BACKGAMMON AMONG THE AZTECS. 497 



sumptuous games, where the board was a courtyard laid out in marble 

 pavement, on which living draught-men clothed in green, red, yellow, 

 and black, walked the circuit and hustled one another off the squares. 

 Our Anglo-Indians sometimes catch the enthusiasm ; and there is an 

 often-told tale of that official personage who, when he paid his native 

 servants their wages, would sit down with them to a match at pachisi, 

 and sometimes win his money back. In London toy-shops they sell 

 board and pieces for what they profess to be the game, but these really 

 belong to the modified form of it known in India as chUpur, in which, 

 instead of cowries, stick-dice numbered on the four long sides are 

 thrown, these Indian dice being in England replaced by our common 

 cubical ones. This shows the change from lots to dice in games of the 

 backgammon sort, and it is curious to notice how clearly the new rules 

 for counting by the dice are modeled on the old rules for throws of 

 cowries. Having now sufficiently mastered the peculiarities of pachisi, 

 let us pass from Asia to America, and compare them with the details 

 of the Mexican game oi patolli. 



When the Spanish invaders of Mexico gazed half in admiration and 

 half in contempt on the barbaric arts and fashions of Aztec life, they 

 particularly noticed a game, at which the natives played so eagerly 

 that, when they lost all they had, they would even stake their own 

 bodies, and gamble themselves into slavery, just as Tacitus says the 

 old Germans used to do. The earliest particulars of the Mexican game 

 come from Lopez de Gomara, whose " Istoria de las Indias " was 

 printed in 1552, so that it must have been written while the memory 

 of the conquest in 1521 was still fresh. He says : " Sometimes Monte- 

 zuma looked on as they played at patoliztli^ which is much like the 

 game of tables, and is played with beans marked with lines like one- 

 faced dice, which they call patolli. These they take between both 

 hands, and throw them on a mat or on the ground, where there are 

 certain lines like a checker-board, on which they mark with stones the 

 point which came up, taking ofi" or putting on a little stone." This 

 may be supplemented from three other old Spanish writers — Torque- 

 mada, Sahagun, and Duran. The figure on the mat is spoken of as " a 

 painted cross full of squares like checkers," or as an " aspa," which 

 word means a + , a Greek cross, the sails of a windmill, etc., descrip- 

 tions which come as close as may be to the pachisi-board. Also, it 

 appears that the stones moved on the board to mark the numbers 

 thrown by the beans were of different colors, one account mentioning 

 twelve stones, six red and six blue, between the two players. 



According as the game was played, three to five beans were thrown 

 as lots or dice, and sometimes these beans were marked on one side 

 with a hole, and left plain on the other, while sometimes they seem to 

 have had dots or lines indicating various numbers. If both ways were 

 really used, then the game was known in both its stages, that of two- 

 faced lots and that of numbered dice, just as in India it is played as 



