Today on Monday Mysteries we travel to Mesopotamia by way of Berlin to track down the secret of a Mesopotamian game board.
Now when people talk about games that were popular back in Mesopotamian times circa B.C. 2600, typically they are talking about the Royal Game of Ur. Here’s what a game board for that game looks like – this example is one we that we saw at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin:
Board for the Royal Game of Ur, Pergamon Museum
They have similar examples at the British Museum London, where you can also buy expensive reproductions. We passed on buying the fancy one, but Chris did buy an inexpensive electronic one that we played once on the iPad. Nothing like playing a 4000 year old game on a 21st century device, eh? Anyway, the point is that we are familiar with concept and the look of the game board used for the Royal Game of Ur.
However, last week at the Pergamon we also spied several examples of another type of Mesopotamian game board. The label on the display case for it was very informative: it read something along the lines of, “Game Board, Mesopotamia.” Hmm. Here are photos of two examples we saw there; note that the second one is made of glass:
Mesopotamian game board from the Pergamon Museum
Mesopotamian game board made of glass from the Pergamon Museum
OK, so it’s a game board. But it’s not the same as the game board for the Royal Game of Ur, so the key question is which game was it used for? It looked to me (and to Chris) like a cribbage board, but we were pretty certain cribbage boards don’t date back to Mesopotamia.
Since we came up zero on finding information at the Pergamon, Chris did some investigating on the internet. Based on his findings, he thinks it’s probably a board for playing the ancient Egyptian game called “Dogs and Jackals”. Apparently this game was quite popular in Egypt and then spread to surrounding areas, including Mesopotamia. You can read about that game here.
Even better, go to this website and you can actually watch Nefertiti and the Egyptian Pharaoh Sethi playing a game of it. At least, you can if you suspend disbelief on a couple of levels. First, it’s a clip from the 1956 movie The Ten Commandments, so of course those are actors playing the game, not really the ancient Egyptians. 😉 Second, you’ll need to take the following sentence at face value:
As is sometimes the case, Hollywood did research and appropriately chose this as a game that could have been played by royalty in ancient Egypt.
–quote from the website with the movie clip for the Dogs and Jackals game
Well, I suppose it could be true that sometimes Hollywood gets the historical facts correct in their movies, so maybe this really is a good representation of how to play the Dogs and Jackals game.
At any rate, I agree with Chris that the unidentified game boards we saw at the Pergamon look just like the ones on these websites for the Dogs and Jackals. Thanks, Chris, for tracking down the answer to today’s Monday Mystery!
How do we know those game boards were not made for the Hollywood movie and are really from Egypt ions ago. Also was this type of glass available way back when.
From a site called glass facts I just looked up, it cites:
It is believed that the first intentionally created glass was used as a glaze on ceramics earlier than 3000 B.C., but it wasn’t until around 1500 B.C. that glass vessels began to appear in Egypt. The popularity of glass manufacturing rose and fell for hundreds of years until it became a strongly established commodity around 500 B.C.
Thanks, Mom. I don’t think these were made for the movie. 😉 But I do think you could be right about the time period for the glass one. I didn’t actually right down the content of the labels, which I thought would be clear in the photos (I have cropped them out of these versions of the photos). Unfortunately, the text is too small the be read with the photos I took – I took all the images with the cell phone camera. But the glass board probably was from a later period in that empire than the other one, so maybe from after BC 1500. Good sleuthing!