.

Onwards

Bobbie