Han keno slips may have helped fund China’s Great Wall
Lotteries draw random numbers for prizes under heavy state regulation—or bans. Chinese Han keno slips from 205–187 BCE are among the earliest records, possibly financing projects like the Great Wall. European money lotteries flowered in fifteenth-century Low Country towns.
Formats fix cash pots or skim a percentage of sales; 50–50 draws split proceeds evenly. Roman dinner parties handed every guest a ticket and a trinket. Ghent, Utrecht, and Bruges ran civic games for walls and charity. Milan’s 1449 lottery funded war with Venice; Genoa popularized number betting on council names.
Francis I imported the idea to France; the 1539 Loterie Royale flopped, yet a later state Loterie (1757–1836), nudged by Casanova among others, profitably aided the École militaire. Casanova argued the case with Madame de Pompadour and the mathematician Jean d'Alembert, working with the Calzabigi brothers.
The Chinese Book of Songs mentions a game of chance called the drawing of wood, apparently the drawing of lots. Augustus ran the first known Roman lottery with tickets for sale, raising money to repair the city and awarding prizes of unequal value. A lottery at L'Ecluse on 9 May 1445 sold 4,304 tickets for 1,737 florins of prizes, roughly US$170,000 in 2014 terms, to build town walls. The Dutch hailed such draws as painless taxation, their state Staatsloterij has run since 1726, and the English word comes from Dutch lot, meaning fate.
In Genoa, gamblers who wanted to bet more often than the twice-yearly draw of five council members from ninety candidates swapped the names for numbers, creating the lotto from which both legal lotteries and the illegal numbers game descend. By the early 1900s most gambling, lotteries included, was outlawed in the United States and much of Europe, and only in the 1960s did governments revive lotteries to raise revenue without raising taxes. Common rules today ban sales to minors and license ticket sellers.
Source: Lottery
