Saturday 24 August 2013

The oldest board game: Senet



One of the oldest currently known game board to of have existed comes from Ancient Egypt and is called 'Senet'. This game was played between Egypt and Turkey, where variations of it have been found to exist, and played between all classes of people. "As many as fifty senet boards have been found amidst the finery and flotsam in ancient Egyptian tombs, from the glory of the table-sized board found in King Tut's tomb to simple boards found in the graves of more ordinary folk" - Although this game was played all over the place there are no known rules to how people played the game, but people have attempted to deduct their own rules from the pictographs left by the egyptians.





When each square is numbered the board would appear to be like this, so you would follow these numbers around the board snaking right, left to right.


1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11
21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30


The board above was found was one of 4 discovered within King Tutankhamun's tomb, 

It apparently evolved farther, still, as over time it became so much a part of the warp and woof of Egyptian life that it entered into the realm of religious practice: it seems to have been thought that a game played with unknown forces shortly after death would determine whether the dead would get to enter a peaceful eternity or not, as depicted in many murals within tombs showing the deceased playing the game against an unseen opponent. 

However Senet was played all the way up till 400 A.D until Christianity marked it as pagan, and from there on it died out. 
http://www.gamecabinet.com/history/Senet.html
http://listverse.com/2013/01/20/10-most-important-board-games-in-history/
http://www.ccgs.com/games/senet.htm

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