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I'm a beginner Japanese student using Yu-Gi-Oh subtitles translations with the
original in Japanese. I don't understand explanations in Japanese mostly, or
it takes me a long (believe me, long) time to understand them yet. Well, I've
spent a good - I mean good - time researching about the following sentence.
Only I couldn`t understand **two** words of it. The rest I could painstakingly
happily understand very well thanks to dictionaries, web and patience - yay.
So, could somebody give me a hand? Here it is:

> 古代｛こだい｝におけるゲームは人間｛にんげん｝や王｛おう｝の未来｛みらい｝を予言｛よげん｝ **し**
> 運命｛うんめい｝を決｛き｝める魔術的｛まじゅつてき｝な儀式｛ぎしき｝で **あった** 。

Something I thought was that maybe the **「し」** worked as a sort of conjunction
to connect both sentences. **「あった」** , I thought maybe was a sort of
collocation with the idea of "They **met** the decicions of their fate through
the magical ritual".

Thanks in advance for the help.
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2016-02-09T12:53:39.363
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2016-02-09T13:29:35.790
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question
grammar meaning
What do 「し」and「あった」mean in this sentence?
し is 連用形 form of する.It joins the two sentences here.  
であった is past form of copula である.

So the translated sentence will be like  
"The games in ancient times were magical rituals which involved predicting the
future of a person or king and deciding their fate."
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-02-09T13:26:15.030
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2016-02-09T13:26:15.030
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answer
Here し is the pre-masu form of する, and equivalent to a slightly more formal
form of "して". Here is another example of this usage:

> 彼はりんごを手に取り、食べ始めた。
>
> He took the apple into his hand and began to eat it.

In this sentence 取り can be replaced with 取って, though the former sounds a bit
more formal to me.

For the second question、であった is simply the past tense of である, which is a more
formal/classical version of です. It simply means "was" in this sentence.

Here is my rough cut at a (slightly non-literal) translation of your sentence.

> In ancient times, games were magical rituals to make predictions about the
> future of people, such as kings.
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-02-09T13:29:35.790
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2016-02-09T13:29:35.790
2020-06-17T08:18:27.500
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answer