Find ancient 'death games' boards of ancient Egyptians

Archaeologists have found evidence of an ancient "death game" of ancient Egyptians used to contact the dead about 3,500 years ago.

The game, called senet , was played at all levels in Egyptian society since it first appeared 5,000 years ago until it was no longer popular around 2,500 years later.

Recently even an expert believed that he had discovered a senet board since the game had a more spiritual nuance, more ancient than previously known.

Image depicting Queen Nefertiri playing senet in a work of art inside her tomb.

Earlier, researchers in ancient Egypt believed that the senet was played by two people, each with five pawns placed on a grid of 30 squares arranged in three rows of 10. Then, the player The dice will move their pawns, the goal is to have all five of their pawns reach the "end" point in the lower right corner of the board.

However, over time the Egyptian texts reportedly began describing the game as describing the movement of souls through the Egyptian kingdom of the dead.

A senet table located in the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum can show this evolution. The sign has a hieroglyphic symbol on a square for fetching water, believed by archaeologists to point to a lake or river the Egyptians felt the soul encountered during their journey through the underworld.

Jelmer Eerkens, an archaeologist at the University of California, Davis, said it was a rare finding because it seemed to record a late-stage change. The new discovery could capture the evolution of the usage of the death game board from birth.

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