What do 「し」and「あった」mean in this sentence?


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.




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.




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.

