1866, John Stuart Blackie, Homer and the Iliad, page 402:
VER. 88. - Waxed wroth in silly strife about the dice. The astragals, ἀστράγαλοι, here spoken of were, properly speaking, the ankle-bones (Poll. II. 192), talus — then also the vertebræ ― […]
2002, Jean Retschitzki, Rosita Haddad-Zubel, Step by Step: Proceedings of the 4th Colloquium Board Games in Academia:
The Germanic peoples also adopted astragal-dice; they are known from several Danish finds. It is hard, though, to establish just how widespread this form of dice was, since tarsus bones were part of the daily kitchen refuse[…]
2018 September 28, Khosrow-Pour, D.B.A., Mehdi, Advanced Methodologies and Technologies in Artificial Intelligence, Computer Simulation, and Human-Computer Interaction, IGI Global, →ISBN, page 754:
Astragal (Talus or Anklebone) is one of the group of foot bones known as the tarsus. It has particularly regular proportions and, since ancient times, taken from goat and mutton, it was like a sort of with [sic] 4-sided dice.
2001 January 1, Horace C. Levinson, Chance, Luck, and Statistics, Courier Corporation, →ISBN, page 344:
Cardan examines throws of both six-sided dice, like those in current use, and four-sided dice (astragals), in use since antiquity. As to card games, the modern reader is altogether lost, for the game referred to is one[…]
2004 March 1, Deborah L. Ellens, J. Harold Ellens, Isaac Kalimi, Rolf Knierim, God's Word for Our World, Bloomsbury Publishing, →ISBN, page 138:
influence as evidenced by their wagering in games with astragals, dice, and the like, or whether there was little in the way of such external influence on adults and what gambling that there was among them was not particularly[…]
1962, Laurence James Ludovici, The Itch for Play: Gamblers and Gambling in High Life and Low Life:
The Greeks called the six-sided astragal kuboi, a word derived, it is believed, from the Arab gab. Indeed the kuboi may well have reached them through later contact with the Arabs. That Indians were ardent dice-players we can [infer][…]
2016 February 25, Walter Crist, Anne-Elizabeth Dunn-Vaturi, Alex de Voogt, Ancient Egyptians at Play: Board Games Across Borders, Bloomsbury Publishing, →ISBN, page 10:
The steatite astragal now in London shows an erotic scene on one side (Petrie 1927:57, no. ... A teetotum is a truncated four-sided pyramidal die, its faces numbered with one to four dots and pierced with a plug or rod allowing it to be[…]
1964, Alan Wykes, The Complete Illustrated Guide to Gambling, Doubleday Books:
The four-sided die -- or astragal -- was commonly used in the East well into the 10th century and games with natural and manufactured astragals are still almost as numerous as the games with cubes. Korea, India, and Indonesia have[…]
2019 May 6, David T. Courtwright, The Age of Addiction: How Bad Habits Became Big Business, Harvard University Press, →ISBN, page 25:
Players cast foursided astragals, knuckle bones from sheep and goats that had first done duty in stew pots. It was not until the Iron Age that six-sided dice began to supplant astragals. Herodotus credits their invention,[…]
1973, J. P. Jones, Gambling Yesterday and Today: A Complete History:
The astragal, or four-sided dice, was used in the East until the tenth century and, in Korea and other eastern countries, they have dice in the form of rectangular prisms with a variety of designs on the ends.
