The chief intellectual game is chess, invented in India; varieties of chess are the game of draughts, known wherever European civilisation penetrates, and the game of Uri or Mugole, spread by the Arabs throughout the whole of Africa from Madagascar to Senegal. The object used in this latter game is a block of wood with 16, 24, or 32 little cups disposed in two or four rows, in which the aim is to place in a certain way a certain number of little stones or seeds. A third variety of the game of chess, backgammon, holds a middle place between Uri and the game of dice, and in consequence is half a game of chance. It is known under the name of Tob in Egypt and Palestine, of Pachisi in India, and of Patolitzli in ancient Mexico.[220]
FIG. 59.—Dance of Australians during the Corroboree or ceremony of initiation.
(Drawn by P. Moutet, partly after Brough Smyth and Sav. Kent.)
Sports and Spectacles.—Hand-to-hand contests so prized by the Japanese and the Mongols, horse-races esteemed by all nomads, the superb nautical sports practised of old by the Hawaiians, in which, standing upright or astraddle on a canoe, they descended cataracts several metres in height,[221] and so many other sports still form, as it were, a link between games properly so called, giving pleasure to those taking part in them, and spectacles, which give pleasure to others. Most spectacles are composed of the dance, pantomime, scenic representations, music and song, of which I shall presently treat. Outside the manifestation of these arts, public spectacles are confined almost everywhere to the different ceremonies, festivals, and processions connected with various rites or customs (initiation, common marriages, worship of the dead, etc.), or to jugglery, exhibition of animals, acrobatic performances, sleight-of-hand tricks, etc., most of which have originated in India. To these we must add combats between men and animals or between animals themselves, the best known of which are the bull-fights so dear to the Hispano-Portuguese of Europe and America, and the cockfights which have had ardent supporters not only in England and the United States, but also in Spanish America, all over the Malay Archipelago, etc. In China and Siam people are less blood-thirsty; they are content to look at contests between crickets, grasshoppers, and fishes.
FIG. 60.—Anthropomorph
ornamental design of the
Papuans of New Guinea.
(After Haddon.)
Masks play an important part in festivals, ceremonies, and spectacles, as in so many other manifestations of the social life of uncivilised and half-civilised peoples (religion, war, justice). Let us merely mention the fantastic masks used in dances and processions among the Javanese and the Dyaks, and especially those of the Melanesians; certain of them are made of cocoa-nuts, with an imitation of the beard and moustache in the fibres of this fruit, others have the human skull as a groundwork. The Papuans are very skilful in making masks with tortoise shells, etc.[222]