History of Gambling

A Brief History of Gambling and Man

Gambling is one of the oldest activities that humans have been recorded as doing. Admittedly it is an odd activity as at it does not deal with constructive activities but a shift in what one person owns based on a mere game of chance. It also represents a natural reversal of how the world works. In gambling, the weak person has an equal opportunity to defeat the strongest foe.

The origins of gambling are quite deep, as one of the oldest known past times to the human species has at least a drop evident in every artifact of human history. In fact, historians believe that the first games of gambling were performed with the first forms of currency. Shall, bones and shiny pebbles were all things that the pre-modern man gambled with because he could. Dice themselves date back to the 16th century B.C. As the British Museum of History has a pair of dice that an Egyptian man carved out of elephant tusks.

While that gives some time frame on when dice was made, it doesn’t quite say where the modern deck of cards came from. Around 1600 B.C. Is the time when the ancient people of China acquired the word for “cards” and there is evidence that cards were used in a game similar to blackjack. Proper decks of cards for gambling didn’t come into existence until Tarot cards around 1254.

The games associated with gambling are an entirely different matter. Some games didn’t come into existence until the late 1600 A.D. Others, like blackjack, didn’t have their rules cemented in popular knowledge until World War II.