Mill replica like the ancient Romans
Are you fascinated by ancient Rome and interested? Then the Roman Round Mill is just the thing for you! The soft leather pouch fits in any pocket - irreplaceable in the waiting room, while hiking or visiting friends, on a car trip or traveling by train...
Unpack and learn
Play mill like the ancient Romans with game pieces made of real marble! Like a traditional mill game, Roman mill revolves around you trying to get a "mill". To do this, each player receives three marble stones, which are drawn in turn. The first player to get three stones over the middle in a row wins. If you want to come out on top in this little pastime, you need skill and also a portion of luck!
Roman round mill
A great advantage that the game Roman Round Mill offers you is its simple rules, which are also attached to the game with color illustrations under these pages of the Roman Shop of the category Museum Shop and Gift Ideas of the section Romans. In order for you to quickly grasp the rules, the game is delivered to you with precise and easy to follow game instructions. This makes the historical game an excellent gift for children, for game fans and also for history fans.
The game has a diameter of about 20 centimeters. Included are six game pieces in two different colors. These are made of real marble. After playing, you can pull the Roman round mill together to a handy leather bag, which you can get in different colors.
- genuine leather
- 6 marble game pieces
- diameter 20 cm
Not without reason, the dice game (alea) was the absolute passion of the Romans! "Infected" by the exciting game with the six-eyed fellows were all strata of society, from slaves to emperors. And the Romans played dice everywhere: at banquets and in thermal baths or in pubs. The dice game was always loud and passionate.
The Roman round mill from an archaeological point of view
The classic mill game is considered one of the oldest board games in the world. Although today we know the mill game mainly as a large board with inner and outer rows, the basics of the simple laying and moving system are based on a concept with only one inner circle with a few laying positions arranged around a central point.
Even if this concept of the so-called "Roman round mill" is supposedly the oldest system, the research is still confronted with the question whether we actually have a game in front of us in the few finds. The source situation is contradictory for this.
We know from archaeological finds of mill games, for example, a game field carved into the stone staircase of the Basilica Julia in Rome. However, this is not a round mill, but rather a large mill game, called a "mola" in Latin." From the Aachen Palatine Chapel, in turn, an example of the "Mola Rotunda", the round mill, is known.
In addition to these stone mill games, we also know from Roman finds numerous game pieces made of different materials, which prove that the game was widespread in antiquity. The mill game has also been cited and mentioned several times in numerous exhibitions devoted to the topic of "Childhood in Ancient Rome" so far, for example in the archaeological museum in Frankfurt or in the Historical Museum of the Palatinate in Speyer, and here, too, the round mill is considered to be the oldest form of this simple board game and thus seems to have been an established game for the pastime of young people in the centuries before and after the turn of time.
What does archaeology say today?
However, some recent research opposes the thesis that the Roman round mill has existed for more than 1800 years. Claudia-Maria Behling, for example, examined numerous round carvings in various parts of the Roman Empire that have been interpreted as evidence of round mills and thus as clues to the age and spread of the mill game. She interprets them as game boards, but it was not the mill game, but a completely different form of games (you throw the stones into individual fields without touching the lines, which have different valuations). Thus, the mill game certainly existed in a complex form, the mola in the Roman Empire - but the mola rotunda, the round mill, never really existed.
Florian Heimann also turns to the round mill in an archaeological essay and shows the complex history of research. The game mechanism associated with it today was only "invented" in 1918 by Carl Blümlein. On the basis of some of Ovid's texts, Blümlein had particularly highlighted some passages in his treatise "Bilder aus dem römisch-germanischen Kulturleben" ("Pictures from Roman-Germanic Cultural Life"), in which Ovid referred to floor elements in buildings and described them in more detail. Blümlein concluded that the text passages, which had previously greatly confused researchers, were in fact descriptions of the round mill game boards. Based on the described round mills, Blümlein then reconstructed the course of a mill game in the manner of the mola rotunda and created a simple set of rules for it, to which he also specified the number of stones and the like. It is interesting to note that he used the mill game as a model - after all, he was already familiar with the modern version of the game.
Thus, in the research the mill game is quite accepted as a time representative of ancient children and adolescents and probably also of numerous adults. However, it is uncertain whether the Mola Rotunda actually existed as a game at all. That it might have been a game, however, remains undisputed even among scholars.
Ovid reports:
The Ovidian passages report that after placing three stones on the board, one should connect them to form a row in order to win the game.
Not a toy for children! Unsuitable for small children. Danger of swallowing!
May only be used under adult supervision.
