About the book
In 1892 an English architect did what no antiquary had done: he wrote down the rules. Two centuries of scholars had collected every classical passage about ancient board games and left them, as Falkener complained, a skeleton — “the bones of the entire skeleton have been put together, but there they remained; the game was not played.” So he supplied the play. The ancient sources do not contain those rules. They are his, inferred from a board, a piece count and a few lines of Latin verse, and the book prints them in the imperative with worked games played to a finish and nothing marking where the evidence stops. This edition marks it. A Register of Reconstructions separates, for each of the three games, what the evidence shows, what Falkener supplies, and what is known now — which in every case includes that the rules are still not known. Sections I to VI complete: Falkener's introduction, the games of the ancient Egyptians, the Manchester relics, and Tau, Senat and Hab em Han. With the 1864 paper Dr Samuel Birch of the British Museum wrote for him — the best thing in the volume, and the place where a specialist marks his own uncertainty. Around them: five original diagrams, each marked EVIDENCE or RECONSTRUCTION on its face, a glossary of the terms, a chronology, an index of subjects generated from the text, and a note on the text that says exactly what a scan can and cannot give you. 78 pages, 6 × 9 in.
