The Ancient Egyptians are known for many things – mummies, pyramids, cats, and gory burial practices – but the weight of all these discoveries means that the mundane tends to get buried, usually literally, underneath.
For instance, the most famous pharaoh in popular culture is Tutankhamun, largely because his tomb is unique.
Ordinary People
KV62, as it’s otherwise known, is the only undisturbed resting place of a king we’ve ever found. Tut was fairly unimportant in life, at least when compared to the likes of Cleopatra, Ramses II, and Thutmose III.
Like all our ancestors, the Ancient Egyptians lived a life just like we do, so the best source of archaeological data isn’t always the royal tomb. It’s in the dull and forgotten places like garbage heaps.
Source: Pexels
For instance, in the Stone Age, structures like shell middens, where piles of discarded shells suggest a place where somebody once lived, can tell us much more about ordinary people than the grave of a queen.
The good news is that the Egyptians liked to include a snapshot of earthly life in their tombs so we don’t always have to go crawling through rubbish to learn a little about those who lived outside the palace walls.
Mehen
Egyptians loved board games. In fact, the connection between entertainment and this North African civilization is still strong today in movies like The Mummy (1932, 1999), as well as the sci-fi epic Stargate, in which antiquity frequently clashes with the 20th century.
The Book of Dead slot game also flirts with the adventurer trope, adding a swashbuckling hero to the sand of Ancient Egypt. This idea likely links back to Tutankhamun, who was discovered by arguably the most famous archaeologist in history, Howard Carter.
The presence of dice at Egyptian sites seems to indicate that board games are a human universal. The major difference between then and now is that the Egyptians sometimes used knuckle bones as pieces.
Thus, pursuits like Mehen, Hounds and Jackels, Aseb, and Senet aren’t too dissimilar to chess or ludo in appearance. In the former case, Mehen was played on a board resembling a coiled snake, with lion-themed counters and several small balls.
Hounds and Jackals
This brings us to one of the issues with the archaeology of ancient games, namely, that their rules are often lost to history.
Senet is arguably the most famous game of the Ancient Egyptians. This chess-like experience involved moving pawns across thirty squares and already had a 2,000-year history by the time of the first millennium.
Aseb was usually carved onto the same box as Senet, albeit with twenty squares instead of thirty. This game utilized throwing sticks, which had both a flat side and a round side. These were used to get a random number between one and four.
Finally, Hounds and Jackals offers a striking example of Egyptian craftsmanship. Discovered once again by Carter, Hounds and Jackals uses ten carved pegs (five hounds and five jackals) in a race to the finish.
For whatever reason, this game was sometimes exquisitely carved, with pegs made out of luxury materials such as ivory.
There may yet be other games still out there, of course, buried beneath meters of drifting sand and entertaining the populace in the next life.