History & Culture
Senet: The 5,000-Year-Old Board Game Found in Tutankhamun's Tomb
Thirty squares in three rows, played with casting sticks rather than dice, and buried with pharaohs — because by the New Kingdom, winning at senet had come to mean something about the afterlife.
Among the objects packed into Tutankhamun's tomb — the chariots, the shrines, the mask — were four game boards. Not symbols of games. Actual boards, with drawers for the pieces. The Egyptians thought a king would want something to play.
The Board
- Thirty squares, arranged in three rows of ten, played in a boustrophedon path that snakes back and forth
- Two players, each with a set of pieces — commonly five a side, though sets vary
- No dice. Movement was decided by throwing sticks flat on one side and rounded on the other, or by knucklebones, and counting how they landed
- The last few squares are usually marked with signs, and are clearly special — the endgame turned on them
Boards survive in every material and at every quality, from inlaid ebony and ivory to squares scratched into a temple roof by bored workmen. It was played by everyone.
How Old
Depictions and boards go back to the Predynastic and Early Dynastic periods, which puts the game somewhere around five thousand years old and makes it one of the earliest board games known anywhere. It stayed in play for roughly three thousand years afterwards — a run no modern game has come close to.
The Rules Are Lost
Nobody knows the rules. No Egyptian text sets them out, because everybody already knew them. What we have are reconstructions built from board layouts, from the marked squares, and from scenes showing play in progress — plausible, playable, and unverifiable.
How a Game Became a Religious Idea
Early on, senet appears to be simply a game — tomb scenes show couples playing, and the pleasure is the point. By the New Kingdom something has shifted. The board's path is being read as the journey of the dead through the underworld, the marked squares as hazards and gateways, and the opponent, in some depictions, as unseen.
Chapter seventeen of the Book of the Dead has the deceased playing senet, and tomb paintings show the dead at the board with no visible partner. Winning is no longer just winning. It is a demonstration that the player can navigate what comes next.
Where to See a Board
Complete sets are displayed in the Cairo collections, including Tutankhamun's. Look for the drawer in the base — the pieces stored inside, which is why any survived at all. In Luxor, keep an eye on flat stone surfaces at temple sites: informal boards scratched by workmen turn up in places that were never meant to have them, which is the most human thing at most of those sites.
Frequently Asked Questions
An ancient Egyptian board game played on thirty squares in three rows of ten, with movement determined by throwing sticks or knucklebones. It was played for roughly three thousand years.
Boards and depictions go back around five thousand years, to the Predynastic and Early Dynastic periods, making it one of the oldest known board games.
No. No Egyptian text records them. Modern reconstructions are based on board layouts, marked squares and scenes of play, and are plausible rather than proven.
By the New Kingdom the board's path had come to represent the journey through the underworld, and playing — and winning — was understood as a sign the deceased could navigate it.
A game so ordinary that workmen scratched it into stone at lunchtime, and so important that a king was buried with four sets, in case.
See Tutankhamun's Boards
The game sets from the tomb, alongside everything else that was packed for the journey.
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