Unusual. The Incredible Discovery of the World’s First Rigged Dice
In 2000, a little girl made the unlikely discovery of the very first mercury-rigged dice in history. This find was unveiled by the Belgian archaeologist Thomas Daniaux, in the Pallas magazine dated October 2022.
According to this specialist in ancient games at the University of Friborg (Switzerland), the rigged die was found on September 9, 2000, in Habay-la-Vieille, Belgium. That day, schoolchildren supervised by volunteer archaeologists carry out excavations near a Gallo-Roman villa, inhabited between the 1st and 4th centuries AD.
“Social Disorder”
It was then that a young girl of about ten broke a small bone cube with her trowel: a dice to play. From it flows a greyish liquid, mercury. The discovery is far from trivial since there is to date no other archaeological evidence of a rigged die. “Without this accident, we would never have noticed that the die was rigged, simply because the mercury does not really affect the weight of the object”, explains Thomas Daniaux.
The dice had been slightly hollowed out and filled with a small quantity of mercury, in order to allow its owner to force one of the six values of his choice. Thus, if a cheater wanted to force face 6, he had to run the mercury on the inside of face 1 to make the die heavier in the right direction.
“What is extraordinary is that mercury dice are still used today,” marvels Véronique Dasen, professor of classical archeology at the University of Fribourg. At the time when the dice was used, games of chance were very popular and could pay off big. “Although very popular among all sections of society, these games are synonymous with social disorder. An entire family could be ruined because of them,” explains Véronique Dasen.
Visigoth king
The article published in the review Pallas recounts that cheating was born at the same time as the game itself, during the Imperial Roman period (27 BC – 476 AD). One of the first dice cheating techniques was that of split faces, which increased the chances of hitting a specific number.
This ruse exploits the fact that only three sides of a die are visible once it is placed on the table. It is then impossible for each of the players to see the two opposite sides without checking the object. According to Sidonius Apollinaris, the Visigoth king Theodoric I, who died in 451, also carefully checked the faces of the dice before each game to check that they were not double…