A modification of such plays consists in throwing one missile after
another of the same kind, as a ball after a ball, a quoit after a
quoit, etc. Thus Burmese children play Tschapieh-Kasah by throwing flat
seeds on one another,[260] and many of our own games are essentially
the same, especially those played with marbles. These little toys are
very generally used, and are quite ancient. Bastian saw them in Burmah
and Siam, where the game is called Leu Thoi-Kong.[261] It is popular
all through the Orient, and extends to Africa. In old German burial
urns, “with the bones of children are found polished round stones, such
as modern children play with.”[262] The Romans called marbles ocellata.
They are frequently mentioned, too, in old German literature,[263] one
instance being of pedagogical interest. In the sixteenth century the
sumptuary laws of Zurich included one forbidding marbles among other
plays, under penalty of the “Gätterei.” And what was this punishment?
The youthful criminal was placed in a revolving wooden machine and
whirled until the crisis of dizziness and nausea was reached![264]
Very common, too, are the games in which small discs are thrown one
after another. The Greek στρεπτίνδα was an attempt to propel a
quoit or coin lying on the floor by means of another thrown toward it.
Forbes describes a peculiar form of the game as practised in Sumatra:
“All day long the boys under my window amused themselves with a game
called Lepar, which interested me very much.... Each player had a sort
of quoit made of cocoanut shell, which he threw from a special stand
and tried to hit one or more (according to the number of players) of
the other quoits lying at a distance of forty or fifty feet.... The
manner of propelling the missiles was remarkable. The player turned
his back to the goal, laid his quoit flat on the ground, seized it
firmly between his heels, and with a rotary motion of his legs shot it
forward so that its rim described a cycloidal curve. It was amazing
to see with what certainty the best players reckoned on the amount of
force necessary for perfecting such a curve as would pass in among the
quoits and hit the ones aimed at.”[265]
In the Greek game κυνδαλισμός the object was to dig up with one pointed
stick another which was fixed in the ground, and to do it in such a
manner that the first stick was left standing up where the other had
been. Fischart and Rabelais mention this game.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account