Ancient Nerd Artifacts: d20

Met Museum - 20-Sided Die

One of the universal symbols of nerd-dom is the d20--a 20-sided die most commonly used in Dungeons and Dragons and other role playing games. While there are a handful of board games that also use a d20, they tend to be niche oriented and mostly played by...well...nerds.

So, when nerds notice a d20 from the Ptolemaic period in the Metropolitan Museum collection of Egyptian artifacts, we immediately conclude that the banks of the Nile were a hotbed of role playing crocodiles!

OK, not really, but it's natural for us to imagine that a 2000 year old faience d20 must have been part of a really interesting game with so many random outcomes that the Egyptians took the time and effort to construct a die with enough sides to encompass them all. It also leads to some interesting conversations about what the ancient Egyptian equivalent of Dungeons and Dragons would be: Deserts and Drakons? Slings and Serpents? Pyramids and Pythons?

There are a multitude of other dice in the Met Museum collection, but the most common is the mundane 6-sided die, or d6, the same kind you use in pretty much every board game, which means the existence of a d20 in the collection is something very special that makes all of us nerds feel a little bit of kinship with the ancient Egyptians.