Irving Finkel

Mm-hmm.

which is not quite the same as pastime.

Time past is the question of what you do when it's too hot to do anything, which is true a good part of the day and a good part of the year.

And grandmothers sit under trees with their grandchildren and they

tell stories and they do this and they do that.

And time pass is a very useful catch-all phrase for the existence of board games.

And in India, there are many board games.

Chess, of course, is the famous one, but there are quite a lot of three-in-a-row type games or fox against geese games and wolves against sheep and all those sorts of things which come out of the landscape in miniature and were played for pleasure.

And

Also, in the kind of way where it doesn't really matter who wins because you might play and it goes round and round and round and eventually somebody wins and then they have another game.

So it's a sort of that kind of rather graceful, valid function for not wasting time doing something which is stimulating and beneficial without it being overpowering in either way.

So I think it is a human matter.

I think so, but probably only late on, because money as such, of course, doesn't appear until quite late.

But there are...

We know in Mesopotamia, it's a rather interesting thing, there's a school tablet with three or four lines quoted from one literary thing and three or four from another literary thing.

And one of them has this, Oh my Astragal, oh my Astragal, woe is me, woe is me.

And that's all we have.

And I think this is an example of a genre of literature called the gambler's lament, because they use knuckle bones or astragals as dice.

And I'm sure there were people who bet sack of this or a roomful of that on the throw of the knuckle bones.

And this extract in the school text is probably from a literary tablet in which somebody lost everything