Sample fact-check report
This is the report our fact-check produced on an early draft of one of our own scripts (ancient dice and gambling, 53 narration lines, about 1,290 words). The draft had already been researched, so most of it holds up, and the report says so. Line labels stand in for timestamps because this draft was never recorded. One fix (line 17) was added when we read the report before sending, a step every order gets.
Summary
We checked 168 claims in the draft. 163 are confirmed by the sources, 3 need fixing, and 2 could not be sourced. The most important fix is the hook line "in the oldest poetry on Earth" (line 4): taken literally it is wrong, because Sumerian poetry is older than the Rigveda, and the script's own line 12 already uses the accurate wording "one of the oldest poems on Earth", so this is a small wording change. Of the two claims we could not source, the figure of "more than five thousand Roman dice" on line 35 is the one worth a citation or softer wording.
Fix these first
| Line | What the script says | What the sources say | Source |
|---|
| line 4 [HOOK] | "in the oldest poetry on Earth" | Wrong as a literal superlative. The Rigveda is among the oldest surviving poetry (composed roughly 1500 to 1000 BCE), but the Sumerian hymns attributed to Enheduanna (about 2300 BC) are older. Line 12 of the video already says "one of the oldest poems on Earth", which is accurate. Suggested fix: "some of the oldest poetry on Earth" or "one of the oldest poems on Earth". We did not verify the gambling hymn itself. | en.wikipedia.org and en.wikipedia.org |
| line 17 [EPIC] | "Prince Yudhishthira sits down against Shakuni" | Wrong title for that moment. By the dice game Yudhishthira had already been crowned king of Indraprastha and had performed the Rajasuya sacrifice, which made him samraj (supreme ruler). Suggested fix: "King Yudhishthira sits down against Shakuni". (Added in our review of the report.) | en.wikipedia.org |
| line 44 [FREEDOM] | "But no one in the ancient sources bets quite like the Germans" | Misleading (mild). Tacitus is described accurately (Germania 24: the Germans gamble sober, stake their own freedom on a final throw, and the loser lets himself be bound and sold). The superlative "no one ... bets quite like" is undercut by the video's own Mahabharata section (lines 16 to 22), where Yudhishthira stakes his kingdom, his brothers, himself and finally his wife. We did not survey all ancient gambling sources, so "no one" is neither proved nor disproved beyond that tension. Suggested wording: "Tacitus describes Germans who staked even their own freedom on a last throw, sober, and called it honour." | en.wikipedia.org and www.poetryintranslation.com |
Checked and confirmed
163 claims checked and confirmed. Where one line holds several claims, each is listed, separated by semicolons.
- line 1 [HOOK]: in the year 2000; a fifteen-year-old volunteer; a Roman rubbish pit; southern Belgium; the trowel cracked the die; a bone die; nine millimetres across
- line 2 [HOOK]: droplets of silver liquid ran out; the liquid was mercury
- line 3 [HOOK]: around seventeen hundred years earlier; hollowed out through its spots; the metal slides when tilted; the wanted number comes up
- line 4 [HOOK]: the only die of its kind; a sacred epic; the private letters of emperors
- line 6 [BONES]: dice began as bones; knucklebones are sheep and goat ankle bones; they land on one of four sides
- line 7 [BONES]: Romans threw four at once; four ones was the Dog; four different faces was Venus
- line 8 [BONES]: Augustus, Rome's first emperor; house rules at one of his dinners; a Dog or a six paid into the pot; Venus took the lot
- line 9 [BONES]: cube dice are ancient; four and a half to five thousand years ago; eastern Iran; the cities of the Indus Valley
- line 10 [BONES]: in the 1920s; Leonard Woolley; game boards from the Royal Cemetery of Ur; in what is now Iraq; little pyramid-shaped dice
- line 11 [BONES]: two thousand years later; a Babylonian scribe wrote down the rules; Irving Finkel of the British Museum; Finkel decoded them; he argues it was a betting game; players paid into a pool or collected from it
- line 12 [BONES]: and in India; one of the oldest poems on Earth is a gambler's confession
- line 13 [BONES]: the Rigveda's Gambler's Lament; the dice cost him his wife, family and friends; the dice were not cubes; they were vibhidaka nuts
- line 14 [BONES]: he swears he will stop, then runs back to the dice
- line 15 [BONES]: the hymn ends with the advice to farm your field
- line 16 [EPIC]: India's great epic, the Mahabharata; it turns on a game of dice
- line 17 [EPIC]: Yudhishthira sits down against Shakuni; a master player; throwing for his nephew Duryodhana; Duryodhana as his great rival
- line 18 [EPIC]: stakes his jewels and his gold; then his cattle and horses; his city and kingdom; his four brothers one by one; then himself
- line 19 [EPIC]: finally, Draupadi; Draupadi as his wife
- line 20 [EPIC]: Shakuni repeats his winning line after each throw; Shakuni resorts to deceit; the text says plainly that he cheated; it never says how
- line 21 [EPIC]: Draupadi is dragged into the assembly hall; the unsettled question of staking a wife after losing oneself
- line 22 [EPIC]: the losses are reversed; called back for one more game; twelve years of exile; a thirteenth in hiding; Shakuni throws and wins
- line 23 [EPIC]: the grudge ends at Kurukshetra; the greatest war of Indian legend
- line 24 [EPIC]: later retellings added the father's-bones twist; it is not in the Sanskrit epic
- line 25 [ROME]: Rome tried to ban it; Roman law forbade playing for money; except on contests of strength and skill; like running or wrestling
- line 26 [ROME]: a host of a dice game could not take anyone to court over a beating there
- line 27 [ROME]: the poet Martial writes; the winter festival of the Saturnalia; only during the Saturnalia; even a slave could rattle the dice box
- line 28 [ROME]: Rome's emperors never took the ban very seriously
- line 29 [ROME]: Augustus gambled openly; he lost twenty thousand sesterces; in a letter to Tiberius; over a festival of play; he blames his own generosity
- line 30 [ROME]: Nero played for four hundred thousand sesterces a point; meaning every spot of the throw
- line 31 [ROME]: Claudius wrote a book about the game; a board fitted to his carriage
- line 32 [ROME]: Caligula cheated; Suetonius is the source; he padded winnings by lying; and by perjury
- line 33 [ROME]: two men passing; rich Roman knights; seized and confiscated on the spot; he boasted of a luckier throw
- line 35 [CHEATS]: the evidence is rare but there; about a dozen dice with doubled numbers; two fives or two sixes; hollowed dice filled with lead to favour the six
- line 36 [CHEATS]: a practised cheat could throw the dice just so
- line 37 [CHEATS]: some Romans used a dice tower; a staircase inside; dice roll out where no hand can guide them
- line 38 [CHEATS]: Martial wrote a verse for a dice tower; the verse is two lines; the crooked hand gets nothing but wishes
- line 39 [CHEATS]: a bronze tower from the fourth century; found at a Roman villa in western Germany; the message cut out in letters; the Picts are beaten, play without worry
- line 40 [CHEATS]: a boast on a Pompeii wall; the sum of 855 and a half; the win at Nuceria; the closing honesty tag; the boast was scratched; the win was at dice; Nuceria as a town near Pompeii; the denarius as the coin; the two closing words, fair and square
- line 41 [CHEATS]: nobody writes that unless people are wondering
- line 42 [CHEATS]: the painted series in a Pompeii bar; two men playing dice in it; the painted captions; like a comic strip; the dice scene followed by the fight; the wording of the two spoken lines
- line 43 [CHEATS]: in the next scene they are on their feet, swearing; the landlord shoving them toward the door; take it outside
- line 44 [FREEDOM]: Tacitus, the Roman historian; the Germans he describes
- line 45 [FREEDOM]: gambled stone-cold sober; as serious business; staked their own freedom on the final throw
- line 46 [FREEDOM]: the loser went quietly into slavery; even if younger and stronger; tied up and sold
- line 47 [FREEDOM]: Tacitus called it stubbornness in a bad cause; the Germans called it honour
- line 48 [FREEDOM]: the winners sold those slaves on; partly to rid themselves of the shame of such a victory
- line 49 [CODA]: when Claudius died; a satire attributed to Seneca; his punishment in the underworld
- line 50 [CODA]: dice forever with a dice box that has no bottom; the dice slip through and run away
- line 51 [CODA]: a hundred and ten dated dice; from the Netherlands; the Roman ones lopsided and irregular; true standard cubes only by around 1450; people had begun to expect a throw to be fair
- line 52 [CODA]: five thousand years of bones and cubes; the nuts
- line 53 [CODA]: do not play with dice, go and farm your field
No source found
This means we did not find a source, not that the claim is false.
- line 35 [CHEATS]: "Among more than five thousand Roman dice studied by researchers". We could not trace the figure of more than five thousand. The specialist article behind the rest of this passage (Daniaux 2022, Pallas 119) discusses about two dozen falsified dice and gives no total for the Roman dice corpus in the pages we could read. A corpus of several thousand is plausible, so we have not called it wrong. You may wish to cite the figure or reword it, for example "among the Roman dice catalogued so far". Source consulted: journals.openedition.org
- line 53 [CODA]: "And the oldest advice is still the best." This is a closing flourish and we are not raising it as an error. The advice itself is quoted correctly from Rigveda 10.34, verse 13, and an older scholarly source calls the hymn the oldest composition of its kind. We found no source that ranks the advice as the oldest on gambling in general. Source consulted: archive.org
Method
Every claim was checked against the source listed, by a first pass and a stricter second pass on anything flagged, and the report was read before sending.
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