The History of Dice: From Ice Age Bone Lots to Craps

Dice are among the oldest tools of chance that archaeology has recovered. For years the oldest known examples came from Mesopotamia, made about 5,500 years ago. In April 2026 that record fell. A study in the journal American Antiquity by Robert Madden, an archaeologist at Colorado State University, identified two-sided bone dice in western North America that are roughly 12,000 years old, which Science News reported pushes the invention of dice back by about 6,000 years.

The six-sided cube most people picture today came later, appearing in the Indus Valley and Mesopotamia in the second half of the third millennium BCE. From there the story runs through Roman courtrooms, where a nineteenth-century classical dictionary says convicted dice players owed four times their stake, through the English game of hazard, and into the New Orleans of the 1840s, where a simplified descendant of hazard was being called craps. This article follows the dice across those thousands of years and separates what archaeologists and historians have documented from what storytellers have added along the way.

Before the Cube: Sticks, Bones and Binary Lots

The first randomizers were not cubes. Egyptian throw sticks served as the principal randomizing agent from the Predynastic Period, roughly 4400 to 3100 BCE, according to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Another natural tool was the astragalus, the ankle bone of a sheep or goat, whose four distinct faces landed differently when thrown. The Met adds that the origin of cubic dice remains somewhat mysterious.

The newest chapter sits at the far end of that timeline. Madden combed published records of Native American artifacts for objects that met strict tests: two-sided, small enough to hold in the hand, marked on at least one side, and free of holes that might suggest jewelry. The search produced 565 objects that met every test and 94 more that were probably dice, from 57 archaeological sites across 12 states in the Great Plains and western United States. At least 14 dated back as far as 12,000 years, and one bone die from the Agate Basin site in Wyoming dates to the Late Pleistocene, between 13,000 and 11,700 years ago.

These early dice were binary lots: flat or slightly rounded pieces of bone, marked so the two sides could be told apart, and tossed onto a surface. Madden has said that dice of this kind were used in games, in gambling and in exchange between groups that did not know each other well. He has also been clear about the limits of the claim. The finding does not mean Ice Age hunter-gatherers practiced formal probability theory; it shows that people deliberately made objects to produce random outcomes.

The Cube Arrives: Ur, the Indus and the Rule of Seven

The cube enters the record in the second half of the third millennium BCE. Yale Assyriologist William W. Hallo wrote that the earliest known dice of that kind come from the Indus Valley culture, in present-day Pakistan, and from Mesopotamia in the Early Dynastic III period, about 2500 to 2300 BCE. Some of those ancient specimens already had dots arranged in the modern way, with the dots on opposite faces adding up to seven. The Encyclopaedia Iranica likewise records cubic dice of bone, stone and clay in use from the third millennium BCE.

Why opposite faces total seven is unknown. Irving Finkel, a British Museum philologist, has suggested that people may have felt it made dice fair, though he notes there is no scientific reason it would. The convention nevertheless stuck: almost all six-sided dice through history follow it, according to BBC Future.

Not every ancient die was a cube. The Royal Game of Ur, found in the royal graves of the Mesopotamian city of Ur and dated to about 2600 BCE, was played with four-sided pyramid dice; the Biblical Archaeology Society reports that three were found with the board. Its rules were recovered in the 1980s when Finkel reconstructed them from two cuneiform tablets, one written by the Babylonian scribe Itti-Marduk-balāṭu in 177 BCE, according to Guinness World Records and the British Museum. Nothing in those sources says the game was played for money, so Ur belongs to the history of dice and games, not necessarily of gambling.

Mesopotamians kept using dice through the second and first millennia BCE, Hallo noted, and one late example from Babylon was made of glass. Egypt and Palestine tried various shapes, though the modern cube and dot layout also turns up there, for instance at Ashkelon.

Turning Points: Rome Puts Dice on Trial

Rome gave dice their first well-documented legal history. Law professor Suzanne Faris notes that gaming boards have been found from the back rooms of Italian inns to legionary bases in North Africa. Against that popularity stood the statutes: the leges Cornelia, Titia and Publicia, cited by the jurist Julius Paulus, which prohibited dice play but allowed betting on contests of strength such as running, javelin-throwing and wrestling. A nineteenth-century dictionary says the Lex Cornelia was probably one of the dictator Sulla’s laws, and that those convicted owed four times their stake and were branded infames, a legal mark of disgrace.

Gambling could also be a political weapon. Soon after Julius Caesar’s assassination, Cicero attacked Mark Antony for pardoning Licinius Lenticula, a senator convicted of gambling. Dice were tolerated during the December Saturnalia, and the same dictionary judges that under the empire the laws were probably little more than nominal; it says Augustus, Caligula and Claudius were fond of gaming and that Claudius wrote a book on it.

Justinian tried a harder line. A law preserved in his Code, published in 534 CE, banned dice play except in five listed contests, capped stakes at one gold piece and let losers or their heirs recover lost money for fifty years.

Aftermath: From Hazard to Craps

The next link in the chain is hazard, a two-dice game once very popular in England. The 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica says hazard was played for large stakes at Crockford’s and Almack’s in London. The player, or caster, named a main number from five to nine and threw two dice. A throw of aces or deuce-ace was called crabs and lost. Seven was the best main, the same entry explains, because seven can be made six ways out of the 36 possible throws, a probability of one in six.

The word crabs appears in a letter of January 9, 1768, in which the Earl of Carlisle told George Selwyn he hoped Selwyn had given up hazard and would never throw crabs. The word craps is first recorded in 1843, in Jonathan Green’s book An Exposure of the Arts and Miseries of Gambling, which describes it as lately introduced into New Orleans and as ruinous as faro. A New Orleans newspaper report reprinted in the Charleston Courier on May 28, 1845, describes police arresting a man for keeping a banking game called craps, seizing $225.30, 85 checks, two dice boxes and nine dice. By the 1840s, then, craps was being run as a banking game in New Orleans, and local police were treating the keeping of such a game as an offense.

Myths, Disputes and the Other Side

The best-known craps story credits Bernard de Marigny, a wealthy man born in New Orleans in 1785, who is said to have learned hazard in England and carried it home. Wilton repeats that account, but Kent Landry, writing in Country Roads, notes that other sources dispute it and that versions of the game were played long before Marigny. The name itself is contested: Wilton considers a corruption of crabs most likely and a shortening of the French crapaud, meaning toad, less likely but not impossible.

Claims about the oldest dice depend on definitions. Madden’s discovery concerns two-sided lots, not cubes, and it rests on a single new study, though Dartmouth archaeologist Robert Weiner, who was not involved, told Science News he sees no compelling alternative explanation for many of the objects. Madden also acknowledges the survey probably underrepresents the true diversity of dice.

There was a human cost as well. Faris writes that Roman lawmakers worried about aristocratic inheritances squandered at the dice and that Roman writers condemned habitual players.

Timeline: Key Dates in the History of Dice

The dates below combine archaeological estimates, which are approximate, with documented legal and printed records, which are exact.

Where the Story Goes Next

The history of dice is really several histories braided together. One is archaeological, and it is still being rewritten, as the 2026 study shows. Another is legal: Rome and Justinian wrote the early rules for restricting dice while tolerating exceptions. A third is the story of games, in which hazard’s simplification into craps points forward to the casino table.

A fourth thread concerns mathematics. Popular Mechanics notes that these ancient dice came centuries before Europe’s first mathematical models of probability, which were themselves inspired by questions about dice games. Together the threads connect to the wider history of casino games, gambling law and famous wagers that WagerPast covers.

Sources & References

• Rebecca Dzombak, Science News — The oldest known dice date back about 12,000 years in North America (2026)
• Tim Newcomb, Popular Mechanics — Archaeologists Just Found the World’s Oldest Dice (2026)
• Anne-Elizabeth Dunn-Vaturi, The Metropolitan Museum of Art — Board Games from Ancient Egypt and the Near East (2018)
• Biblical Archaeology Society, quoting William W. Hallo — Ancient Games (2013)
• Schädler and Dunn-Vaturi, Encyclopaedia Iranica — Board Games in Pre-Islamic Persia (2009)
• William Park, BBC Future — The ancient invention that ignited game play (2021)
• The British Museum — Top 10 historical board games (2021)
• Guinness World Records — First board game with surviving rules
• Suzanne B. Faris, UNLV Gaming Law Journal — Changing Public Policy and the Evolution of Roman Civil and Criminal Law on Gambling (2012)
• William Smith, A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities — Alea (1875)
• Jan J. Hallebeek — On the origin of the constitution Alearum lusus (C. 3,43,1) and its insertion into the Codex Justinianus (2013)
• Apsītis, Joksts and Dinsberga — The legal regulation of gambling phenomenon in Roman law (2024)
• Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed. — Hazard (1911)
• David Wilton, Wordorigins.org — craps (2020)
• Kent J. Landry, Country Roads — Did Bernard de Marigny really bring the game of craps to the new world? (2023)