Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c14.63

c14.63

The community had periodic assemblies in what appears to have been a regular club-house or meeting-hall, from which women were excluded and in which not only the business of the clan was discussed, but ordinary farmers' gossip was retailed. There too the men gambled at a game of chance played with nuts and usually rendered 'dicing', though it cannot have been played according to the methods usual with marked dice (such as those known in the Harappā Culture, for instance). The nuts were thrown towards a hole or depression in the ground, and bets were laid according to some complicated system: I once watched what must have been a similar game, also played with nuts thrown towards a hollow in the ground, in a village of the Kangra district in the Himalayan foothills. The stakes were evidently often high - one of the hymns of the *Rigveda* (x, 34) is a rueful Gambler's Lament, in which he prays for better luck next time. He has gambled away even his wife, or at least her affections - in the old days