Please forgive me if this question has been asked before. My time is limited and I don't want this opportunity to slide.

Does anyone know where The Shell Game was first referenced in any writings? Be they diaries or histories or other writings?

Thank you in advance for any information.

1670 in "Hull Elections" in England (according to Wikipedia and threeshellgame.com) as part of a list of games played.

Also look here http://www.themagiccafe.com/forums/viewt......orum=117 for a fuller history by Whit Hadyn.

Thank you. I disagree with Whit's characterization of the Cups and Balls as a scam in its original form.

The first mention of the Cups and Balls was around 100 A.D. in Rome, during which it was recounted as a memorably mystifying trick. Nothing more.

I am interested in finding a similar reputable source for the pea and shells.

I doubt the observers in Rome or Egypt saw it as a scam.

Robert-Houdin describes the way the scam worked in a Parisian restaurant in the 1840's. I suspect this was a very old ploy. It is difficult to present a trick on the street without sometime encountering a spectator who is "sure" he knows what is going on and is willing to bet on it. It would be a slow learner who didn't find a way to encourage the suckers. I suspect that it was always presented as entertainment--just as Robert-Houdin described, and though it didn't have the "find the ball" gambling presentation, it was set up to ensnare the suckers.

The original version was probably the Indian Cups and Balls which date back 5000 years. Gary Kosnitzky has sources on that. I doubt that Cheppum Panthum was originally a takedown scam, but I suspect it derived from stone counting games. Gary would be the one to ask.

Seneca mentioned the cups and balls in 100 AD.

The Deipnosophistæ, written in the late 2nd Century AD in Egypt where the Greek Athenæus writes of a cups and balls performer in the aisle
of a theater:

A certain man stepped into the midst, and placed on a three-legged table three small cups, under
which he concealed some little white round pebbles such as are found on the banks of rivers; these
he placed one by one under the cups, and then, I don’t know how, made them appear under another
cup and finally showed them in his mouth.

Thimble-Rig seems to first appear in England in the 17th Century.

The Shell Game first appears in America in the 1840's and 50's.

It does seem logical that what is the Cups and Balls trick today, originated as a game. Equally logical is the assumption that the game evolved into a demonstration of sleight-of-hand as the observers would eventually realize that the game could not be won because the operator of the game was using some skill to cheat; and ordinary observation would not be enough to find the ball – rendering the game a folly in popular culture.
BUT, if it was EVER originally a game of chance, it stopped being a game that people would play a very long time ago. In Alciphron’s time (estimated to be between 170 and 350 CE) he tells the story of a countryman's experience seeing a performance of a "most dexterous fellow" in the "theater" and expresses the fear that "such a creature" would "steal" his property.
That doesn’t sound like the depiction of a game of chance.
Also, I'm no scholar of the Greek text, but it's my understanding that Alciphron's letters are fiction and he may have been satirizing the simple farmer, describing the farmer/author's naivety. The farmer does describe himself as "rather dull" in comprehension.
And the fact that Alciphron doesn't describe cups, but rather "dishes" may indicate an Indian technique and Indian origin... or it might just be an eccentricity of the translation. The performance is on a table, not seated.

Here is a link to the text

It's interesting that this question of the translation of the term for the "dishes" has become so controversial. I don't have a Greek font on my keyboard, but the words in Greek sound like mikras paropsidas. I showed this text (which I had copied from an on-line copy of the Greek text) to a Greek friend of mine. I asked him what this term made him think of.

He replied "really old cups."

It is important to bear in mind that few, if any, scams, tricks or cons had their actual origins in literature. Most of them were passed on via oral tradition and kept within families or other groups of people who were actual practitioners of these scams. They were not prone to share them. Some of them could neither read nor write.

The cups and balls had been around for centuries before anyone wrote it up. And Reginald Scot's description is really not very revelatory at all.