We human beings like to think of ourselves as wise, as homo sapiens. But we share two of our most common qualities with the beasts. We are often murderous, and hence have been described as homo necans in a disquisition on violence (in relation to Greek sacrificial rites and myths) published under that title by Walter Burkert. And we are irrepressibly playful, as documented in Jan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens. Evidence of this universal playfulness goes deep into the past. Surprisingly, some of its manifestations have stayed recognizably similar over the millennia, such as dice and board games. It may seem […]
