THE HISTORY OF GAMES. 233 



into sport should rise again as science, and man's failure to divine the 

 future should lead him to success in controlling it ? 



Already in the ancient world there appear mentions of games where 

 the throws of lots or dice, perhaps at first merely scored with counters 

 on a hoard, give the excitement of chance to a game which is partly a 

 draught-game, the player being allowed to judge with which pieces 

 he will move his allotted number. In England this group of games is 

 represented by backgammon. When Greek writers mention dice-play- 

 ing, they no doubt often mean some game of this class, for at mere 

 hazard the Persian queen-mother could not have played her game care- 

 fully, as Plutarch says she did, nor would there have been any sense 

 in his remark that in life, as in dicing, one must not only get good 

 throws, but know how to use them. The Roman game of the twelve 

 lines {duodecim seripta) so nearly corresponded with our trictrac or 

 backgammon, that M. Becq de Fouquieres, in his " Jeux des Anciens," 

 works out on the ordinary backgammon-board the problem of the Emper- 

 or Zeno that has vexed the soul of many a critic. All these games, how- 

 ever, are played with dice, and as there exist other games of like prin- 

 ciple where lots are thrown instead of dice, it may perhaps be inferred 

 that such ruder and clumsier lot-backgammon was the earlier, and dice- 

 backgammon a later improvement upon it. Of course, things may 

 have happened the opposite way. Lot-backgammon is still played in 

 the East in more than one form. The Arabic-speaking peoples call it 

 tab, or game, and play it with an oblong board or rows of holes in the 

 ground, with bits of brick and stone for draughts of the two colors, and 

 for lots four palm-stick slips with a black and white side. In this low 

 variety of lot-backgammon, the object is not to get one's own men 

 home, but to take all the adversary's. The best representative of this 

 group of games is the Hindoo pachisi, which belongs to a series an- 

 cient in India. It is played on a cross-shaped board or embroidered 

 cloth, up and down the arms of which the pieces move and take, in 

 somewhat the manner of backgammon, till they get back to the central 

 home. The men move by the throws of a number of cowries, of which 

 the better throws not only score high, but entitle the player to a new 

 throw, which corresponds to our rule of doubles giving a double move 

 at backgammon. The game of pachisi has great vogue in Asia, ex- 

 tending into the far East, where it is played with flat tamarind-seeds 

 as lots. It even appears to have found its way still farther eastward, 

 into America, forming a link in the chain of evidence of an Asiatic 

 element in the civilization of the Aztecs.* For the early Spanish- 

 American writers describe, as played at the court of Montezuma, a 

 game called patolli, played after the manner of their European tables 

 or backgammon, but on a mat with a diagram like a + or Greek cross, 

 full of squares on which the different-colored stones or pieces of the 



* See the author's paper in the " Journal of the Anthropological Institute," Novem- 

 ber, 1818. 



