Backgammon among the aztecs

Edward Burnett Tylor

Parution le 17/03/2026

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Résumé

By backgammon we usually mean one particular game played with dice and thirty draughts, on a board with twelve points on each side. But this is only one of a family of games, whose general definition is that they consist in moving pieces on a diagram, not at the player's free choice, as in draught-playing, but conformably to the throws of lots or dice. It can hardly be doubted that the set of games thus combining chance and skill are all, whether ancient or modern, the descendants of one original game...

The exact primitive game whence all known games of the class were derived cannot now be pointed out, and indeed is perhaps lost in prehistoric antiquity. So we may as well keep to our own word, and call the whole set the backgammon family. It is in this sense that I use the word here, with the purpose of proving that, before Hernando Cortes landed with his invading Spaniards at Vera Cruz, one variety of backgammon had already found its way over from Asia into Mexico, and had become a fashionable amusement at the barbaric court of Montezuma. But, before following the game on its hitherto unnoticed migration into the New "World, let us first glance at its Old World history...

When the Spanish invaders of Mexico gazed half in admiration and half in contempt on the barbaric arts and fashions of Aztec life, they particularly noticed a game, at which the natives played so eagerly that, when they lost all they had, they would even stake their own bodies, and gamble themselves into slavery, just as Tacitus says the old Germans used to do. The earliest particulars of the Mexican game come from Lopez de Gomara, whose"Istoria de las Indias" was printed in 1552, so that it must have been written while the memory of the conquest in 1521 was still fresh....