492 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



may be asked to look closely into the games presently to be described, 

 so as to satisfy himself that their agreement goes even further, as in 

 the peculiar principle on which the high and low throws are counted, 

 and, so far as one knows, in there generally being in some shape the 

 rule of hitting a blot, that is, taking an enemy's undefended man off 

 the point one's own man moves to. The exact primitive game whence 

 all known games of the class were derived can not now be pointed out, 

 and indeed is perhaps lost in prehistoric antiquity. So we may as well 

 keep to our own word, and call the whole set the backgammon famil}-. 

 It is in this sense that I use the word here, with the purpose of proving 

 that, before Hernando Cortes landed with his invading Spaniards at 

 Vera Cruz, one variety of backgammon had already found its way over 

 from Asia into Mexico, and had become a fashionable amusement at 

 the barbaric court of Montezuma. But, before following the game on 

 its hitherto unnoticed migration into the New "World, let us first glance 

 at its Old World history. 



Clearly our English hachgammon and the more complicated French 

 trictrac are descended from the Roman game of the "twelve lines" 

 {duodecim, scriptd), which was played throughout the empire. This is 

 the game which Ovid says has lines as many as the gliding year has 

 months, and he means it where he gives the lover insidious counsel, 

 when his mistress casts the ivory numbers from her hand, let him give 

 himself bad throws and play them ill. Among the Christian antiquities 

 in Home is a marble slab, on which a backgammon-table is cut, with a 

 Greek cross in the middle, and a Greek inscription that Jesus Christ 

 gives victory and help to dicers if they write his name when they throw 

 the dice — Amen. Carelessly scratched as it is, by some stone-cutter 

 whose faith went beyond his trictrac, it shows that the board was like 

 ours even to the division in the middle, which makes the two groups of 

 six points on each side. From ancient Rome, too, we inherit the habit 

 of making the backgammon-board with a draught-board on the reverse 

 side, at any rate the commentators so interpret Martial's epigram on 

 the tabula lusoria : 



Sie mihi Ms seno numeratur tessera puncto 

 Calculus hie gemino discolor hoste 2ierit. 



Here, twice the die is counted to the point of size, 



Here, 'twixt twin foes of other hue, the draughtsman dies. 



The very mode of playing the men in classic backgammon may be 

 made out from a fifth-century Greek epigram, commemorating a re- 

 markable hit, in which the Emperor Zeno got his men so blocked that, 

 having the ill-luck to throw 3, 5, 6 (they used three dice, as indeed we 

 continued to do in the middle ages), the only moves open obliged him 

 to leave eight blots. This historic problem, and other matters of Greek 

 and Latin backgammon, are worked out by M. Becq de Fouqui^res, in 

 his " Jeux des Anciens," with a skill that w^ould have rejoiced the hearts 



