THE STELE OF MOSCHION AND BILINGUAL ALLUSIONS TO GAMING

The Stele of Moschion is a bilingual Greek-Demotic Egyptian dedication to the god Osiris, as a thanks-offering for the healing of a foot ailment. The text has several unusual, visually striking features: its bilingualism and use of two scripts; a double word square in which the reader needs to trace the hidden message; and two acrostich passages where the reader can read Moschion’s own name down vertically at the start of each line. The fragments of the stone are now housed in two separate collections: the upper lunette in Cairo (JdE 63160, 30.5 x 91.5 cm) and the surviving portion of the lower body of the text in Berlin (Berl. 2135, 81 x 86 x 25 cm). The original location of the stone was at Sakha (ancient Khasut/Xois) in the north-central Nile Delta. It has no known archaeological context and is difficult to date: most publications suggest the second or third century c.e., although this is on the late side for a Demotic text, for which a Ptolemaic or early Roman date would be more probable. The text itself states that it was ‘on a stela set up against the entrance to your [Osiris’] sacred enclosure’ (Vleeming 2001, Text A): presumably, an archaeologically unattested temple of Osiris in or near Sakha.

Previous discussions of the text have focussed on its bilingualism and dual Graeco-Egyptian cultural milieu, topics which we do not cover in depth here.Footnote ¹ Because Demotic and Greek are read in opposite directions, no one script and language can be said to have precedence over the other: both are read from the centre of the stele. Mairs has examined the wordplay and self-conscious cleverness of the text, as well as the ‘multimedia’ aspects of the text, in which the viewer is invited to engage with it in ways other than silent reading, such as tracing the lines and characters with their fingers, or hearing the words spoken aloud.Footnote ² Little about the stele’s authorship and readership/viewership can be established for certain. The society within which it was produced was profoundly multilingual and multicultural. While individual spoken bilingualism (Egyptian and Greek) was widespread, literate bilingualism is another matter, especially with a script like Demotic that was much more complicated to learn than an alphabetic script like Greek. There were certainly cases like the priesthood at Madinet Madi in the Fayyum in the late second–early third centuries c.e. who used written Greek and Demotic in combination, even within a single utterance.Footnote ³ Such cases of literate bilingualism were probably most common in temple contexts, given the role of temples in Demotic education. The temple of Osiris at Sakha would therefore be a suitable place for the Stele of Moschion to be able to reach a biliterate audience, as well as separate audiences literate in Demotic and in Greek. It would make most sense for its author to also have belonged to the priesthood there, although we have no information on authorship in the text itself.

An important aspect of the text has, however, hitherto been neglected: its references to boardgames. In the present study, we argue that the Stele of Moschion conceives of and announces itself as a gameboard, using language that would be familiar and evocative to its audience. It also invites people engaging with the inscription to treat it like a gameboard in a tactile sense. These dimensions of the text underline both the centrality of games among the expected audience and the obliqueness of these gaming references to us today.

The discussion in the present note on the inscription relates primarily to the upper portion of the Berlin fragment of the stone, containing the two word squares (Figure 1: Reconstruction of the Greek word square). These are to be read starting in the centre, and following any route moving vertically or horizontally (but not diagonally) towards the corners. Most of the Greek word square (on the left of the stone) is preserved, so it can be reconstructed with confidence: Ὀσίριδι Μοσχίων ὑγιασθεὶς τὸν πόδα ἰατρείαις, ‘To Osiris Moschion, who had his foot healed by medical treatment’. Only a corner of the Demotic word square remains, with the concluding portion of the text Ms (?) sḏm n-y pꜢ ntı͗ ḏd nt-ı͗w wꜢḥ.f dı͗.t lk šn r.wn.nꜢ.w ẖn rd(⸗y) tꜢ pẖrı͗ r.dı͗.f n⸗y (n) ḫpry, ‘Mos (?): Listen to me, the one who says: “Since he has caused to cease the pain which was in my foot by the medicine which he has given me as a miracle”’.Footnote ⁴ The Demotic grid was originally nineteen squares along each side, and the Greek thirty-nine. Because Demotic is not an alphabetic script, each square contains a word or short phrase instead of a letter. The lines of the grid are incised into the stone, but the arrangement of the letters also makes it immediately obvious to the observer that some pattern is at work: from a distance the long diagonal lines of repeated letters create a striking diamond-shaped effect. This is by no means the only Egyptian inscription to present text in a word square that can be read in multiple directions. These include the ‘Crossword Stele’ of Paser (c. 1150 b.c.e.), now in the British Museum, which contains three different hymns to the goddess Mut, to be read horizontally, vertically and around the side of the text.Footnote ⁵ Paser’s word square stood within a grid, originally painted in blue.

Fig. 1:

Ὀσίριδι Μοσχίων ὑγιασθεὶς τὸν πόδα ἰατρείαις

The gameboard references within the Stele of Moschion itself are as follows. In Text A (Greek, at the top of the lunette), Moschion states that ‘I set up this dedication as recompense, proclaiming it to Greeks and natives along the rows of the chequer-board’ (ἄνθεμα τοῦθ’ Ἕλλησι καὶ ἐνδαπίοισιν ἀμοιβὴν ἕστακα κηρύσσων πλινθίδος ἐν σελίσιν). The key terms here are σελίς, meaning row, also used for the cross beam of a house, and πλινθίς, which Vleeming and others translate as ‘chequer-board’, but for which we will propose a more accurate translation below. In Text B, which speaks in the voice of the gameboard itself, κανών ‘straight rod, bar’ is used of the lines. Text F, in Moschion’s voice, again uses πλινθίς for the board and στοιχηδόν ‘in a row’ for the way the reader should move their hand along it. A related term, στοιχεία, for ‘lines’ recurs in Text I. The Demotic Text G refers to the board as a ḥbꜤy. This term is also used (in the form ḥbꜤ.t) in a Demotic literary text of the third century b.c.e., the Tale of Setne, to describe a gameboard on which two characters play for possession of a magical book, using game pieces called ‘dogs’ (ı͗wı͗w.w).Footnote ⁶ The Demotic verb ḥbꜤ, from which the noun ḥbꜤy or ḥbꜤ.t derives, means ‘to play’. Overall, there are a greater number of references to gameboards and gameplay in the Greek than the Demotic portions of the inscription, but since a greater proportion of the total text is in Greek, this difference may not be significant. We will now discuss the significance of some of these terms in greater detail.

PLINTHIS

The Greek word πλινθίς used by the Stele of Moschion (F.1, 3) to refer to a gameboard is a diminutive of πλίνθος (brick).Footnote ⁷ This term has a variety of different meanings, mostly related to objects or concepts which are characterized by a squareness of shape, presumably one resembling the squareness of a brick.Footnote ⁸ A few examples of physically or conceptually square things which πλινθίς was used to describe include: a stone cut into a brick shape,Footnote ⁹ a square or check pattern,Footnote ¹⁰ a sundial,Footnote ¹¹ a paperweightFootnote ¹² (the latter two perhaps square-shaped ones), as well as a block of land 6,000 feet square, equivalent to the Latin laterculus,Footnote ¹³ and a number which has been squared and multiplied by a smaller number.Footnote ¹⁴ These meanings all seem to be semantically linked by a shared squareness. πλινθίς is then a particularly apt word to use to evoke the square grid design of the Greek word square on the Stele of Moschion, which is itself made up of individual square cells. To our knowledge, there are no other uses of this precise term to refer to games.

Another closely related word may however provide clues as to how we should interpret the term πλινθίς. It is not the only diminutive form of πλίνθος, nor the only one to be connected to games: another diminutive, πλινθίον, is similarly employed to denote square or rectangular objects, some of which overlap with the meanings attributed to πλινθίς.Footnote ¹⁵ Relevant square objects this word describes include a small brickFootnote ¹⁶ and a sundial,Footnote ¹⁷ and in the plural πλινθία can mean ‘fields into which the Augurs divided the templum of the heavens’, equivalent to the Latin regiones caeli.Footnote ¹⁸ These meanings are again, then, all characterized by or semantically linked to squareness.

Given the considerable overlap between the square nature of the things that πλινθίον and πλίνθος are used to describe, it is therefore significant that πλινθίον is explicitly used to describe a game in one of our most important technical sources for Greek vocabulary surrounding games: the Onomasticon of Julius Pollux, a rhetorician and native of Naukratis (forty kilometres as the crow flies south-west of Sakha). Pollux wrote during the second century c.e.; each of the ten books of the Onomasticon is prefaced with a letter addressed to Commodus, who appointed him to a chair of rhetoric at Athens in 178 c.e. or later.Footnote ¹⁹ The Onomasticon is not an easy source to use—not least because it survives in four incomplete versions all based on a common epitome of the tenth century c.e.;Footnote ²⁰ it is especially difficult to use when trying to understand games. Costanza’s recent reassessment of the sections on games has shown that this work sometimes tells us precious little about the games themselves, since Pollux’s primary concern was to transmit good use of language to his students and the wider intellectual elite of the empire.Footnote ²¹ This challenge notwithstanding, an analysis of how Pollux uses πλινθίον nevertheless clearly connects this word to a game played on a square grid. Pollux informs us (9.98, our translation):

In this passage, Pollux twice uses the word πλινθίον—first to outline the nature of the game (‘[it] is played with many counters’) and the type of board it is played on (‘surfaces marked by lines’) and secondly to tell us that this game is also known by another name—πόλις. This game is first attested in the fifth century b.c.e., to judge from a mention in a fragment of Cratinus’ comedy Runaways.Footnote ²³ It is generally understood to have been a strategy game played, as Pollux describes, on a grid made up of squares, with the aim of the game being to surround your opponent’s pieces with two of your own to capture it, a game mechanic known as ‘custodial capture’ or ‘interception capture’.Footnote ²⁴ Pieces were probably moved orthogonally, a point to which we return below. It is unclear whether dice were used in this game.Footnote ²⁵ Explicit mentions of πόλις as a game are not especially common after the Classical period and largely disappear from view in the Roman period,Footnote ²⁶ but this may be in part because in later Greek, games are often referred to not by the name of the game but obliquely through the use of the generic term πεττεία—probably derived from πεσσοί—one of the terms used for counters.Footnote ²⁷ Another contributing factor for the disappearance of polis as a game may be that it was rebranded ludus latrunculorum at least in the Latin-speaking parts of the Roman world, as we know that this board was played on a grid-like board, employed the same custodial capture game mechanic as polis, and in the first century c.e. the Laus Pisonis alludes to the connection between the two games.Footnote ²⁸ This game is probably attested in Egypt in the Roman period, for example, by a terracotta model gameboard with a grid layout found in Roman layers by Flinders Petrie in the Fayyum.Footnote ²⁹ Pollux seems to be telling us in this passage that in the Greek-speaking parts of the Roman world, polis/ludus latrunculorum had gained an additional or alternative name, related to the shape of the board on which it was played: πλινθίον.

πλινθίον is a particularly appropriate name for a game played on a grid-like board which resembles the Hippodamian grids of many Greek city-states, πόλεις, and this name may have a punning origin. Schädler has already suggested that πόλις in fact draws its origins from the similarity between the grid-like board on which this is played and the Hippodamian city grid.Footnote ³⁰ But the implications of this connection do not yet appear to have been brought to bear to on our understanding of the vocabulary used. Through his erudite concern for correct Greek usage, Pollux is also highlighting for us how some Greek speakers placed the physical shape of the gameboard used for πλινθίον/πόλις at the centre of how they conceived of this boardgame.

Returning to πλινθίς, the word used by the Stele of Moschion to refer to gaming, it is clear both from the overlapping semantic range it shares with Pollux’s term πλινθίον—both of which relate to many different square objects—and from the way that it is used on the Stele, that this term too refers to a gameboard or a specific game. We posit that it might be a variant of the same game that Pollux describes. That is to say, πλίνθος/πλινθίον/πόλις all refer to the same game; these names all probably derive from the shape of the board on which the game is played, so we might expect that several distinct, but not unrelated, terms could contemporaneously be in circulation to describe the same game.

On a technical level, the term previously used to translate πλινθίς—‘chequerboard’—should now be modified, since it is anachronistic. The use of this term harks back to an earlier time when ancient games had received considerably less scholarly attention, and the study of ludic culture was considered an antiquarian concern of little consequence to the serious study of antiquity. However, it is now clear that the formal similarities between the grid-like board on which πλινθίς/πλινθίον/πόλις and modern checkers/chequers/draughts were/are played is unhelpful. These names all refer to a family of games which differ considerably from the ancient game πλινθίς/πλινθίον/πόλις: they are played on a grid made of alternating-coloured squares, pieces are moved diagonally, and an opponent’s pieces are captured through jumping over them. This contrasts with the monochrome grid, orthogonal movement, and custodial capture employed in πλινθίς/πλινθίον/πόλις. Draughts is probably a descendent of the medieval game alquerque, which appears to have originated in the Arab world, and we have no evidence for the playing of checkers/chequers/draughts in antiquity.Footnote ³¹ We should therefore consider either using the original Greek terms or a neutral term—‘gameboard’—when translating πλινθίς.

GREEK AND EGYPTIAN GAMING TERMINOLOGY

As noted above, the Greek portions of the Stele are richer in gaming terminology than the Demotic, ḥbꜤy for ‘gameboard’ being the only specifically ludic term used. The appearance of related terms in the Tale of Setne, however, presents an opportunity to explore the extent to which Greek and Egyptian gaming terminology and games themselves overlapped, and thus the ways in which the gaming references on the Stele of Moschion would have been understood by both sides of its bicultural audience.

In the Tale of Setne, the title character tries to gain possession of a book of magical spells from the spirits of the deceased prince Naneferkaptah and princess Ahwere. Although Ahwere explains at length why this is a bad idea—the book brought about the deaths of her husband, herself and their young son—Setne persists. In Lichtheim’s translation, the next section runs as follows:

We have bracketed the Egyptian after the relevant terms in the translation, to make it clear how far gaming terminology in the Tale of Setne revolves around derivatives of the verb ḥbꜤ ‘to play’. As with the Greek examples discussed above, Lichtheim’s translation here takes the more neutral ḥbꜤ as a more specific game, draughts. Vittmann’s translation (in the Demotische Textdatenbank of the Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae, https://aaew.bbaw.de/tla/) uses the more neutral Brettspiel (‘boardgame’), which we also prefer, for the reasons already discussed.

In addition to ḥbꜤ derivatives, the Tale of Setne uses a term for game pieces: ı͗wı͗w.w ‘dogs’. The equivalent term in Greek (κύων) was long used in gaming contexts running back at least as far as Cratinus in the fifth century b.c.e.,Footnote ³² though this may refer to an astragal or dice-based game as this word also refers to a specific combination rolled with astragals; the same term is also used in the passage of Pollux (Onomasticon 9.98) which we met above, where it is used either to describe dice or counters used to play πόλις. The Tale of Setne is apparently the only Demotic text in which the word ‘dogs’ appears as a synonym for ‘gaming piece’,Footnote ³³ although it must be allowed that it is also one of the only Demotic texts to refer to gaming at all. The Stele of Moschion and Tale of Setne supply most of the references for gaming terminology cited in the Chicago Demotic Dictionary. A Demotic dream interpretation manualFootnote ³⁴ of the second or early third century c.e. also mentions an ı͗ny n ḥbꜤy, literally ‘stone of a game [board]’ (P. Berlin 8769, 3/7). Crist et al. take ı͗wı͗w as ‘a Hellenizing influence on Egyptian gaming vocabulary’, brought in in the Ptolemaic period,Footnote ³⁵ although in the same volume we also find extensive discussion of the more ancient Egyptian game known as the game of 58 holes or more colloquially ‘hounds and jackals’.Footnote ³⁶ This coinage is a modern one, based on the use of canine-shaped pieces, but the morphology of these pieces strongly suggests that earlier Egyptians would also have had good reason to refer, colloquially, to game pieces as ‘dogs’. Although the term ‘dog’ does not occur in either the Greek or the Demotic portions of the Stele of Moschion, we introduce this synchronism between Greek and Egyptian gaming terminology to reinforce the point that the gaming references on the stele would have been comprehensible and familiar—and likely also a common point of interest—to both its envisaged audiences.

In modern Egyptian Arabic, the word كلب kalb ‘dog’ can be used to mean a gaming piece in the game سيجة sīga,Footnote ³⁷ which is played on an orthogonal grid.Footnote ³⁸ If this is a survival of the ancient term, it shows both a remarkable continuity of gaming terminology, and another example of a term that might move between languages.

TACTILITY AND GAMING ALLUSIONS

Mairs has previously argued that the Stele is not solely a series of inscriptions to be read but also offers a tactile, multisensory experience, perhaps for those unable to engage fully with its textual dimensions.Footnote ³⁹ In light of our foregoing discussion, we would now add that the allusions and tactility of the Stele are carefully curated to offer a play on its gameboard-like shape. Several different aspects of the Stele’s shape and its text are useful to note here. First, consider the physical form of the Stele’s word squares: each word square is made up of rows of individual cells clearly delineated by incised lines. This creates the impression of an overall grid-type board and mirrors the shape of the gameboard on which πλινθίς/πλινθίον/πόλις (and ludus latrunculorum) would be played. In other words, the stele reproduces the likeness of the gameboard associated with a very real game.Footnote ⁴⁰

The grid is necessary for playing πλινθίς/πλινθίον/πόλις: it regulates orthogonal movement of pieces and the ‘custodial capture’ mechanism by which pieces are surrounded and ‘taken’. Thus the orthogonal arrangement of words on the word square mirrors the orthogonal movement paths of counters on the gameboard. Counters on a gameboard could not move diagonally, nor could the reader move diagonally when reading the ‘hidden’ message in the word squares: only horizontal and vertical moves were permissible. That πλίνθος is a direct reference to a boardgame/gameboard highlights the skill and wit on display in the composition of the texts and layout of the Stele.

The language of the stele’s texts persistently refers to the rows of the grid, ramming home the importance of this layout to the overall message: we have already met the terms σελίς (‘row’ or ‘cross beam’, A.4), κανών (‘straight rod, bar’, B.3), στοιχηδόν (‘in a row’, F.6) and στοιχεία (‘lines’, I.3). All these terms conceptualize the word squares in terms of their lines. Many literary texts that have come down to us from antiquity also describe a range of different boardgames in terms of their defining lines: for example, Ovid describes another game, perhaps ludus duodecim scriptorum, a backgammon-type game, as ‘confined by subtle method into as many lines as the slippery year has months’ (in totidem tenui ratione redactum | scriptula, quot menses lubricus annus habet: Ars amatoria 3.363–4, transl. Mozley) and Agathias Scholasticus also refers to pieces being placed on lines (Anth. Pal. 9.482). These passages suggest that in the ancient world games were sometimes thought of in terms of lines to travel between or along, rather than in terms of their squares.

This way of thinking about gameboards is particularly important because the text of the Stele makes clear allusions to tactility: the text’s repeated allusion to hands implies that the grid of the word square was intended to be touched, traced or travelled down.Footnote ⁴¹ The consistent use of χειραγωγία or χειραγωγός ‘leading by the hand’ at F1, B11, I8) across the Greek texts of the stele suggests that the tactile element is envisaged as central to understanding the word squares, and we find the letters of the word square being described as ‘easy to grasp’ (I7, ἀποκνίσας εὐξύνετον γράμμ’ ἀφ’ ἑκάστου), again implying tactile intent: the letters were to be picked out with the fingers the way someone might pick up a game piece. In the Demotic word square guide, the same intent is evidenced by a reference to ‘knowledge established the hand’ (G13: pꜢ swn ntı͗ ı͗ (n)-ḏr.ṱ⸗f). When combined with the word square and its mimicry of the shape of a gameboard, these texts reflect the way in which game players must have moved their pieces—by hand—along the rows of a gameboard.