Early Puzzles
Salve amice, ut vales? Puzzles and riddles are as old as history itself. Ancient Greeks and Latins - from Epimenides ("all Cretans are liars") to Eubulides of Miletus ("this statement is false"), from Archimedes ("Ostomachion puzzle") to Celsus ("posthumous twins" problem) - were ingenious inventors of puzzles and paradoxes. They appreciated particularly simple and neat recreational math problems, playwords and riddles and used them for educational purposes. This page is a tribute to the inventiveness of our ancestors. Some ones of the puzzles presented here are from the late Roman and medieval period.
On this page you'll find a collection of interesting latin rebuses and riddles, pangrams, a vanish puzzle, magic ROTAS squares, Greek and Latin palindromes, chronograms, tongue twisters, famous double-meaning sentences, anagrams, a verbal labyrinth, some jokes, and finally the Archimedes' puzzle (aka 'Stomachion' or 'Ostomachion'). Specta, lege atque delecteris. Vale!
Rebuses/riddles Rotas square Palindromes Chronograms Word Labyrinth
Double-meanings Anagrams Ancient jokes Ostomachion