Archaeologists Discovered the Pieces of a Fifth-Century Board Game. They Tell a Big Story.
An excavation in modern-day Turkey near what was once a Roman fortress revealed a pair of carved bone disk-shaped pieces likely used for a strategic board game.
Each of the pieces is shaped the same, but with a different symbol carved onto the token.
The game in question isn't known, but experts believe it was a popular military strategy game of the day.
When Roman soldiers weren't out doing real soldiering, they were spending at least some of their time learning military strategy through fun and games. A team of archaeologists recently confirmed this by uncovering pair of game pieces carved from bone in the ancient city of Hadrianopolis (in modern-day Turkey).
'The discovery of strategy games in Hadrianopolis further solidifies the presence of a military unit here,' Ersin Celikbas, an archaeologist at Turkey's Karabuk University, said according to the state-run media Anadoula Agency, 'as it is known that bone pieces were used to play ancient strategy games such as Ludus Latrunculi and Doudecim Scripta.'
The two small bone objects are disk-shaped, about size of a half-dollar coin, and date to the fifth-century A.D. Each one a symbol etched onto it, Celikbas said, according to a translated statement from the university. One token features a symbol with four arms and the other depicts eight arms (both have punctuation marks at the end of the arms). 'These are actually symbols that help the person playing the game pieces determine their strategy,' Celikbas said, adding that the symbols could have marked the worth of each piece in the game.
The games in questions could be either Ludus Latrunculi or Doudecim Scripta, both of which were known board games played with bone pieces by Roman soldiers in the fifth century. Celikbas said both are based on military strategy, and may be similar to modern strategy games like checkers or Battleship.
'When we compare the games played with these stones in ancient times and the games played today, we can say that there are actually similarities,' Celikbas said. He noted that military strategy of surrounding and conquering opponents is present throughout centuries of gameplay.
Ludus Latrunculorum translates to Game of Mercenaries, according to Smithsonian Magazine, and is a two-player strategy game that was born from the Greek game Petteia and popular throughout Roman culture. The full rules aren't known, but a 1994 essay from the University of Fribourg in Switzerland explains that players would have attempted to surround a piece and cut it off from the rest of their opponent's pieces to capture it.
The Doudecim Scripta game board was similar to backgammon.
The pair of game pieces provide a richer picture of Hadrianopolis—a city known for beautiful and complex mosaics of animals on the floors of various structures. Locating the game pieces has experts believing that the Roman forces thought to have been headquartered in the city starting in the second century A.D. may have remained into the fifth century.
'The presence of a Roman headquarters and a Roman unit in Hadrianopolis, from the second to the fifth century A.D., as well as the existence of the Roman fortress, are clearly supported by these findings,' Celikbas said. With work at the site ongoing this year, archaeologists may one day be able to construct a fully formed game of Ludus Latrunculi or Doudecim Scripta.
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