For the love of God, we know about the Roman d20!

[diaglo]

Merak,
They're for auction on Ebay.

The Ebay auction gives details, but to answer your question: yes, that's a rhomboid d12!

According to the Louvre museum in Paris, the d20 for auction on Ebay is based on an Egyptian one. The one for auction at Christies was brought back from Egypt as well. It could be Roman, but my feeling is that the Louvre is right. Both the Ebay one and the Christies ones are probably Egyptian. The Louvre claims the Ebay one is Ptolemaic (323 - 30 BC). It's possible, but I have my doubts about that. I suspect it's later, perhaps when the Romans had more influence in Egypt, hence the confusion.

thanks for the link Zander.

i'm hoping to snipe it later.

 

[Zander]

Merak,

The Ebay one is "numbered" 1 to 20 which means it's probably not for divination. Both the Egyptians and the Romans had normal sized dice for playing board games/gambling in small groups. But both the Christies one and the Ebay one are quite large and therefore easy to read if you're standing around a table. My guess is that they are indeed for gambling - perhaps the ancient equivalent of craps with gamblers and onlookers standing around.

 

[Zander]

thanks for the link Zander.

i'm hoping to snipe it later.

You're welcome. And good luck in the auction.

I already have a set of the Louvre dice and I have to say that they're among the coolest dice in my collection of about 2,000 dice. Even people who aren't interested in D&D or dice are impressed by the d20 and the d12.

 

[tarchon]

Merak,

The Ebay one is "numbered" 1 to 20 which means it's probably not for divination. Both the Egyptians and the Romans had normal sized dice for playing board games/gambling in small groups. But both the Christies one and the Ebay one are quite large and therefore easy to read if you're standing around a table. My guess is that they are indeed for gambling - perhaps the ancient equivalent of craps with gamblers and onlookers standing around.

The guy who wrote the eBay ad is wrong. Upsilon is 400, not 20. http://www.math.tamu.edu/~dallen/history/gr_count/gr_count.html has a nice little chart of the numeral values. If the die is labeled alpha to upsilon, it's most likely using letters for ordinal ranking symbols rather than numbers, which means the underlying mechanic would probably be based on testing whether one outcome is greater than, equal to, or less than another. However, one of those sides seems to have a qoppa (a little like a Q), and that only occurs as a number. Unfortunately, the possible qoppa side is at a bad angle so I can't tell if that's what it really is, or if it's an omicron with some damage.
The 12-sider on the other hand is actually numbered from 1 to 12, since iota-beta is actually the number 12, and not just an arbitrary ordinal.

 

[Zander]

tarchon,

Interesting link. Thanks for that.

It could be ordinal, but if that were the idea the letters wouldn't necessarily be the first 20 of the Greek alphabet. In other words, if you just wanted that order, you would probably start with alpha and end with any large number such as chi, psi or omega, not upsilon. Also, the letters are arranged so that if you start at alpha, the letters go up by one in a regular pattern around the die.

BTW, it's omicron, not koppa.

 

[frankthedm]

Gaming before soap... surprise...surprise

 

[tarchon]

tarchon,

Interesting link. Thanks for that.

It could be ordinal, but if that were the idea the letters wouldn't necessarily be the first 20 of the Greek alphabet. In other words, if you just wanted that order, you would probably start with alpha and end with any large number such as chi, psi or omega, not upsilon. Also, the letters are arranged so that if you start at alpha, the letters go up by one in a regular pattern around the die.

BTW, it's omicron, not koppa.

Upsilon is the 20th in the Hellenistic alphabet, so if you were just labelling A, B, C... you'd get upsilon as the 20th.

 

[Zander]

Upsilon is the 20th in the Hellenistic alphabet, so if you were just labelling A, B, C... you'd get upsilon as the 20th.

It could be purely alphabetic but I suspect the letters are meant to be used numerically. Why do I think that? Because at the Louvre museum, they also have a Roman d20. I've seen a picture of it, and there's the layout (i.e. the net) of the die in F.N. David's book on the history of probability. The die has Roman letters A, B, C etc and also Roman numerals I, II, III etc, so that A is on the same face as number I, B with II and so on up to XX (i.e. 20). So whatever the game for which the Christies d20, the Ebay (from the Louvre) d20 and the Roman d20 at the Louvre are for, they all seem to require the numbers 1 to 20.

 

[tarchon]

It could be purely alphabetic but I suspect the letters are meant to be used numerically. Why do I think that? Because at the Louvre museum, they also have a Roman d20. I've seen a picture of it, and there's the layout (i.e. the net) of the die in F.N. David's book on the history of probability. The die has Roman letters A, B, C etc and also Roman numerals I, II, III etc, so that A is on the same face as number I, B with II and so on up to XX (i.e. 20). So whatever the game for which the Christies d20, the Ebay (from the Louvre) d20 and the Roman d20 at the Louvre are for, they all seem to require the numbers 1 to 20.

Quick - what's K + T?

That's why I think they're ordinal.

 

[Zander]

Quick - what's K + T?

A very good point but it supports my position at least as well as it does yours....
The Romans didn't use A,B,C etc for numbers, so when the Romans copied the Greco-Egyptian game, they also included their numbers on the die, I, II, III etc. But for the Egyptians who used Greek letters for numbers, there was no need for any other kind of numeration. For them, the letters were numbers. If, as you contend, the game required ordinals only, there would not have been the need for the Romans to number their die. After all, the Romans would have known the order of their letters just as well as the Greco-Egyptian knew theirs, so the Roman die would have gone A,B,C without I,II,III.