Gaming in the Place of Palms at Aphrodisias

The Place of Palms at Aphrodisias contains the highest concentration of gameboards identified to date at any Roman site. Following years of careful study, the extensive corpus of informal inscriptions from this complex, roughly half of which are gameboards, has been documented, mapped, and analysed In this contribution we introduce the Place of Palms and explain its remarkable archaeology and architecture, and what we now know of its development over more than six centuries. We then turn to the mass of gameboards inscribed on the marble surfaces within this complex, and what their distribution, the range of game types represented, and the texts and decoration that accompany them reveal about the use of this space and the chronology of gaming within it.