An Egyptian ivory game box for senet, with its small playing pieces beside it
Game Box for Playing Senet and Twenty Squares, ca. 1580–1458 BCE
Marked Ur

SubjectIn outline · lessons being written

Senet, Ur and the first board games

People in Egypt played senet from about 3100 BC, and the Royal Game of Ur spread across the Middle East and as far as India. Its rules were worked out from a clay tablet written in 177 BC.

Place
Ur · Abydos · Kochi, IndiaAfrica, The Middle East, Asia
Laid out as
A theme across timeOne idea followed through the eras it crosses.
Lessons
5 planned, none written yet

The lessons we plan

Titles may change as they are written

  1. ISenet and the afterlife
  2. IIThe Royal Game of Ur
  3. IIIReading the rules on a tablet
  4. IVBoards scratched in stone
  5. VGames played on in India

Still to come

The people and objects these lessons will cover

People

  • Irving Finkel
  • Itti-Marduk-balatu, a Babylonian scribe

Objects

  • Boards from the royal tombs of Ur
  • Tutankhamun’s senet boxes
  • The Ur rules tablet

Where it sits

All of human history, era by era

Early human ancestryOur species and the Old Stone AgeFarming and the New Stone AgeFirst cities and the Bronze AgeThe Iron Age and growing statesThe classical worldAfter the empiresMedieval networks and empiresOceans crossedRevolutions and the first factoriesIndustry, empire and world warThe world since 1945

3100 BC to AD 500. Each era is drawn the same width, so the earliest are squeezed: era II alone is over 300,000 years.

Nearby in time and place

This page is an outline. The summary above is a starting point; each lesson, when it is written, will give its sources, its pictures and where historians disagree. Spotted a mistake?