[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review.]
This collection of essays, edited by Barbara Carè, Véronique Dasen, and Ulrich Schädler, contains 15 peer-reviewed papers presented at the 21st Conference of the International Society for Board Game Studies (BGS), entitled “Dialogues and Interactions,” held in Athens in April 2018. Organized by Barbara Carè, the conference was hosted by the Italian School of Archaeology and the Benaki Museum, with the participation of scholars from all over the world. After the introduction are essays that showcase a broad chronological and geographical range of interests, organized as follows: Part I—Gaming pieces and boardgames; Part II—Designs of boardgames and images of play; and Part III—Between literary fiction and divination. Preceding each essay is an abstract and keywords and a bibliography follows each.
Part I consists of seven papers that present and discuss often neglected archaeological evidence. The authors assess the difficult task of identifying ludic material culture and address critical issues involved in the interpretation of game-related objects. In the first essay, Letitia Phialon discusses gaming pieces unearthed in a tomb of Late Bronze Age Crete and explores the polysemic value of the small animal figurine associated with this assemblage. She suggests a ludic function for this class of artefacts, concurrent with or preceding their role as offerings in sacred and funerary spaces. In the second contribution, Vassiliki Pliatsika reflects on the interpretation of cone shells as gaming pieces, suggesting that they could have been markers for a kind of game, possibly one of the games of strategy, skill, and chance known in the Eastern Mediterranean. In the third study, Jérémy Lamaze touches upon the blurred boundaries between games and religious rituals through a study of the unparalleled fixed gaming table found close to a fireplace in the middle of a main hall of the Cypriot Temple 4 at Kition-Kathari. He suggests that the best interpretation of the use of this building is as a crossroads of secular and ritual activities at the turn of the 1st millennium BC. The fourth paper, by Dimitris Paleothodoros, reviews the evidence for Attic decorated terracotta dice and game boards found in graves ranging from the middle of the 7th to the middle of the 6th century BC. He offers a detailed chronological development for their appearance and suggests that originally such grave gifts had a specific social and ideological meaning related to the notion of leisure intended for the male upper classes. After the reforms of Solon and the advent of a new wealthy class engaged in handicraft trade, board games ceased to be regarded as an exclusively aristocratic domain and gaming tables appeared for everyone’s use. In the fifth contribution, Victoria Sabetai presents the first known 6th-century Boeotian die, made of clay, unearthed in an undisturbed rich female grave in Akraiphia, with a peculiar configuration of twenty-five dots instead of six. The study of the grave’s furnishings also reveals a possible early set of gaming pieces composed of shells, stored in a wine vessel with five pebbles recalling the pentalitha game. This assemblage indicates the high status of the deceased young woman and her family. The paper also includes appendices on bowls decorated with upside-down flying birds; on the osteological analysis of the grave’s skeleton by Eftyhmia Nikita; and a catalogue of all the grave’s finds. In the sixth study, Lynn Arslan Pitcher and Chiara Bianchi discuss the finds from the recently published Piazza Marconi dig dated between the late Republic and the early Empire (40 BC – 69 AD). These are made of various materials and include glass counters, ivory dice, and bone “Alexandrian” counters. The study revises the past interpretation of these items and suggests possible ludic functions based on comparison with new material of the same period. Concluding Part I is a contribution by Barbara Carè, who presents a corpus of pavement designs detected on floors, steps, and stylobates in public spaces of Roman Athens. She focuses on their features and locations to provide identification of actual game boards, contextualizing them and suggesting their plausible chronological setting.
Part II contains five contributions dedicated to the study of visual representations of board games or gaming devices in sacred or funerary contexts. The papers enhance understanding of some of the games’ deeper meanings relating to their social, gendered, and religious dynamics. This section starts with the study by Véronique Dasen and Jérôme Gavin, who discuss the relationship of board games, abaci, and education, based on a late 5th century BC funerary relief from Krannon (Thessaly). Alluding to numerous visual parallels and literary sources gathered from wide cultural contexts, their analysis includes the figures’ postures, types of board games, counting tables and moving pieces, and the relationship between board games and education. The authors propose that the man on the Krannon relief is the earliest depiction of a “pebble” mathematician, that the boy in the front is a student, and that the five-line pattern on the board is part of a training system for games and numeracy. The paper also includes an appendix by Jérôme Gavin showing the use of the five-line abacus. The next contribution, by Despina Ignatiadou and Irini Papaikonomou, focuses on an early 3rd-century BC marble statue of a boy found in Lilaia (ancient Phocis) holding a knucklebone and a goose. After discussing the various symbolic meanings of children holding knucklebones and/or geese, their study suggests that they are the boy’s playthings, that the statue is a dedication related to the healing cult of Kephissos, and that it symbolizes luck and healthy growth. The paper includes an appendix by Irini Poupaki on the type of Parian marble used. The next study, by Maria Chidiroglou, aims to offer a new interpretation of a Roman terracotta depicting a man, woman, and dwarf, and impressed images of a bird and a flower on the back of the players’ seats. They are playing the board game poleis or another game like the Roman ludus latrunculorum; the figures’ details and the impressed images probably suggest a discourse on the figures’ victory or defeat. In the next paper, Ulrich Schädler questions whether marble boards for the “XII scripta” or “Alea” game, used to close loculi in Christian catacombs near Rome, are re-used game boards, as hitherto suggested. He observes that the boards differ in shape from those that were really used for playing, and that the boards’ inscriptions were literary imitations. Therefore, he suggests that they were produced as funerary slabs. The last contribution in Part II is by Francesco Muscolino, who discusses the association of a Nine Men’s Morris design on the funerary slab of Agate, daughter of an Ostrogoth comes, dated to 512 AD. His analysis of the pattern and inscription leads him to suggest that the design is not for a game board but has a symbolic function.
Part III consists of three contributions dedicated to allusions and transformations of board games in ancient and modern literature. First is the study by Geoff Bakewell, who examines the political references of Socrates to the ancient boardgame poleis in Plato’s Republic 422e1–423a2, a discussion of Callipolis and its ability to wage war. The next contribution is by Costanza Salvatore, who studies the transformation of Homeric epics into lot-oracles in Late Antiquity. Focusing on the Homeromanteia written in Roman Imperial times, she analyzes dice oracles as a divinatory habit with special relation to gambling. The last contribution, by Ioannis M. Konstantakos, focuses on how storytelling is reworked and adapted to the rules and phases of board games. He provides numerous examples: from the ancient Near East in the 1st millennium BC in the Demotic Egyptian Tale of Setne Khaemwaset (Saite period); in Apion, an Alexandrian grammarian and scholar active in the times of the emperors Tiberius, Caligula, and Claudius; and in the novelistic literature of Sasanian Iran, ca. the 7th century AD.
In conclusion, this is a collection of high-quality essays, well organized around each specific subject, accompanied by well-illustrated figures and plans. It represents an important step forward in exploring and collecting often neglected archaeological evidence that furthers understanding of some of the games’ uses and deeper meanings from early in the Late Bronze Age to the reception of ancient ludic culture in contemporary literature. Some strengths of this book derive from the editors’ compilation of multiple contributions from diverse cultures and broad chronological periods, its interdisciplinary approach, and its important updating of many of the topics in the field. The editors, Carè, Dasen, and Schädler, should be congratulated for this insightful anthology, written for specialists and non-specialists alike, that paves the way for future research on the various topics.
Authors and Titles
An Introduction: Barbara Carè, Véronique Dasen, and Ulrich Schädler
PART I: Gaming Pieces and boardgames
Letitia Phialon, Amulets, gaming pieces, toys or offerings? Thoughts on animal figurines and funerary practices in the Late Bronze Age Aegean
Vassiliki Pliatsika, Why so serious? An extraordinary cone shell group from Mycenae and the problem of identifying Mycenaean board gaming material
Jérémy Lamaze, Games and oracular practices around the hearth: the “table of offerings” from the so-called Temple 4 at Kition-Kathari (Cyprus)
Dimitris Paleothodoros, Board games equipment from archaeological contexts in Archaic Attica
Victoria Sabetai, A Boeotian die in context: Gaming pieces, jewellery, seals, spindle whorls and bird bowls in a female burial of status
Lynn Arslan Pitcher and Chiara Bianchi, Roman game finds from Cremona (Italy)
Barbara Carè, Pavement designs and game boards from public spaces of ancient Athens: a review across the board
PART II: Designs of boardgames and images of play
Véronique Dasen and Jérôme Gavin, Game board or abacus? Greek counter culture revisited
Despina Ignatiadou, Irini Papaikonomou, The knucklebone and the goose. Playing and jeopardy for the boy of Lilaia
Maria Chidiroglou, A playful coroplast? A new look at the terracotta group of the early Roman board-game players NAM 4200 and related finds
Ulrich Schädler, Catacomb games: reused game boards or funerary inscriptions?
Francesco Muscolino, Une “triple enceinte” et l’inscription funéraire de Agate filia comitesGattilanis à Milan
Part III: Between literary fiction and divination
Geoff Bakewell, Plato plays Polis
Salvatore Costanza, Rolling dice for divination, gambling and homeromanteia
Ioannis M. Konstantakos, Board games in ancient fiction: Egypt, Iran, Greece