Ancient Egyptian d20

[CAFRedblade]

Just came across this article (on tabletop games) on Aintitcoolnews.com which mentions an Ancient d20 from Egypt, with Greek lettering on it.
http://www.aintitcool.com/node/62848

which leads back to the original article on cnet here: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-57547697-1/ancient-d20-die-emerges-from-the-ashes-of-time/

Let the musings on what the Egyptians used this for begin..

Gambling would be my first guess, but I wonder what the rules were.

Or perhaps an early form of LARP with real world results... ouch...

 

[Dioltach]

Perhaps the pyramids were actually someone's dungeon that got out of hand. I mean, why mess around with graph paper and miniatures when you're Pharaoh and you have ten thousand slaves to make your dungeon come to life?

 

[Dethklok]

Wow.

The Ptolemeics had a d20.

I'm not much of an Egyptologist, but I wouldn't be surprised to know they used the letters as numbers - at least, Greek Numerals were used that way by the Greeks themselves. Unfortunately (?) my guess is that this splendiferous d20 was probably only used for gambling, for divination, or for simple "move the piece" games of the style of Felix Sex or Backgammon. Sad to think that the ancients whose societies we pay homage to with our games had no roleplaying games themselves!