Not getting out alive

Twenty-sided dice with faces inscribed with Greek and Latin letters, from Egypt-Roman Period 2nd–3rd century.

It was thrown in order to choose a letter at random. One consulted the inscription to find the matching letter and read the oracle's response. There would be twenty oracular messages, each beginning with a letter of the alphabet that corresponded to one side of the dice.

Another remarkable example discovered in Dakhleh Oasis in Egypt in the 1980s records an Egyptian god’s name in Demotic (the Egyptian script of these late periods) on each face. Divination – seeking advice about the unknown from the supernatural – seems to be the most likely purpose for the Dakhleh die: the polyhedron might have been thrown in order to determine a god who might assist the practitioner.

Boundary stone, Babylonian, from the reign of Nebuchadnezzar I, 1146-1123 BC