On Tue, 23 Jan 2001 20:20:45 +0100, "Piotr Gasiorowski"
<
gpiotr@...> wrote:
>And yet dicemakers have almost invariably used the "less intuitive" add-up-to-seven design ever since the cubic dice was invented. We find it on nearly all surviving dice from Egypt, Greece, Italy and other places. There are dice from Etruria with pips in lieu of words, and the pips add up to seven on opposite faces. How to arrange the numbers on a dice is something that any apprentice in the dicemaking business would have been told by members of the dicemakers' guild, alea players and diviners who were his customers, etc. If there is a preferred design, you can be sure that all interested parties will know about it.
>
>Why was that design preferred by the ancients? Well, why is it still preferred nowadays? Any schoolchild knows (or should know) that the arrangement doesn't affect the odds, so why do our dice manufacturers follow a pointless ancient custom? Deference to tradition is a sufficiently strong factor. However, prior to Blaise Pascal's gambling experiments in the 17th century nobody knew how to define or measure probability. I suppose dice enthusiasts vaguely believed in a "fair" or "balanced" arrangement iw which none of the three orthogonal directions was favoured. Perhaps the fact that 6+1 = 5+2 = 4+3 = 7 had some mystic importance (dice were magical or even sacred objects, like magic squares with their slightly more complex constant sums).
The story of the Tuscan dice (for those not in the know), is the
following. We dice with the numbers written out on them, in the
following arrangement:
<thu> opposite <huth>
<zal> opposite <mach>
<ci> opposite <s'a>
We know from the Pyrgi bilingual that <ci> is three (Phoen. s^-l-s^).
We also know, from subtractive formulas like <ci-em zathrum>
("three-from twenty" = 17), that <ci>, <zal> and <thu> are the numbers
1..3. Much to the chagrin of those who would like to see Etruscan as
an Indo-European or Anatolian language, <thu> doesn't seem to mean
"2": <ci> and <zal> are said to appear with plural nouns (I am unable
to confirm the existence of <zal clenar> "two sons", but there is TLE
718 <ki aiser tinia ti...[illegible]> "three gods: Tinia, Tiv(?), ...,
and we *know* that <ci> is 3, anyway). An inscription like TLE 171
(Avle Alethna, son of Arnth and Thanchvil Ruvfia; he was zilach while
living in the town of his father; served as head(?) of the marunuchva,
served as prytanis ESLZ (twice). [added:] He was prytanis ESLZ),
makes little sense if we interpret ESLZ as "once" (OTOH, in "Larth
Tuthe. And he was born of Arnth Tute (and) Ravnthu Hathli. He was
eight times zilach and THUNZ prytanis..." (TLE 324), THUNZ *does* make
sense as "once").
If the dice are indeed arranged in the normal pattern, <s'a> must then
be "4", <mach> "5" and <huth> "6". But the pattern a+b=7 was not the
only one in existence. Other Etruscan dice (marked with dots) have
been found that conform to different arrangements (1-2, 3-4, 5-6; 1-6,
2-4, 5-3). There was a town in Greece called Tetrapolis (Four-town),
which was also known under the Pre-Greek "Pelasgian" (remember that
Herodotus calls the Lemnians "Pelasgians") name Huttenia. A funerary
fresco in Tarquinia depicting the four Charun daemons bears the
inscription <huths>, referring to one of the four. There are also, of
course, reasons for thinking that <s'a> is "six" (but they carry no
more probative weight than the reasons for thinking <thu> is "2").
The case for <huth> = "4", however, is strong enough for someone like
Beekes to think the arrangement of the dice conforms to the formula
|a-b|=3, and I would agree with that, even though, as far as I'm
aware, such an arrangement is not otherwise known (the bonus is that
if <huth> = 4, <s'a> = 6).
=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...