Some Misconceptions About Ancient Roman Games

Ulrich Schädler's examination of popular claims about ancient Roman and Egyptian games argues that a number of widely repeated assertions lack reliable evidentiary support. Its central thesis is that modern writers have frequently projected conclusions onto ancient material that the sources do not bear out. The analysis addresses claims spanning Pharaonic Egypt, the Roman period, and later artifacts misattributed to antiquity, drawing on the methods of board game studies to separate documented evidence from speculation.

The most significant corrections concern the Sethos I temple carvings, traditionally cited as proof that Mancala and Nine Men's Morris were played in Pharaonic Egypt around the fourteenth century BCE. Schädler shows that these carvings cannot be securely dated and that many are Coptic or Islamic in origin, which undermines their use as evidence for early Egyptian play. Similar scrutiny is applied to the special "dux" piece attributed to the Roman game ludus latrunculorum and to the Stanway "doctor's game," an interpretation involving an eight-by-twelve grid with an extra piece per side. Both rest on conjecture that conflicts with the surviving ancient testimony.

The study further finds no ancient basis for the claim that Roman legionaries invented hopscotch as a military exercise. The earliest clear sources for hopscotch date to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with Willughby's seventeenth-century manuscript supplying the first recorded rules and diagram, and the military training manual of Vegetius makes no mention of such a game. The popular notion traces instead to a 1975 publication and to text repeated widely online. Likewise, the letter-inscribed polyhedral dice often presented as Roman artifacts are identified as nineteenth-century serpentine-stone objects from Zöblitz, Germany, associated with a German drinking and betting game. Taken together, these findings establish a clear methodological lesson: claims about ancient games must be grounded in dateable, contextually secure evidence before being accepted.