Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/510

494 varieties of backgammon in this way show traces of the game near its original state, they seem in another respect to have passed out of their early simplicity. They are all played with dice, and indeed the French author lately mentioned seems right in guessing that the division of our board into groups of six points each was made on purpose to suit the throws of cubical dice like ours, numbered on all the sides, from 1 to 6. As to the early history of dice, I have elsewhere endeavored to show ("Primitive Culture," chapter iii.) that the origin of games of chance may be fairly looked for in instruments of the nature of lots, at first cast seriously by diviners for omens, and afterward brought down from serious magic into mere sport. Now, the simplest of such instruments is the lot which only falls two ways, like the shell, white on one side and blackened on the other, which Greek children spun up into the air to fall, "night or day," as they said; or, like our half-pence, tossed for "head or tail." Both in divination and in gambling, such two-faced lots probably came earlier than the highly artificial numbered dice. The kinds of backgammon now to be described seem in general to belong to the earlier stage of development, for it is with lots, not dice, that they are played.

The traveler in Egypt or Palestine now and then comes on a lively group sitting round a game, and in their eager shouts, if he knows some Arabic, he may distinguish not only such words as "two" or "four," but also "child," "dog," "Christian," "Moslem. On closer examination he finds that the game is called táb, and that it is a sort of backgammon played on an oblong checker-board, or four rows of little holes in the ground, where bits of stone on one side and bits of red brick on the other do duty as draughts, being shifted from place to place in the rows of squares or holes. Not dice, but lots, are cast to regulate the moves; these lots are generally four slips of palm-stick, with a green outer side and a white cut side (called black and white), and when they are thrown against a stick set up in the ground, the throw counts according to how many white sides come up, thus:

Notice particularly this way of counting throws, for its principles will be found again in lot backgammon elsewhere. There is evidently a crude attempt to reckon probabilities, giving a higher value to the less frequent throws of all four white and all four black, than to two or three white, which come up oftener. Besides the high count, they have the privilege of a second throw. This, if lot backgammon came first, and was succeeded by dice backgammon, would naturally pass into our rule of giving doubles another throw. The throw of one white, which is called "child," or táb, i. e., "game," has a special power, for only by it may a "dog," that is, a stone or draught, be moved out of its original place in the outer row, and set at liberty to circulate along the lines of