The Complete History of Gambling and Betting throughout the World

Gambling through the ages is a fascinating glimpse into the stories of cultures and civilisations. Bringing fortune to ordinary folk while disrespecting kings, it is the fickle nature of chance and the hope of a favourable spin that has hooked us for millennia. We look back at the history of betting.

Gambling has been around throughout recorded history. It’s also one of the world’s favourite pastimes. It is a great influencer of popular culture (think Casino Royale, Ocean’s Eleven, The Color of Money, and so many others), and is itself constantly changed by time. Join us as we take a fascinating ride through the history of gambling.

It is impossible to know exactly when the first human being wagered something on the outcome of a chance occurrence. Boards of two or three parallel rows of holes found in the near East date back to the Neolithic era (10,000 – 4,500 BCE) but we can’t say for sure if these really were board games or not.

So we will start our History of Gambling with what we do know. Archaeologists in Egypt have found what we’d today consider to be dice that date back to around 3000 BCE. Scenes painted on tomb walls and ancient papyrus scrolls show players on opposite sides of a board enjoying recreational games like Mehen, Senet, Twenty Squares, and Hounds and Jackals. It seems these games spread through Egypt and the Near East through trading of goods and military campaigns. In fact, these four popular ancient games are represented at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City if you’re ever in the neighbourhood.

To give you an idea of what these were about, we’ll use the Mehen game as an example. Played in the Egyptian Predynastic Period and the Old Kingdom (that’s 2649 – 2130 BCE), the board shows a coiled snake divided into squares. The snake represented a deity that wrapped itself around the sun god Re to protect him during his journey through the night. We know this because the game is painted in the tomb of Hesre at Saqqara (2700 BCE) along with the gaming pieces to be used with the Mehen board (three lions, three lionesses, and six sets of six marbles). We also have a good idea of how the game was played thanks to religious documents called Pyramid Texts. These suggest that the afterlife was achievable if you were able to successfully pass through the Mehen game board and reach the centre of the spiral, symbolically joining Re.

Apart from Mehen, there are dozens of games of chance that were played in the ancient world. Senet is the most famous and was especially popular around 664 – 332 BCE. Another is Mancala which, amazingly, is still played today throughout Africa, the Middle East and Asia. In fact, there are many variants of this two-player game of strategy aimed at capturing all or some of your opponent’s pieces.

Play starts with placement of a certain number of seeds, prescribed for a particular game, in each of the pits on the board. The player takes a turn by removing all seeds from a pit, “sowing” the seeds (placing one in each of the following pits in sequence) and capturing based on the state of the board. The object is to plant the most seeds in the bank. If playing in capture mode, once a player ends a turn in an empty pit on his own side, he captures the opponent’s pieces directly across. Once captured, the player gets to put the seeds in his own bank. After capturing, the opponent forfeits a turn.

There are more than 800 recorded names of traditional mancala games. Certain aspects of the game remind us of agricultural activities and players do not need any specialised equipment to take part. Evidence of Mancala has been found in so many ancient civilisations, from 6th century Aksumite areas in Eritrea and Ethiopia, to 10th century Muslim Spain and an excavated Roman bathhouse in the Israeli city of Gedera, and evidence found in Jordan that dates to around 6000 BCE. This has led some historians to suggest that the game could be the oldest in the world, dating back to the beginnings of civilisation itself.