DICING HISTORY

China, India, the Ancient Greece and Rome, Egypt — there’s no such ancient civilization which monuments would not leave to historians certificates of dicing hobby. Dices didn’t always have the modern appearance: cubes with six faces and slightly rounded off corners in which the sum of opposite sides always equals seven. It is possible to consider as ancestors of dices — joints of animals, and tetrahedral cubes with deepening and plates with two sides, black and white, even tree nuts (India).
Dices with pyramidal form existed — the most ancient of them are found out at an excavation in an imperial tomb of the Sumer city of Ur (III millennium B.C.). Some ancient Egypt’s dices had a size about a tennis ball and their form was also close to a sphere: they had a lot of faces!
Games in pairs and odds were spread, throwing dices into a circle, throwing dices with the purpose of getting them in special apertures. Guessing by means of the dices was known. Players concerned to playing dices reverentially and even with some fear — as live beings or lords of spirits. They talked to them, whispered, said spells and tried to ask for reckless promises.
The speed of prize definition, almost lightning fortune change have made dicing one of the most popular gambling. “Innocent” dices defined launches and falling, enrichment and ruin. The axiomatic plot of an Old Indian poem “Mahabharata” in “the Legend of Cash and Damajanti” narrates about how the prince Nal, playing with an evil ghost of Cali dices, has lost the kingdom and has been compelled to go to exile. The harmful dices have turned into birds and have caught up with the prince. They didn’t calm down until they took away his last clothes. After, however, the prince managed to seize all secrets of the game and managed to come back, and return the kingdom.
Ancient German lost in bones not only money, but also the freedom — the losers obediently went to slavery.
Passion has generated, on one hand, cheaters and, in the other hand, numerous interdictions and persecutions for dicing.
Any dice with deviations of its sides from the correct form, changes the character of the game as the probability of equal appearance of some numbers is deformed. The cheaters use dices with displaced centre of gravity (with a lead overlay on one or another side) in the game. Are known also “magnetic” dices with an iron or magnetic plate inside, which can define the falling on a certain side.
The so-called “translation dices” differ that inside them the fillet where a mercury drop is filled. If some instants the dice is hold in the necessary position (while mercury will move from one end of the fillet to the other) it will fall how it was held. Already in tombs of the Ancient Egypt have been found dices with cheater’s changes. The poet-hanged man François Villon in the poetic “the big will” sends to his friend-cheater some special dices which have been filled in with lead.
The authorities of different countries and nations periodically declared war not only to cheaters, but also to dicing. In the III century B.C. in Ancient Rome the first law known against gambling — Lex aleatoria (alea — a playing dice) was entered. This law resolved many public, sports and even gladiatorial games. Under a strict interdiction have got only the “alea”.
In the Middle Ages Decrees against dicing were created with an enviable constancy: in 1291, 1319 and 1369. However the Decree of 1396 shows some softening of severe legalists: this Decree forbids not the game itself, but the manufacturing and distribution of counterfeit dices. In Russia, the «devilish game” was convicted angrily by Christian preachers. After all, according to an ancient legend, soldiers at the cross bottom where Jesus Christ was crucified were playing dices.