Ancient marbles game

The player with the most points scored wins. The essentials of shooting 'nuts' and marbles is to shoot or bowl at some form of a target.

In the ancient world Roman children were not the only children to play games with marbles. However, it is not known what these games may have been.

The oldest marbles that have been found date to BC. They were a group of rounded semi-precious stones that were buried with an Egyptian Child at Nagada.

In North America engraved marbles have been found in ancient Native American earthen mounds Britannica. Now in discovering where our modern names for 'marbles' originate from is of historical interest to the marble collector.

The French word for a toy marble is 'bille' which means 'little ball'. The word 'bille' appears as early as the 12 th century Dauzat's Etymological Dictionary.

The Dutch word for marbles is 'knikkers'. Children in New York used the term 'knikkers' straight into the 19 th century Gartley and Carskadden. The word knikker bakker originally referred to a Dutch ceramic marble maker marble baker. It is from the Greeks that we get the word 'marmaros'. However, the word 'marbles' was not used in England until These were made for an adult game that was played on carpets in Victorian homes.

Many of the early handmade and factory-produced American marbles are also very collectible. A marble from the Christensen Agate company, which went out of business after the Depression, is called the guinea. It was never that popular with children, so very few were made.

There still are a couple of American marble factories. The toys are also manufactured in Mexico. A number of artisans in the United States now make handmade marbles, which are pieces of art rather than playthings.

Some of them are as large as six inches in diameter. Their vibrant, rich colors and unique designs make them one-of-a-kind beautiful objects to enjoy. Sharon L. Cohen has years' experience as a writer and editor.

Her Atlantic Publishing book about starting a Yahoo! Some of these games have been around for over years, and although some have disappeared from history, archaeologists have worked tirelessly to discover the rules. Even King Tut had a copy—it spent around three millennia lingering in his tomb before modern archaeologists got their hands on it. Throughout the Aztec empire , noble families and peasants alike were known to relish patolli.

By the s, machine -made marbles had supplanted the imports from Germany. World War 1 closed down many German marble mills, and they were never reopened. Imported German handmade marbles were to become a thing of the past as twentieth century progressed, bringing with it automation and mass production.

Marbles as we know them today began in the mid 's when they were produced in quantities in Germany. The name marble originates with the type of stone that was once used to make marbles.

White marble, alabaster marbles were the best playing pieces during the early s. German hand production continued until the earliest forms of machine production began in the early 's.

Christensen and Son — In Martin Frederick Christensen patented a machine that revolutionized the manufacture of steel ball bearings. Using the same principles, he went on to design a machine that would make balls from glass.

It took a team of two people to operate. When marbles were to consist of two or more colors, it was necessary to melt the glass in separate pots of color and then pour them into a third pot to be stirred.

A worker would then gather some of the molten glass on a puny, allowing the glass to drip downward over each set of wheels. The other worker would use a tool to shear off the exact amount of glass to make the size marble being produced. Ten thousand marbles could be produced in a ten hour day.

With this machine and the glass formulas he acquired from Leighton, Christensen established in Ohio the first company to manufacture machine made glass marbles. Christensen and Son. By , the company was making its own marbles at its marble works in West Virginia.

Their significant contribution was the introduction of an automatic cutoff of hot glass, which further automated the machinery by eliminating hand gathering of glass. The decade that spanned the late s and s is referred to by collectors as the Golden Age of Marbles.

On gets a sense of how popular marbles were when one notes that West Virginia companies such as Master Marble, Vitro Agate, Alox Manufacturing and Champion Agate went into business and made a profit during a time in America when thousands of other businesses failed. Peltier Glass Company — Sellers and Joseph Peltier learned glassmaking from their French immigrant father, Victor, who specialized in stained glass.