Senet, or senat (Ancient Egyptian: 𓊃𓈖𓏏𓏠, romanized: znt, lit. 'passing'; cf. Coptic ⲥⲓⲛⲉ /sinə/, 'passing, afternoon') is a board game from ancient Egypt that consists of ten or more pawns on a 30-square playing board. The earliest representation of senet is dated to c. 2620 BCE from the Mastaba of Hesy-Re, while similar boards and hieroglyphic signs are found even earlier, including in the Levant in the Early Bronze Age II period. Even though the game has a 2,000-year history in Egypt, there appears to be very little variation in terms of key components.
The Egyptian word “snt” means to “to pass” or “to go by” and this echoes the overall aim of the game, which is to get all of your five playing pieces from one end of the board to other.
Senet was rediscovered and reintroduced to the world by Egyptologists during archaeological excavations in Egypt in the 1930s. As no complete record of the game's rules survived, the Swiss archaeologist Gustave Jéquier analyzed recovered senet boards and artistic depictions of senet to devise a conjectural set of rules for the game, which precipitated the initial revival of senet in the modern era.
Fragmentary boards that could be senet have been found in First Dynasty burials in Egypt, c. 3100 BCE. The first unequivocal painting of this ancient game is from the Third Dynasty tomb of the high official Hesy (c. 2686-2613 BCE). People are depicted playing senet in a painting in the tomb of the Fifth Dynasty vizier Rashepses as well as from other tombs of the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties (c.
Over the course of a few hundred years, however, images of Senet began appearing in tombs, showing the dead playing against surviving friends and family. As the game became a tool for glimpsing one’s fate, its last five spaces acquired hieroglyphics symbolizing “special playing circumstances.
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“Beloved by such luminaries as the boy pharaoh Tutankhamun and Queen Nefertari, wife of Ramesses II,” Meilan Solly notes at Smithsonian, Senet was played on “ornate game boards, examples of which still survive today.” Four Senet boards were found in Tutankhamun’s tomb, but it was an activity that was not dependent upon one’s status in Ancient Egypt. “Those with fewer resources at their disposal made do with grids scratched on stone surfaces, tables or the floor.”
A game board that dates back to before the reign of the pharaoh Hatshepsut may represent the transformation of the game senet from fun pastime to religious symbol. Senet is ancient, dating back some 5,000 years to Egypt's first dynasty.
By the era of the New Kingdom of Egypt, which began in about 1550 B.C., these game boards had acquired a religious symbolism, appearing in the Egyptian Book of the Dead. The game seemed to represent the soul's journey through the afterlife. Over time, the markings on senet boards also became more elaborate.
The game's rules likely changed with its evolving purpose, and might have been played several different ways over the course 2500 years or so. These rules have been debated by academics for years, but one thing we do know is that.
And remember: information extracted from Old Kingdom tombs suggests that, although Senet was a game of strategy, it was aided by a bit of luck.
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Games don’t just pass the time, they enact battles of wits, proxy wars, training exercises…. And historically, games are correlated with, if not inseparable from, forms of divination and occult knowledge. We might point to the ancient practice of “astragalomancy,” for example: reading one’s fate in random throws of knucklebones, which were the original dice. Games played with bones or dice date back thousands of years.
As Brandeis University professor Jim Storer notes in an explanation of possible gameplay, “the exact rules are not known; scholars have studied old drawings to speculate on the rules” - hardly the most reliable guide.
If you’re interested, however, in playing Senet yourself, resurrecting, so to speak, the ancient tradition for fun or otherwise, you can easily make your own board. Storer’s presentation of what are known as Jequier’s Rules can be found here.
Another fragment of a grey/green steatite senet-game board features two joined lotus flowers and a carved handle at its unbroken end. The squares are divided by three lines with hieroglyphs or groups in separate squares: Hr nb, two ii’s three iii’s, boat on mw, ms together with partly incised circles on the back.
The senet board itself was usually constructed out of wood, ivory, faience, or some combination of these materials, and the layout of the board was a grid of 30 squares, called "houses", arranged in three rows of ten.
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A complete senet game set would have contained a distinct set of five pawns for each of the two players. At least by the New Kingdom, these pieces were in the form of hounds or dog-headed figurines.
Through most of the game's 2,000-year history, the senet boards themselves would indicate the direction of play, usually from the top left corner and indicated by the decorations on the spaces.
Although details of the original game rules are a subject of some conjecture, historians Timothy Kendall and R. C. Bell have made their own reconstructions of the game rules. These rules are based on snippets of texts that span over a thousand years, over which time gameplay is likely to have changed.
In Dr. Timothy Kendall's rules, the object of the game is for one player to advance all five of their pawns across the senet board and remove them before the second player does so. The game's length can be extended by increasing the number of pawns allocated to each player as desired, to a maximum of ten pawns per player.
Players take turns and begin by throwing a set of four flat wooden sticks with one side painted white and the other side painted black (or differentiated by some other means), equivalent to two-sided dice. The number of sticks that land on white determines how far a single pawn may advance that turn. One white stick and three black sticks signifies that the player may advance one of their pawns forward by 1 house, two white sticks means the pawn can advance by 2 houses, and so on.
The player selects a pawn and places it on the senet board starting at the first house (numbered 1 in the chart on the right), then moves the pawn forward according to the result of the stick roll. If doing this will result in a pawn coming to rest on a house already occupied by one of their pawns, they must move the newer pawn backward to the first empty house.
If the house is occupied by a pawn belonging to the opposing player, then the opponent's pawn can be captured: the player may optionally choose to place their own pawn in the occupied house, then move the opposing player's pawn backward to the first empty house available.
If you land on a space with an opponent’s piece, you take that spot and the opponent moves to where your piece came from. If you get three of your pieces in a row (other sources say four or five), that creates a blockade that your opponent cannot go past. Once a game piece has made it to the final three squares - you need the exact number from your roll to land on the imaginary 31st square to safely exit.
The Jéquier rules were eventually replaced by alternative sets of rules that were reconstructed in the latter half of the 20th century by the Canadian historian R. C. Bell and the American archaeologist Dr.
Senet gameplay was complicated. “Two players determined their moves by throwing casting sticks or bones,” notes the Met. The object was to get all of one’s pieces across square 30 - each move represented an obstacle to the afterlife, trials Egyptians believed the dead had to endure and pass or fail (the game’s name itself means “passing”).
But there are major gaps in the historical record of senet. For example, though there are tomb carvings and paintings that show game boards and that date from between the fourth and sixth dynasties (a span of more than 400 years, between 2613 B.C. and 2181 B.C.), no archaeologist has ever found a game board known to date from this period, Walter Crist, an anthropologist at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, wrote in a new paper published in The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology.
Now, a new examination of a never-before-studied senet board from the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum in San Jose, California, reveals a style of game board that may bridge the gap between Egypt's Middle Kingdom and subsequent New Kingdom.
The exact age of the board is unknown. It was purchased from a British antiquitarian's collection in 1947 and was probably taken from Egypt before the advent of modern archaeology, Crist wrote, when antiquities were removed from tombs and archaeological sites with no concern for their historical context. Though the board is wooden, it has never been radiocarbon dated, so Crist could gauge its age only by its style.
Over the long history of senet, the board orientation changed. For most of ancient Egypt's history, play started on the top left of the board and ended with the decorated squares on the bottom right. For a period during the Middle Kingdom, though, the decorated squares were placed at the top of the board and play switched to starting on the bottom right and ending on the top left.
The San Jose game board shows this Middle Kingdom orientation, but its decorated square markings are more complex than those on other Middle Kingdom game boards. In the Middle Kingdom, these markings were simple, usually consisting of X's or hash marks. By the New Kingdom, the markings were more complicated. For example, the second- and third-to-last squares on the board in the Middle Kingdom usually contained two or three lines, respectively. By the New Kingdom, those same squares might contain depictions of two or three gods, or two or three ba birds, representing the soul.
The San Jose board is marked with cursive hieroglyphic writing depicting a symbol for goodness, a symbol for water, three seated men and two seated men. The closest examples to such markings are found on a board from the tomb of Hatshepsut, the female pharaoh who reigned during the 18th dynasty between 1478 B.C. and 1458 B.C. Another board with similar markings has a murkier history but may come from the reign of Hatshepsut's successor, Thutmose III.
The Middle Kingdom orientation and New Kingdom decorations suggest that the board at the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum was a transitional step between simple senet games and the more decorative and religiously relevant games of later years, Crist wrote.
The latest known game with the Middle Kingdom orientation is a sketch made of ink on a schoolchild's writing tablet dating to Egypt's 17th dynasty, about 70 years before Hatshepsut reigned and boards with markings like those on the Rosicrucian game board became the norm. "[T]his game is a likely candidate to fill that stylistic gap," Crist wrote. Radiocarbon dating, he added, could help nail down the age of the board and confirm whether it is, in fact, a gamer's missing link.
Here are details about special squares on the board:
- Square 26: “The House of Beauty” - All pieces must stop on this square if a roll lands a piece there.
- Square 27: “The House of Waters” - You have two options if one of your pieces lands here.
- Option 1: Return the piece to square 15 or “The House of Rebirth”. If a piece should already be here then you must return the piece to the first available square behind it.
- Option 2: Try and roll an exact value of four. Good luck!
The Jéquier rules were eventually replaced by alternative sets of rules that were reconstructed in the latter half of the 20th century by the Canadian historian R. C. Bell and the American archaeologist Dr.
Here are the special rules for houses 28-30:
- House 28, "the House of Three Truths": Any pawn that lands on House 28 cannot be moved to any other house, and capturing is prohibited.
- House 29, "the House of Re-Atoum": Any pawn that lands on House 29 cannot be moved to any other house, and capturing is prohibited.
- House 30, "the House of Horus": Any pawn that lands on House 30 can still be captured.
R.C. Bell's rules, also first published in 1979, are mostly identical to Kendall's except on the following points. Both players always begin with ten pawns each. All pawns are placed on the board from the start of the game, beginning with a white pawn in House 1, then a black pawn in House 2, and so on until the first two rows of the board are filled.
In place of sticks, players take turns rolling a single four-sided die, and turn priority is determined at the start by whoever rolls a higher number. Capturing is mandatory when the opportunity presents itself, but the capturing player confiscates the opposing pawn and removes it from the board, which prevents the opponent from being able to score it.
As for the five decorated houses, they have simpler special rules: pawns on those houses cannot be captured, but their owners can take them off the board and score them on the first turn that they roll a specific number.
Here is a table summarizing the key differences between Kendall's and Bell's rules:
| Rule Aspect | Kendall's Rules | Bell's Rules |
|---|---|---|
| Number of Pawns | 5 pawns per player | 10 pawns per player |
| Starting Position | Pawns enter the board one by one | All pawns are placed on the board from the start |
| Dice/Sticks | Four two-sided sticks | One four-sided die |
| Capturing | Optional | Mandatory |
| Special Houses | Complex rules for houses 26-30 | Simpler rules: pawns cannot be captured, owners can score them |
How to Play Senet
A Senet board with playing pieces.
Royal Game of Ur - a Mesopotamian game played c.
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