About Lotto

By veritas on Jan 22, 2010 | Reply

Yolanda

Lotteries and games of chance have been played since ancient times.

Here’s what Wikipedia says

*****
The first recorded signs of a lottery are Keno slips from the Chinese Han Dynasty between 205 and 187 B.C. These lotteries are believed to have helped to finance major government projects like the Great Wall of China. From the Chinese “The Book of Songs” (second millennium B.C.) comes a reference to a game of chance as “the drawing of wood”, which in context appears to describe the drawing of lots. From the Celtic era, the Cornish words “teulet pren” translates into “to throw wood” and means “to draw lots”. The Iliad of Homer refers to lots being placed into Agamemnon’s helmet to determine who would fight Hector.

The first known European lotteries were held during the Roman Empire, mainly as an amusement at dinner parties. Each guest would receive a ticket, and prizes would often consist of fancy items such as dinnerware. Every ticket holder would be assured of winning something. This type of lottery, however, was no more than the distribution of gifts by wealthy noblemen during the Saturnalian revelries. The earliest records of a lottery offering tickets for sale is the lottery organized by Roman Emperor Augustus Caesar. The funds were for repairs in the City of Rome, and the winners were given prizes in the form of articles of unequal value.

The earliest public lottery on record is that which was held in the Dutch town of Sluis in 1434.

The first recorded lotteries to offer tickets for sale with prizes in the form of money were held in the Low Countries during the period 1443–1449. Various towns in Flanders (parts of Belgium, Holland, and France) held public lotteries to raise money for town fortifications, and to help the poor. The town records of Ghent, Utrecht, and Bruges indicate that lotteries may be even older. A record dated May 9, 1445 at L’Ecluse refers to raising funds to build walls and town fortifications, with a lottery of 4,304 tickets and total prize money of 1737 florins.[1] In the 17th century it was quite usual in the Netherlands to organize lotteries to collect money for the poor. Tickets cost about four guilders, and the prizes were paintings (50 to 100 per lottery); some by painters today considered famous such as Jan van Goyen.

The Dutch were the first to have solely cash prizes and to base these prizes on the odds of winning — roughly a quarter of tickets winning a prize. The lottery proved very popular and was hailed as a painless form of taxation. In the Netherlands the lottery was used to raise money in support of the poor, to build dikes and town defenses, and to free sailors from slavery in Arab countries. The English word lottery stems from the Dutch word loterij, which is derived from the Dutch noun lot meaning fate. The Dutch state-owned staatsloterij is the oldest running lottery.