Disc: die or gaming piece (?)

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Objects such as this one can present problems of interpretation when they are not preserved as part of a set. Gaming accessories are rarely retrieved together with game boards. A game of 58 holes was discovered in association with three clay plano-convex discs in the area of the Enlil temple at Nippur. The discs, with the rounded side marked and the flat side plain, were presumably cast to determine the movement of the pieces along the board. They would have indicated a different value depending on the side, marked or unmarked, they landed. This bone disk from Nippur with two double incised lines on the edge may also have been used as a die. A great variety of dice—with two, like here, four, or six sides—have been used with race games in the ancient Near East. If not a die, this disc could have been part of a set of playing pieces for the game of 20 squares, also attested at Nippur. The number of pieces for each player seems to vary across time and probably decrease from seven for the Sumerian version to five during the 2nd and 1st millennium B.C.

Ancient Near Eastern Art

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Met's Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art cares for approximately 7,000 works ranging in date from the eighth millennium B.C. through the centuries just beyond the emergence of Islam in the seventh century A.D. Objects in the collection were created by people in the area that today comprises Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Syria, the Eastern Mediterranean coast, Yemen, and Central Asia. From the art of some of the world's first cities to that of great empires, the department's holdings illustrate the beauty and craftsmanship as well as the profound interconnections, cultural and religious diversity, and lasting legacies that characterize the ancient art of this vast region.

Metropolitan Museum of Art