![]() ‘Through the clothes we can see the different phases of the dance,’ Gouy said. She said researching the dancers’ clothes in paintings and carvings reveals a lot about their movements and the sounds they made. Gouy studied textiles in Etruscan art as part of an EU-funded project called TEXDANCE, which ended in 2021, and published a book on the subject last year. ‘Dance has a psychological effect on the body that helps to heal after a death,’ she said. She opened up a connection between the world of the living and the world of the dead, helping the deceased pass through.ĭance at a funeral also served people coping with grief, according to Gouy. The castanet player led people through the ritual’s different stages. ‘This woman controlled the ritual,’ said Gouy, who was the first person to study Etruscan dance. The Etruscans created an envelope of paintings around their dead to protect them for all eternity. Bands of sacred cloth are draped over her arms – a symbol of her religious authority. The dancers are performing an ancient funeral ritual. Scenes painted in underground tombs in Tarquinia not only show women and men dancing together as equals, they also depict the females as leaders in their community. ‘The Greeks were shocked by the status that Etruscan women had and described them as women of ill repute,’ said Dr Audrey Gouy, an archaeologist specialising in pre-Roman Italy at the University of Lille in France. Many of their rituals were adopted by the Romans. ![]() The Etruscans controlled central Italy before the region became part of the Roman empire. Unlike the ancient Romans and Greeks, women in Etruscan society had equal status to men. Locus Ludi, whose funding is through the European Research Council, started in 2017 and runs through September this year. Knowing more about the educational and societal role of play in the past is important to understand the present and widen the debate about high-tech toys and new forms of sociability. The aim is to help integrate ancient games as cultural material in school and university programmes today, according to Dasen. The researchers used these descriptions and archaeological finds to recreate the rules of the game so that it can be played again today, along with several other ancient pastimes that have been made accessible to modern-day players. The image of the board game shows intimacy between the couple. The “Little Soldiers” amusement played by the slave and her lover is the only Roman strategic board game described in detail in Roman literature. In addition to studying the hidden messages in the images of games in ancient Roman as well as Greek art, the Locus Ludi team has recreated some and made them available to play online. Such pastimes were a way for children to experience winning and losing and to learn to master their emotions. Instead, they are always shown playing nicely and quietly. Roman girls, on the other hand, were never depicted fighting over games. This reflects the extent to which violence was allowed in games and was culturally part of the fun, according to Dasen. Romans valued this behaviour. The beautiful carvings show the boys fighting over their game and pulling each other’s hair. These are no simple illustrations of childhood amusement – they have a twist. Some Roman sarcophagi of children are carved with scenes of boys playing. It is carrying out the first comprehensive study of the written, archaeological and iconographic records of games, which have been largely forgotten in museums and libraries.Įtruscan urn with female slave and master over board game. The only major work on the topic was published in 1869.ĭasen is leading an EU-funded research project called Locus Ludi to address this gap. The game is also a message to say they will be together forever.’Īlthough games were an important part of ancient life – even the gods played them – for a long time they went unstudied. ‘It is a very beautiful thing because she is a slave, but she’s also the beloved one and the leader. ‘The image of the board game shows intimacy between the couple,’ said Véronique Dasen, professor of classical archaeology at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. The couple is playing “Little Soldiers”, a game of strategy symbolising seduction, and Margaris is winning. The Roman marble urn, for example, bears an inscription identifying the deceased woman as Margaris, a slave of Marcus Allius Herma. While tombs and urns might seem to be unlikely places to find scenes of people dancing or playing board games, in classical antiquity they conveyed important messages about personal relationships and society. A 1st-century funerary urn of a woman who died in nearby Rome depicts a couple playing a board game. A 2 500-year-old Etruscan tomb in the Italian city of Tarquinia has walls covered in paintings of brightly coloured dancers and musicians.
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