Juryeonggu, the Fourteen-sided Wooden Dice from Wolji
Eighth century
It looks like a small wooden ball with its sides cut flat, six square faces and eight triangular ones, each carved with a short phrase in Chinese characters. It is a dice, but not for gambling. Each face gives a forfeit for a drinking party: sing a song and drink, drink three cups in one go, let others hit you on the nose, laugh loudly and drink, dance without music, recite a poem, drink and stay silent while others tease you. Whoever rolled it at a banquet in the Silla palace had to do what it said. It is the only object of its kind ever found, and it makes the people of a kingdom that vanished eleven centuries ago suddenly very close.
The dice was made from a single block of oak, and the geometry is clever. A shape with six squares and eight hexagon-like triangles gives fourteen faces of almost equal area, so that the odds of each forfeit were nearly the same. The characters are cut in a neat hand and were probably filled with ink. Look at the replica in the case and read the translations beside it: several of the forfeits involve drinking a large quantity of wine, and one instructs the loser to sit still while the others make faces at him.
The dice was found in 1975 in the mud of Wolji, the pleasure pond of the crown prince's palace, along with tens of thousands of other things dropped or thrown into the water. What you see is a faithful replica. The original was placed in a drying oven for conservation, the oven malfunctioned overnight, and by morning the dice had been reduced to charcoal. The photograph taken at excavation and the measurements recorded before it was lost are all that remain, and the replica was made from them.
Did You Know? The original dice survived eleven hundred years in pond mud and less than a year in a museum laboratory, destroyed by a faulty drying oven.
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