![]() The best description of the game appears in a picture in the tomb of Hesre at Saqqara (ca. The spiral imitates the natural posture of the snake protecting its (or her) eggs. ![]() Its board depicts a coiled snake divided into squares, which refers to a protective deity who wrapped around the sun god Re during his journey through the night. Mehen, meaning “the coiled one,” was played during the Egyptian Predynastic Period and the Old Kingdom (ca. The four games most commonly found in those regions-Mehen, Senet, Twenty Squares, and Hounds and Jackals, which were sometimes closely associated and played on opposite sides of the same boards-are represented in The Met collection. Egypt and the Near East share a number of games that were transmitted through military campaigns and trade relations. Secular recreational games were included in rituals illustrating the ties between the sacred and the profane. In Egypt, scenes depicting players exist on tomb walls ( 08.201.2a–g) and papyri. Knuckle bones, typically the astragalus bone of a sheep or goat, have four unique faces and could be thrown to give different results ( 16.10.505a–c).īoard games are well represented in archaeological material. 4400–3100 B.C.), whereas the origin of cubic dice remains somewhat mysterious, and is probably to be found in the Indus Valley ( 10.130.1155 10.130.1156 36.30.7). Throw sticks ( 19.2.24) functioned as the principal randomizing agent in Egypt since the Predynastic Period (ca. A great variety of dice-with two, four, or six sides-have been used to determine the movement of gaming pieces. Most preserved ancient board games are race games, where players move pieces on a track made of holes or squares the first player to get all the pieces off the board wins. The earliest known boards, which have two or three parallel rows of holes, come from the Neolithic period in the Near East, but we are not sure they were used to play games.
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