134 Mr. E. B. Tylor [March 14, 



idea of finding sport in placing stones or pieces on a diagram and 

 moving tliem by rule. One liint as to how this may have come about 

 is found in the men at backgammon acting as though they were 

 " counters " counting up the throws. The word ahax, or abacus, is 

 used both for the reckoning-board with its counters and the play- 

 board with its pieces, whence a plausible guess has been made that 

 playing on the ruled board came from a sportive use of the serious 

 counting instrument. The other hint is that board-games, from the 

 rudest up to chess, are so generally of the nature of Jcriegspiel, or war- 

 game, the men marching on the field to unite their forces or capture 

 their enemies, that this notion of mimic war may have been the very 

 key to their invention. Still these guesses are far from sufficient, 

 and the origin of board-games is still among the anthropologist's 

 unanswered riddles. The simpler board-games of skill, that is, 

 without lots or dice, and played by successive moves or draws of the 

 pieces, may be classed accordingly as games of dj-aiights, this term 

 including a number of different games, ancient and modern. 



The ancient Egyptians were eager draught-players ; but though 

 we have many pictures, and even the actual boards and men used, it is 

 not clear exactly how any of their games were played. Ingenuity 

 and good heavy erudition have been misspent by scholars in trying to 

 reconstruct ancient games without the necessary data, and I shall not 

 add here another guess as to the rules of the draughts with which 

 Penelope's suitors delighted their souls as they sat at the palace gates 

 on the hides of the oxen they had slaughtered ; nor will I discuss the 

 various theories as to what the " sacred line " was in the Greek game 

 of the " five lines," mentioned by Sophokles. It will be more to the 

 purpose to point out that games worth keeping up hardly die out, so 

 that among existing sports are probably represented, with more or 

 less variation, the best games of the ancients. On looking into the 

 mentions of the famous Greek draught-game of pUiithion, or j^olis, it 

 appears that the numerous pieces, or " dogs," half of them of one 

 colour and half of the other, were moved on the squares of the board, 

 the game being for two of the same colour to get one of the other 

 colour between them, and so take him. The attempt to reason out from 

 this the exact rules of the classic game has not answered. But on 

 looking, instead of arguing, I find that a game just fitting the descrip- 

 tion still actually exists. The donkey-boys of Cairo play it in the 

 dust with " dogs," which are bits of stone and red brick, and the guides 

 have scratched its siga, or diagram, on the top of the great pyramid. 

 If it was not there before, it would have come with Alexander to 

 Alexandria, and has seemingly gone on unchanged since. There is 

 an account of it in Lane's ' Modern Egyptians,' and anyone interested 

 in games will find it worth trying with draughts on a cardboard square. 

 One kind of the Roman game of latrunculi was closely related to this, 

 as appears from such passages as Ovid's " cum medius gemino calculus 

 hoste perit," referring to the stone being taken between two enemies. 

 The poet mentions, a few lines farther on, the little table with its 



