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Among the many lesser known methods of divination in Asia Minor - a region rich in all sorts of techniques of divination - are the dice oracles. They are attested only by inscriptions that record, often in alphabetical order, the hexameters that were given as answers; those answers were picked out by rolling several dice whose outcome corresponded to a given verse. The rather neglected inscriptions pose several interesting questions for the history and theory of divination. Provided Giovanni Manetti's opposition between a Near Eastern, literal approach to divination and a Greek, oral one is correct, these texts go together with the Ancient Near East: what do we know about their tradition, and could there be even a connection with the many dice oracles in Italy, on the lines of the Hittite-Latin isoglosses pointed out long ago by Roberto Gusmani? What made them so popular in a rather narrowly defined part of Asia Minor? Given the fixed text, what are the textual mechanism to make the answers match all sorts of questions - how does a text achieve the necessary blend of openness and precision that makes it work in such a situation? Or were there professional mediators between the texts and the clients who could interpret the text in order to adapt it to a given situation? Even if not all questions will find a clear answer, the texts in themselves form an exciting and provocative corpus.
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