The history of dice

A die looks simple — a cube with pips — but behind that small object lies a history spanning thousands of years. Long before cubes existed, people were already throwing bones to play games, decide fates, and read the future. In this article we travel from ancient Mesopotamia through the Roman Empire to the modern dice you hold in your hand today or roll online.

Antiquity: from knucklebones to the first cubes

The forerunner of the die was not a cube but a small bone. Thousands of years ago, people threw knucklebones — the ankle bones of sheep and goats, also known as astragali. Such a bone has four clearly distinct sides and won't rest on its two rounded ends, which makes it work more or less like a four-sided die.

Those astragali weren't used just for games. They also played a role in casting lots and in divination: by throwing the bones and reading the outcome, people believed they received answers or omens. In antiquity, rolling dice and consulting fate lay close together.

The first true cube-shaped dice are about 5,000 years old. Early six-sided examples come from the Indus Valley (such as Mohenjo-daro, around 2500 BC) and from the "Burnt City" of Shahr-e Sukhteh in present-day Iran (around 2800–2500 BC). The famous dice from the city of Ur, in the south of present-day Iraq, are in fact not cubes at all: the Royal Game of Ur came with pyramid-shaped, non-cubic dice — a fine example of how varied early throwing objects were. What's remarkable is that dice weren't "invented" in one place and spread from there: they appeared more or less independently in different cultures — including India and China. Apparently the idea of a throwable object with numbered sides is so obvious that people came up with it everywhere.

The Roman Empire: dice as a national pastime

In the Roman Empire, dice play was wildly popular. The Romans called dice and games of chance alea, and money was wagered everywhere — in the street, in taverns, and at home. Officially, gambling had a poor reputation: laws largely banned playing for money, except during certain festivals. In practice hardly anyone paid much attention, and even several emperors were known as avid dice players.

Where there's money to be won, there's cheating too. Archaeologists have recovered Roman loaded dice: dice doctored so they landed on a favorable number more often. So the idea of the "fixed" die is at least as old as dice playing itself.

Roman dice play also gave us a famous saying. When Julius Caesar crossed the river Rubicon with his army in 49 BC — an irreversible step toward civil war — he is said to have declared "alea iacta est": "the die is cast". "Die" here is simply the old singular of "dice". The expression means that a decision has been made from which there is no way back — just like a roll you can't do over.

Standardization: why everything adds up to 7

Pick up an ordinary modern die and look at the pips: the opposite faces always add up to 7. The 1 sits opposite the 6, the 2 opposite the 5, and the 3 opposite the 4 — each pair makes seven. This is no coincidence, but the standard layout of the Western die, in common use since antiquity.

Why this particular arrangement? The honest answer is: mostly tradition. Someone in classical antiquity chose this layout, and we've done it that way ever since. There is one nice practical benefit, though: because high and low faces sit neatly opposite each other, small imperfections in the die's shape cancel each other out on average. That keeps the die fairer. But that advantage was probably only noticed later, long after the "add-up-to-7 rule" was firmly established. Want to know more about the probabilities that follow from such a fair die? Read the page on dice probability.

The Middle Ages: popular yet controversial

After the fall of the Roman Empire, dice play didn't disappear — quite the opposite. In the Middle Ages, dice were rolled everywhere, from market square to tavern. It remained a controversial pastime, though: church and secular authorities regularly tried to rein in gambling, because it led to quarrels, debts, and deceit.

At the same time, dice making became a true craft. There were dice makers who carved the little cubes by hand and applied the pips, often working in bone. Dice from this period weren't always perfectly shaped, and the line between an ordinary die and a secretly loaded one was sometimes razor thin — a worry that returns again and again through the centuries.

The modern era: casinos and role-playing games

In the modern era, the story splits in two directions. The first leads to the casino. Games like craps use so-called precision dice: dice with sharp edges and very tight tolerances, made of transparent plastic. They are manufactured to within a fraction of a millimeter, so that every face is exactly equally likely. Fairness here isn't a bonus but a hard requirement — hence the sharp corners and the strict inspection.

The second direction leads to role-playing games. In the seventies, Dungeons & Dragons broke through, and with it polyhedral dice became a household item: not just the familiar six-sided cube, but also the four-sided D4, the eight-sided D8, the ten-sided D10, the twelve-sided D12, and the iconic twenty-sided D20. This whole family of shapes has become a fixture of the game closet. Exactly which shapes exist and what you use them for is covered on the page about types of dice.

And then there's the youngest member of the family: the digital die. What once began with a polished sheep bone, you now roll with a single click in your browser. The probability of each face is still exactly as equal as with the oldest cubes from the Indus Valley — only now you never have to bend down to pick one up.