Core Programm - EGPT 1099 - Fall Semester 2017 Lecturer: Dr. A.

Ptigny

Aspects of Everyday life in Ancient Egypt

Board and Games (2): Adults playing
Focusing on two main board games
Mehen and Senet
 The Mehen-game
Earliest civilian known exemple: Predynastic Period

Earliest royal known exemple: 1st Dynasty, Pharaoh Hor Aha (31st cen. BCE)

Also the oldest known board game in the World

The shape of the Mehen-game board evokes a coiled serpent associated with the
netherworld, the god Mehen playing the primary function of envelopping the god Ra in his
many coils, thus protecting him from all evil.

The playing spaces do not always take the form of bounded squares as they oft en do in
senet , rather the playing spaces can be delineated by a number of alternating bosses and
recesses, with each boss or each recess apparently being one playing space.

The board could vary since some exemples show forty-nine spaces, some others show
hundred spaces. The number of spirals of the snake could vary between 2 and 7.

The Mehen-game is the earliest known example of a linear-track game in which players
attempt to move their pieces from one end of the boards track to the other, often using
tricks or shortcuts.
 Left - Painting from
the tomb of Hesyre
depicting the board
and the game box,
tokens and marbles,
3rd dynasty (27th cen.
BCE), tomb of Hesyre

Right - Mehen
board,
Predynastic
period, Petrie
Museum, UCL,
London

Left Mehen
board, Hor Aha,
1st Dynasty (31st
cen. BCE),
Metropolitan
Museum, New
York
Above The sun-god under his form of Atum-Ra is protected by serpent god Mehen
coiled around the naos of the god, Scene from the tomb of Seti I, Kings Valley, 19th
dynasty (13th cen. BCE)
 The Senet Game

Only fragmentary boards before the 5th Dynasty

Two players with five pieces per player, quite similar to the bakgammon in the rules

Board : 30 squares, three rows of ten, traversed in a boustrophedon-way (from left to

right and next row, from right to left) along an S-shaped pathway

Heritage in modern days Egypt: Ottoman-originated siqa, still played nowadays in

Upper Egypt

When encountered some squares can bring your token back to the beginning of the
platter, to the center of it or your token can be frozen during a whole round
 Above Drawing of a scene from the masataba of Nikauhor, 5th Dynasty, senet
playing alongside singers and musician, Metropolitan Museum, New York

Above - Animal playing Senet game, Above The deceased plays senet
Satirical papyrus, Turin, 19th Dynasty alongside his wife, scene from the tomb of
(13th cen. BCE) Piay, 18th dynasty (15th cen. BCE)
How to determine
patterns and rules

A. Old Kingdom

B. Middle Kingdom

C. New Kingdom

D. Late Period

E. Undated
Ostracon
Soldiers delight

Left Senet board on

terracotta platter, 26th
dynasty, 7th cen. BCE, Tell
Defenneh, British
Museum
 The casting device
Above Three ivory casting sticks, New
Kingdom (16th-11th cen. BCE), Egyptian
Department, Louvre, Paris
Casting-sticks replaced, in
Ancient Egypt, the current
dices used to determine the
moves in nowadays board-
games.
Earliest known exemple:
Predynastic period
In the 3rd dynasty (27th cen.
BCE) tomb of Hesyre, casting
sticks are depicted, by the
number of 4, alongside Senet-
game tokens.
The same device was probably
used to play Mehen and 58
holes-game
In such an early period, neither
dices nor knucklebones existed
 More than mere games:
The role of boards in the intellectual
training
 Pure entertainment

Inscriptions

The Big One among the Five,

Petosiris has fun playing with his
friends after his lunch, until the
moment comes to get some
rfreshments in the Beer Hall.

Above Petosiris playing Senet-game with a

friend before having a beer, Scene from the
tomb of Petosiris, Pronaos, North Wall of the
tumb,Seconde Persian Domination, Darius III (c.
340 BCE), Tunah el-Gebel
 Strategical thinking
through Mehen-game

In 728 BCE, the Kushite king Piankhy

invaded Egypt. The power was split among
concurrent kinglets to such an extend that
the Kushite power rising from the South
easily managed to seize Egypt.

The Piankhy campaign is precisely narrated

in his Triumphal Stele, found in Gebel
Barkal and now stored in the Egyptian
Museum of Cairo.

Left Front side of Piankhys Triumphal

Stele, Egyptian Museum, Cairo
Egyptologist Cannuyer determined that the text
elaborates a code of honnor to be respected during a war.

One of those strategical statements copes with an

unnamed game which can be identified with the Mehen-
game :

As in the game, do not attack at night when you have

visibility and announce the fight from afar.

Egyptologist Grimal recognised the rules of Mehen-game

Left Mehen board with two lion-shaped tokens, Abydos,

Old Kingdom (24th cen. BCE?), British Museum
 Explanation of the analogy

In the Mehen-game, you were allowed to hide temporarily a trump (token, marble)

This hidding phase of the game was intended to designate which player could be the
starter

From the Old Kingdom tomb of Aba, we learn that the Mehen-game really began when the
player who hid a trump showed it to the other player.

That is obvously the actual meaning of the sentence:

As in the game, do not attack at night when you have visibility and announce the fight
from afar.

It means you had to respect certain rules avoiding concealment.

In other words, you had to play fair.

 Board-game as (funny?) maths training

Plato, who may have visited Egypt, stated in his Laws

(7.819b):

The Egyptians had proved their intelligence by teaching

arithmetics to their children through games.
 Mehen-game as a (funny?) maths training
The first twist is that you dont move immediately after throwing the dice, instead you accumulate the
results until you throw a 2

Then move your pieces according to the results. This gives the game some tactical deepth

When you move onto a field that is occupied by another players marble, this one is bumped to the
bumping marbles old position

Another twist is that 1 counts as a special throw, a so-called Shinyat (magical spell) that you keep track of,
not use in play

Shinyat must be used for entering the board at the beginning of the game, so to get to the center of the
game needed an exact throw

When you have got one marble back to the start, you must throw two throws of 1 before you can enter
your lion-token.

When a lion reaches the center, you must throw or have stored four throws of 1 to release him

The lion devours any of your opponents marble he meets on the way back

The game ends when the lion has left the board, and the number of marbles each player could safely
bring home determines the ranking
 The Senet game: an equivalent of riddles for literary
characters
In the Demotic story Setne I (4, 10-14), Setne plays a role similar to Oedipus in the
greek mythology, answering the Sphinx riddle. He has to compete against
Nofrekaptah in a Senet-game

Setne then said: Ahure! Give me this papyrus that I saw between you and
Nofrekaptah, otherwise Ill take it by force! Nofrekaptah thus stood up from the
funerary bed and said: Is that you Setne, in front of whom this woman pronounced
deadly words without you taking full advantage of it? This very papyrus, will you be
able to seize it thanks to the power of a good scribe or by winning a game against me?
Lets play!

Setne answered : I am ready! The board was thus lad in front of them and they
played one against the other. Nofrekaptah won against Setne, he then read a spell on
him and hit his head with the game-box in front of him. He made him sink in the
ground up to the legs. He made the same at the second play. He won Setne and made
him sink up to the genitals. He made the same for the third play and made him sink up
to the ears. That done, Setne was very embarassed because of Nofrekaptah. Setne
called his brother Inaros and told him: Hurry up and stand back from the surface so
that I can tell what happened to me to Pharaoh and that you can bring me my father
Ptahs amulet in addition of my magic books!
Transl. Agut & Chauveau 2012
Board games and its place in the
religious beliefs
 Senet-game as a religious metaphor
Initially, Senet was an abstract game, purely secular.

The struggles in the game of Senet began to be associated with the dangers of the journey
in the afterlife and began then to become a set of key narratives of Egyptian religion,
telling the story of the struggles of the sun god Ra traversing the Underworld by boat
each night and fighting off an array of deities, demons and obstacle.

Certain moves and squares became associated with specific actions and events referring to
those stories.

By the 18th dynasty (16th-13th cen. BCE), the board had been transformed a simulation of
the Netherworld with squares depicting major divinities and events in the afterlife.

Old and Middle Kingdom New Kingdom

5 squares 5 squares
Good, Bad, Three, Two, One Three gods, three bas, two
gods and the single-figure of
the sun god Ra
Numbers indicating the exact Numbers mystically
throw of sticks interpreted
 Senet-game as a connection with the Afterlife
Before the New Kingdom,
tomb scenes depicted the
tomb owner playing the
game with another person,
or watching two people play,
as a pure form of
entertainement.

From the New Kingdom on,

the game becoming
associated with the idea of
resurrection and the struggle
to reach the afterlife, tomb
scenes began to show the
deceased playing an invisible
opponent as a means to
entering the Afterlife

Above Queen Nefertari playing Senet against nobody,

from her tomb QV66
Intercultural exchanges through
games
 The Twenty squares-game: when Egypt borrowed
Mesopotamian Games
The Game of twenty squares (possibly called aseb by the Egyptians) is sometimes
found on the reverse side of the Senet board and was played with the same pieces. An
ancient game dating from Old Kingdom times, it survived, unlike the Mehen, into to
the Late Period. The oldest extant boards were made during the 17th dynasty (16th
cen. BCE).

Unlike the descriptions accompanying depictions of Senet there is no information as to

the rules of Twenty Squares.
Most boards had a few special squares, marked with rosettes or inscriptions such as
ankh nefer (good life), hesty merty (you're praised and loved), Amen or heb sed (The
Thirty Year festival, as can be read in an inscription was found on a board found in
Tutankhamen's tomb) and the like.

Right Royal Game of Ur, with gaming pieces and

tetrahedrons, board, British Museum, 26th cen. BCE
 Map of the geographical
distribution of
occurrences of Twenty-
squares game board
known in the Near East
and Egypt

Above - The Twenty-Squares Game route of playing

 Left - Senet-game boards,
Episkopi, Cyprus, 9th cen. BCE

Above Senet rough

Right Senet rough board
board found in Arad,
found in Hazor, Israel
Israel