Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/511

Rh squares or "houses," taking an enemy's dog if found alone in its house. While a draught is still in its first inactive, useless condition, they call it a "Nazarene," or Christian; but, when the throw of táb gives it the right to go forth conquering and to conquer, it becomes a "Moslem." It is not needful to go further into the rather complicated rules of moving and taking. Those who are curious may find much about it in Lane's "Modern Egyptians," and in the quaintly learned little book "De Ludis Orientalibus," by Thomas Hyde, who was Bodleian librarian in the reign of William and Mary. But one question suggests itself. Seeing how the modern fellahs delight in táb, one naturally asks, Did they inherit it from the ancient Egyptians? From remote antiquity the Egyptians played draughts on earth, and after death their righteous souls still had the oblong checker-board, and the men like chess-pawns, to amuse their glorified but perhaps rather tiresome life in the world below. But, as Dr. Birch points out, no Egyptian dice have been found earlier than Roman times, nor any plain mention of backgammon. Even if they played like their descendants in the Nile Valley with such things as slips of palm, something about it should be found in the hieroglyphic texts. But at present nothing appears, and there is no reason to add backgammon to the long list of inventions whose earliest traces are found in Egypt. Perhaps the nearest relative of táb is Chinese backgammon, but this is played with dice.

Next, as to India. Here, since ancient times, cowry-shells have been thrown as lots, their "head" and "tail" being according as the shell falls with mouth or back upward. In Sanskrit literature there is an old mention of a game called panchiká, which was played with five cowries, and where it seems that the winning throws were when all the mouths came up or down, as against the commoner throws when some fell each way. That a game of the nature of backgammon was known in India from high antiquity has been plainly made out by Professor Weber. It was called ayánaya, or "luck and unluck"; or at any rate that was a term used as to the moving of the pieces, which traveled right and left through the squares, and took an undefended man from his place to begin his course anew. So, as a Sanskrit riddle has it: "In a house where there were many, there is left but one, and where there was none and many come, at last there is none. Thus Kála and Kâlî, casting day and night for their pair of dice, play with human beings for pieces on the board of the world." Putting these particulars together, it is clearly possible to trace from ancient times the game of pachisi, played in modern India, into which game it will now be necessary for our argument to go more exactly; in fact, to qualify ourselves to sit down and play a game. English backgammon-players will hardly take five minutes to learn it.

Suppose four players to be seated, each at the end of one arm of the diagram or board, of which a figure is here given. Each player will have four little wooden cones as his pieces or draughts, all of one