Games of ancient Egypt

Egyptians played race games on boards — senet, mehen, hounds and jackals, and twenty squares, which came from Mesopotamia — threw knucklebones and sticks instead of dice, and played with balls. The boards survive in museums; the rules do not. Everything said about how these games were played is a modern reconstruction, and the honest answer to many questions is “we don’t know”.

• Senet — about 3100 BC to Roman times; 30 squares in three rows of ten. Boards in the Metropolitan Museum and the British Museum; Tutankhamun’s boxes are in Egypt.
• Mehen — about 3000–2300 BC; a round board carved as a coiled snake. In the British Museum and the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.
• Hounds and jackals — from about 2000 BC; 58 holes and pins with animal heads. The finest set is in the Metropolitan Museum.
• Twenty squares — at Ur about 2600 BC, in Egypt from the 2nd millennium BC; 20 squares. In the British Museum and on the backs of senet boxes.
• Knucklebones and throwing sticks — all periods; no board needed. Found with Tutankhamun’s game boxes.

The best known of them: two players race five pieces each along 30 squares, moving by throws of four sticks. Senet was played for some three thousand years, and in the New Kingdom it came to stand for the soul’s journey through the underworld. We give its history, the meaning of the marked squares and one playable reconstruction on a page of its own.

Mehen is played on a round board carved as a snake coiled around itself, its body divided into segments, the head at the centre. It belongs to the earliest Egypt: boards come from Predynastic and Early Dynastic graves, and the game seems to vanish after the end of the Old Kingdom, around 2300 BC. The tomb of Hesy-Ra at Saqqara shows a mehen board next to a senet board.

Sets came with lion and lioness pieces and small balls. The game is named after Mehen, the serpent god who in later religious texts coils around the sun god to protect him on his night journey. A good example of the board, carved in limestone, is in the British Museum.

No rules survive. Most scholars think it was a race along the snake’s body, from the tail to the head, but what the lions and the balls did is guesswork. Modern versions borrow from the “hyena game” recorded among the peoples of Sudan in the 20th century, whose board and pieces are strikingly similar. Mehen boards also turn up in Cyprus, where the game lasted longer than in Egypt itself.

This game is played on a small board with 58 holes and pins that end in the heads of dogs and jackals. The finest set, in the Metropolitan Museum, comes from the tomb of an official named Reniseneb at Thebes, found by Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon in 1910. It dates from the reign of Amenemhat IV, about 1814–1805 BC: a board shaped like an axe-head, with a palm tree carved in the middle and holes running around it.

“Hounds and jackals” is a modern nickname, and archaeologists often prefer the plain “game of 58 holes”. Boards of this kind have been found well beyond Egypt, from the Levant to Mesopotamia. Some holes are linked by lines, so the Met compares it to Snakes and Ladders: land on one end of a link and you jump to the other. That is a reasonable guess, not a recorded rule.

The game of twenty squares came from Mesopotamia. Its most famous boards, inlaid with shell and lapis lazuli, were found by Leonard Woolley in the Royal Cemetery at Ur and date from about 2600–2400 BC; one is in the British Museum. In Egypt the game appears in the 2nd millennium BC, often on the back of senet boxes, as on Tutankhamun’s.

Twenty squares is the one ancient game with rules on record — though from much later. A Babylonian clay tablet written in 177 BC by the scribe Itti-Marduk-balatu describes a version of it, and Irving Finkel of the British Museum reconstructed a playable game from it (2007). Whether Egyptians played by the same rules a thousand years earlier, nobody knows.

Before cubic dice became familiar, chance came from the ankle bones of sheep and goats — astragali, or knucklebones. A knucklebone has four sides it can land on, each with its own value. Egyptians used them, and four flat throwing sticks, light on one side and dark on the other, to move pieces on senet and other boards. Tutankhamun’s game boxes came with both: W. J. Tait catalogued the sticks and knucklebones in 1982.

Knucklebones were also a game in their own right — tossed and caught on the back of the hand, much as children still play jacks. The Met’s essay on board games of Egypt and the Near East gives a good overview of these boards and pieces.

The liveliest pictures of play come from Beni Hasan. In the Middle Kingdom tomb of the governor Baqet III, women juggle up to three balls, one with her arms crossed, and others play catch while riding piggyback on their partners. Balls themselves have survived too: museums hold balls of linen and reed, and the British Museum has one from Roman Egypt with stone chips inside to make it rattle.

Whether these were games with rules and winners or dances and acrobatics for a feast is hard to say from a painting. What the walls do show is that play was part of everyday life — and of the life the Egyptians hoped to enjoy after death.

• Known: what the boards looked like, how many squares and holes they had, what the pieces were, roughly when each game was played, and that senet carried a religious meaning in the New Kingdom.
• Partly known: the names of senet’s marked squares and the rules of twenty squares — but only as a Babylonian version from 177 BC.
• Guesswork: the actual rules of senet, mehen and hounds and jackals. Every set of rules you can buy today, ours included, is a modern reconstruction.

In Anubis City the games behind the doors are modern: Texas Hold’em, blackjack, roulette, bingo and slots. The ancient ones are present as details — senet boards scratched into the street, an ankh on the slot reels. Five thousand years apart, it is the same pleasure: people around a board, waiting for the throw.