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Archaeologists Find Roman Iron Age Board Game in Norway:
Last month, Norwegian archaeologists chose to excavate the remains of a small Early Iron Age grave cairn in western Norway. Dotted with monuments and grave mounds, the scenic location overlooking Alversund played an important role in Norwegian history.
The site at Ytre Fosse turned out to be a cremation patch. Amidst the fragments of pottery and burnt glass, archaeologists found a surprise: rare Roman Iron Age dice and board game pieces.
"This is wonderfully exciting. Such discoveries have not been made so many times before in Norway or Scandinavia. The special thing here is that we have found almost the whole set including the dice," said Morten Ramstad from Bergen University Museum to NRK.
[...] The pieces are of a very rare type, known to be from the Roman Iron Age, dated to around AD 300. The haul included 13 whole and five broken game chips along with an almost completely intact elongated dice.
The dice is marked with number symbols in the form of point circles and have the values zero, three, four and five. Less than 15 of these have been found in Norway. Similar dice were found in the famous Vimose weapon-offering site at Fyn in Denmark.
[...] The gaming board at Vimose was also preserved, so we have some idea of what board games may have been played during the period in Scandinavia. Inspired by the Roman game Ludus latrunculorum, board games seem to have been a popular hobby amongst the Scandinavian elite of the time.
Guess they'll have to push the founding date of Gen Con a little further back than 1968...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 17 2020, @07:19PM (3 children)
Your memory fails you old man [wiktionary.org]
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Wednesday June 17 2020, @07:48PM (2 children)
Not nearly as much as your grasp of history fails you! What part of Late Latin and Middle ages do you not understand?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 17 2020, @11:54PM (1 child)
The part where the word came into existence during the Byzantium Empire but slavery from the region didn't begin in ancient Rome. I do not "understand" because your claim is wrong.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Thursday June 18 2020, @01:38AM
Best to read the entire Wikipedia entry, instead of cherry picking bits that support your twisted and racist world view.