In 2000, a child had discovered a small cube of bones during a school outing for an introduction to archaeological excavations on the site of the Gallo-Roman villa of Mageroy in Belgium.
He had unintentionally broken the object and a gray liquid had flowed from it.
According to the work carried out by the European project ERC Locus Ludi and the results of which were published in the journal
Pallas
in October 2022, it was thus a die rigged with lead, reports
Sciences et Avenir
.
A particularly rare item since no other similar dice has yet been found.
“Without this accident, we would never have noticed that the die was rigged, simply because the mercury does not really affect the weight of the object” admitted Thomas Daniaux, Swiss researcher and coordinator of the 'study.
Booming during the Imperial Roman era (27 BC – 476 AD), games of chance quickly became associated with cheating due to the large payouts they could generate.
Some crooks had participants play with split-sided dice.
An object of great value
Here the method of cheating is different.
The object was meticulously hollowed out and mercury was inserted to weigh down the die in the right direction, without influencing the total weight of the object.
To force the right side, the player had to discreetly sink the lead into the opposite side.
The researchers also estimated that the object must have been particularly expensive to produce.
According to Thomas Daniaux, it would thus have required “know-how worthy of a goldsmith” to dig the die.
"It allows us to assess the price (certainly quite high) of the finished die and therefore the colossal sums that were wagered in gambling," he said.
A similar technique, based on iron powder, had also been relayed at the time;
which invites the researcher to think that other dice already found would in fact be rigged.
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