(Please note that the copyright laws of new.discovery.com prohibit their article being rewritten in anyway. However, it was too interesting to pass up sharing with other board game enthusiasts)
“Then, with bamboo dice and ivory pieces, the game of Liu Bo is begun; sides are taken; they advance together; keenly they threaten each other. Pieces are kinged, and the scoring doubled. Shouts of ‘five white!’ arise.” (Translation by David Hawkes).
2, 200 years ago, Song Yu wrote about what an ancient board game, newly discovered from a 2, 300 year old tomb near Qingzhou City in China, was like.
Recently archaeologists found a 14-faced die made of animal tooth and game pieces which they have attributed to Song Yu’s description. Twelve faces of the die are numbered from 1 to 6 twice in an ancient Chinese writing called seal script and two are left blank. These game pieces were found in a heavily looted tomb next to a skeleton archaeologists assume is a grave robber.
The tomb has a staircase that descends into the burial chamber, and in antiquity this would have been hidden under dirt. During the 3rd century BCE, a state called Qi was ruled by Qin Shi Huangdi. This tomb is thought to be built to bury the aristocrats from the state of Qi. After Qin Shi Huangdi conquered Qi and three other states, he had unified all of China and became the China’s first emperor. It was then after this conquest that he started to build his own tomb which was guarded by the terracotta army.
(As a side note, it is really quite fascinating and upsetting that it takes so long for archaeologists to publish their findings. It’s great that their research and hard work gets publicly announced, however, specifically with these game board pieces, they were excavated in 2004 and only just got published in 2014 and then translated this year.)
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