Published Catalogue Text: Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Bronzes at the Harvard Art Museums
This object is a faithful representation of an astragalus, a bone from the ankle of a sheep or goat commonly known as a knucklebone. The underside features two parallel ridges and a valley, with a deeper indentation in the center. The top is more uneven and resembles a real knucklebone. The rounded knobs on one end are parallel, but uneven, with one being larger than the other. Copper alloy replicas of astragaloi occur in many collections of antiquities (1). Astragaloi of various mammals were used as gaming pieces for a variety of different games throughout the ancient world (2), and sets of the bones often occur in Greek graves of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. Much work remains to be done on knucklebones themselves, from the standpoint of faunal analysis, and on their metal replicas, which may have served at times as votive gifts as well as weights and game pieces (3).
NOTES:
1. For a few examples in museum collections, see M. Comstock and C. C. Vermeule, Greek, Etruscan and Roman Bronzes in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Greenwich, CT, 1971) 436-37, no. 639 (inv. no. 65.1184), said to be Roman in date; and Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, inv. no. X.229, third to second century BCE. Note also large red-figure pottery vessels in the shape of astragaloi in the British Museum, London, inv. no. E804; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, inv. no. 40.11.22, and the Villa Giulia, Rome, inv. no. 866; see G. M. A. Richter, “An Athenian Astragalos,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 36.5 (1941): 122-23; and H. Hoffmann, Sotades: Symbols of Immorality on Greek Vases (Oxford, 1997) 107-12.
2. See J. Neils and J. H. Oakley, Coming of Age in Ancient Greece: Images of Childhood from the Classical Past, exh. cat., Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College; Onassis Cultural Center, New York; Cincinnati Art Museum; and The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (New Haven, 2003) 278-79, nos. 86-90. Note that ibid., no. 90, is a glass replica; see also a lead knucklebone in the Harvard Art Museums, 1935.35.52.A. For information on the use of astragaloi in games before and after Classical antiquity, see F. N. David, “Dicing and Gaming (A Note on the History of Probability),” Biometrika 42.1-2 (1955): 1-15; and G. Bar-Oz, “An Inscribed Astragalus with a Dedication to Hermes,” Near Eastern Archaeology 64.4 (2001): 215-17.
3. For a detailed discussion on the uses of knucklebones in the Greek world in connection with the thousands of knucklebones found in the Corycian Cave, above Delphi, see P. Amandry, “Os et Coquilles,” in L’Antre Corycien 2, Bulletin de correspondance hellénique Suppl. 9 (1984) 347-78. For a knucklebone with an inscription dedicating it to Asklepios, see L. Robert, Collection Froehner 1: Inscriptiones Grecques (Paris, 1936) 44-45, no. 40, pl. 17. See also lead and bronze weights with depictions of knucklebones on them as an indicator of their unit of measurement, in that case a stater, in M. Lang, Weights, Measures and Tokens, Athenian Agora 10 (Princeton, 1964) 6-7, 13-17, 19, 25, and 27; nos. BW 1 and LW 3-7; pls. 1-3.
David G. Mitten
