Sebbane M. 2001.Board Games from Canaan in the Early and Intermediate Bronze Ages and the Origin of the Egyptian Senet Game. Tel Aviv 28: 213-230 (original) (raw)
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Ancient Egyptians at Play : Board Games across Borders
Ancient Egyptians at Play : Board Games across Borders, 2016
gaming to larger social and political developments including trade, migration, conquest, and colonization. This study is also innovative in discussing not only the religious, but also the social significance of gaming not only in Egypt but also throughout the Near East and to some extent northeast Africa, considering the most modest game boards in addition to the fancy sets of nobles and Pharaohs. Their discussions of the material residues of gaming provide useful tools for archaeologists in identifying and contextualizing elements from boards, 'dice' and playing pieces. In sum, this volume provides a fascinating glimpse into the mechanics and dynamics of play in antiquity. The authors' concern for gaming's temporal, geographic and social contexts adds an important dimension to their study, making it an essential source for those who are interested in gaming in the Near East and northeast Africa and indeed at all times and places.
Social ritual and religion in ancient Egyptian board games
Board games are particularly well represented in the archaeological record of ancient Egypt. Their connections with ancient Egyptian religion means there are also references to gaming in religious texts and funerary artwork. Games by their very nature have a social element to them, they usually require more than one player and are often played with friends or family. When religion and ritual is attached to such games they can take on magical properties. In ancient Egypt this could be your ticket to the underworld or even a system which allowed communication with the dead.
Board Game Studies Journal, 14, 2020, 2020
It has for long been accepted that one of the earliest known board games was the celebrated 'Royal Game of Ur' (Fig. 1), that is exhibited in the British Museum and is dated to around 2500 BCE (Becker 2007; Finkel 2007: 17). The game of 'twenty squares'-the type of game that is exemplified by the 'Royal Game of Ur'-is indeed one of the oldest known board games. As Sumer is sometimes dubbed the 'cradle of civilization', it was assumed that there could be some sort of correlation between the rise of earliest states and the birth of board games. Although very simplistic, the hypothesis receives some kind of support from ancient Egypt. There too we have board games-senet (or znt) and mehen (mhn)-which appear as early as the first dynasties, and seem to accompany the rise of the Egyptian civilization. If we leave apart a miniature board from el-Mahasna, which is exhibited in the Musées royaux d'Art et d'Histoire, in Brussels, and which is assigned to the Naqada I period (ca 4000-3500 BCE), because there are doubts about its actual function (Crist, Dunn-Vaturi, de Voogt 2016: 41-43), boards for playing senet (Fig. 2)-at least fragmentary-appear in the First Dynasty (ca 3100-2900 BCE). Mehen, another board game from ancient Egypt, offers examples that date back to the end of the fourth millennium BCE, in other words around 3000 BCE (Crist, Dunn-Vaturi, de Voogt 2016: 17). Keeping with these very early times we can see that the Indus civilization also had board games. Although they are hard to characterize, because the few gameboards that have been unearthed are just fragments, and the field is 'invaded' with small objects often interpreted as 'gamesmen' (or 'pendants'…), and even sometimes as… chessmen, it is clear that the game of 'twenty squares' was also known there. Not only were terracotta fragments of gameboards excavated at Mohenjo-daro, but four fragmentary boards, made of stone, were unearthed at Dholavira, Gujarat, two of which being easily recognizable as parts of 'twenty squares' games (Bisht 2015: 8.9.4.1., p. 594-6) (Fig. 3-forget the 'gamesmen'). The city of Dholavira flourished between ca 2500 and ca 2000 BCE.
Board games are often used as a plot motif in modern genre fiction, especially in detective and adventure stories. In these types of narrative a well-known pattern of storytelling or literary structure (e.g. the treasure hunt, the detection of serial crimes, the iniatory course, or the medieval tale collection) is reworked and adapted to the rules and phases of a board game such as chess, jeu de l’oie, or the tarot card pack. This literary practice is very ancient and may be traced back to a number of novelistic compositions of the ancient Near East, dating from the first millennium B.C. to late antiquity. In the Demotic Egyptian Tale of Setne Khaemwaset, from the Saite period, the protagonist Setne plays a board game (probably senet) with the mummy of a long dead and buried magician, in order to gain a powerful book of spells. The widespread Near-Eastern story-pattern of the magical competition is here superimposed on the procedure of a celebrated Egyptian game. In a late Hellenistic Greek novella inspired by the Odyssey (Apion of Alexandria, FGrH 616 F36) Penelope’s suitors play an elaborate game of marbles (petteia) in order to determine which one of them will marry the queen. This is a playful rewriting of the famous bow contest of the Homeric epic. A Sasanian novelistic work, the Wizārišn ī čatrang, adapts the age-old legend of the riddle contest of kings; the riddles are replaced with board games (chess and backgammon), which the opponents invent and propose to each other as difficult puzzles for solution. In all these texts the board game becomes a central symbol of the transformative and innovative power of literary narrative.
Ancient Games And What They Teach Us About Modern People
Tamil Heritage Trust, 2023
In his Talk, "Ancient Games And What They Teach Us About Modern People", Raamesh Gowri Raghavan will use game boards and pieces unearthed in excavations, games etched on monument floors, heirlooms, depictions in literature, and ethnological reports, to present a a rich culture of games and the consequent opportunities to be had by historians, anthropologists, archaeologists and museologists in the study of games to complete the picture of historical societies.
Game boards and game pieces in the Kingdom of Kush: tokens of cultural contact and influence
The game related objects found in Kush illustrate both Egyptian and Greco-Roman influences. A group of graffiti boards and rows of holes that point at mancala games both present a later influence that may have an Arab or African origin, respectively. Together they illustrate a continuous outside influence on playing practices in Kush but little evidence for locally developed games. The difficulty of dating graffiti boards and the absence of wooden boards in excavations so far prevent conclusions on the presence of African or Nubian games in the Kingdom of Kush. Yet, the complex dispersal of games at the borders of Africa, the Mediterranean and the Near East and the unknown distribution of, particularly mancala, games in ancient times make Kush an important crossroad for future research in board games.
When Games get Lost: On the Disappearance of the Ancient Egyptian Board Game Mehen
XXIII BOARD GAME STUDIES COLLOQUIUM- The Evolutions of Board Games, 2022
The late fourth and early third millennium BC saw the rise in popularity of the mehen board game in Ancient Egypt. Its circular shaped game board with its characteristic coiled serpent as spatial game design appeared in a number of royal burial contexts, and also in inscriptions and wall paintings. A visible decline of mehen's popularity can be observed in the mid-3third millennium BC, leading ultimately to the total disappearance from the material culture of the Egyptians in the late third millennium. It is argued that the disappearance of mehen can be better understood by utilising Assmann's cultural memory theory. This study presents a concise material biography of mehen. Moreover, Assmann's cultural memory is introduced as theoretical apparatus through which mehen's transformations in material culture and representation are analysed. The conclusion regards mehen's disappearance as a result of mehen's fading role as object for establishing social identity.
Appendix I. Games in the Ancient World
Games in the Ancient World: Places, Spaces, Accessories, 2024
A list of ALL games from ancient Greece and Rome for which at least one source (written, material ot iconographical) is known to us, accompanied by major references.
Games in the Ancient World: Places, Spaces, Accessories
Games in the Ancient World: Places, Spaces, Accessories, 2024
Le volume réunit une série d’études présentées lors de colloques organisés par le projet ERC Locus Ludi (#741520) ainsi que d’autres contributions. Un large éventail de cas met en lumière la diversité culturelle des comportements dans l’espace et le temps. Ces études révèlent l’étendue géographique et chronologique des pratiques ludiques, de l’Égypte pharaonique à la Grande-Bretagne romaine et à la périphérie celtique du haut Moyen Âge. Malgré l’abondance de témoignages, le matériel conservé est souvent fragmentaire et dispersé, occulté par la perception occidentale moderne des jeux comme des passe-temps futiles. En déconstruisant la complexité des pratiques ludiques antiques, cet ouvrage met en lumière l’intersection des jeux avec la vie sociale, culturelle et religieuse dans l’Antiquité, et livre une perspective nouvelle sur un aspect jusqu’ici négligé de l’histoire humaine.
The discussion of ancient board games from the territory of modern day Bulgaria has been focused on data from the Greek apoikiai on the West Black Sea coast, Roman towns and Medieval settlements. An increasing number of archaeological finds from settlements, necropoleis and pit sanctuaries in early Hellenistic Thrace, however, allows us to embark upon the subject from a Thracian perspective. This paper deals with a still modestly researched aspect of Hellenistic everyday routineboard games by offering a short survey of available archaeological data from inland Thrace set against the broader scope of the ancient Mediterranean.