The lottery games of today are varied and incredibly numerous, offering a near-endless range of gameplay options, risk:reward ratios and odds of winning. Some people fancy their chances playing online on sites like Coral, whilst others prefer to yell and groan along to the TV. The rules and the mediums differ, but the essence of the game is just about the same everywhere.

Lotteries are now played in almost all countries throughout the world, from Ireland to Italy, Australia to the United States of America, but where did the game come from in the first place?

The British Isles?

Whilst it may be tempting to search close to home to begin with, the birthplace of lottery games is almost undoubtedly elsewhere on the world map. Perhaps the two best known lottery draws from this part of the world are the nationally televised UK National Lottery – founded in the mid-nineties – and the Irish Lotto, which began in the 1980s. Whilst lottery games undoubtedly arrived in the UK in some form much earlier, the roots of the lottery actually extend far deeper into the past…

The Italian Quarter?

‘Italian Lotteries’ were widespread throughout Italian-American neighbourhoods of the USA around the turn of the 20th Century. The link between Italy and lotteries seems a particularly solid one – the nation’s own national draw SuperEnalotto has existed in some form or other for over half a century – and, as our next destination proves, it goes far further back in time.

Ancient Rome

Whenever you’re in doubt as to where something useful in modern society comes from, there’s a fairly strong chance that the place of origin was ancient Rome. The Romans gave us everything from viaducts to vomitoriums (we still have those, right?) and are often spoken of as the progenitors of civilisation as we know it. Hard as it may be to believe it, the Romans played the lottery too, in a range of variants from dinner party games to area-wide fund-raising lotteries not altogether dissimilar from those seen today!

China

Everyone knows that every great genius steals their ideas from somebody else. If the Romans were those great geniuses, then maybe the ancient Chinese were that somebody else. The earliest evidence of lottery style gaming in China comes from around 200BC, in the form of kendo slips. Remarkably, it is believed that the money raised through the game was used to help fund the construction of the Great Wall of China! Could it be that we’ve been playing the lottery since the dawn of civilisation? Written evidence suggests that the Chinese were doing so hundreds upon hundreds of years before those kendo slips were made!