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Ivory Teetotum Gambling Ball, Early 18th Century / Circa 1710 - 20,
An Exceptionally Large and Very Rare Ivory Teetotum Gambling Ball with Engraved Crown and Numbers 1 - 32 on the Faceted Sides.
Size: 7cm dia. – 2¾ ins dia.
Courtesy: Finch & Co.
Sp!n, a spinning top designed by a Spanish architect, made in Japan. It can be spun upside down too – ¿ maybe to accommodate the Spanish speaking ? De todas formas, it retails for 972 yen.
The Noble Game Of Elephant And Castle
The Noble Game Of Elephant And Castle - a lost game, first produced in 1822 by William Dalton
The world is our oyster now. We can, or at least could, travel almost anywhere in the world we care to choose and, courtesy of the internet, information is at our fingertips. In the early 1820s this was anything but the case. Britain’s empire was growing as more and more exotic parts of the globe turned pink on the map, but information about these far-flung parts of the Empire was hard to…
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Made a small Teetotum (six sided spinning top die / dice) to carry around and fidget with. Spins amazing depending on the surface. This one is made of brass, but you can order it in different materials for sale on shapeways.
https://www.shapeways.com/product/DAK3CZDJE/teetotum-six-sided-die-spinning-top
Made a small Teetotum (six sided spinning top die / dice) to carry around and fidget with. Spins amazing depending on the surface. This one is made of brass, but you can order it in different materials for sale on shapeways.
https://www.shapeways.com/product/DAK3CZDJE/teetotum-six-sided-die-spinning-top
Another one from Disembodied Art Gallery archives... a “Tarantinees” game to generate a film script.
Teetotum (in Armenian/ Spanish/ French/ English).
“A teetotum (or T-totum) is a form of gambling spinning top that is known across Europe from Roman times. It has a polygonal body - originally four-sided - marked with letters or numbers, which indicate the result of each spin. The name originates from Latin Totum meaning 'all' which was marked by a T on one of the four sides and indicated that the winning player could take all the played tokens.” (Wikipedia)
dreidel
dreidel--a four sided game top inscribed with Hebrew letters that decide the outcome of a player’s turn in a game.
Most scholars seem to agree that the dreidel is derived from the version of the top, called a teetotum.
In an illustration from Pieter Brueghel's "Children's Games", painted in 1560, a child is holding a teetotum. By the 1800’s, in England, the four sides were labled T for “take all,” H for “half,” P for “put down” and N for “nothing.” In Germany the letters were G stood for gantz (all), H for halb (half), N for nicht (nothing) and S for stell ein (put in).
Like the Christmas-inspired gift-giving, the teetotum was incorporated into Hanukkah festivities. Yiddish-speaking Jews changed the name of the top to dreidel, from the German word drehen, meaning “to spin” and replaced the letters with their Hebrew counterparts, Yiddish being a dialect of German.
Here is a comparison of the Latin, English, German and Driedel versions.
