Q&A for History of Mankind (33)

Who designed the world's first board game? Plus, questions on the revolutions of 1848, Antony and Cleopatra and the first democracy-destroying democratic ruler

To check all previous newsletters in the History of Mankind, which is pretty long, you can click here.

This is the thirty-third Q&A for History of Mankind. Paying subscribers received an email asking for questions; and those are right below the paywall.

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Today we have a question very dear to my heart. You see, as a teenager I was an avid (board) gamer. I used to play wargames (mostly those designed by a company called NAC, on ancient history or WW2-themes) with friends or my father, who was a military history nut, and later played too much Dungeons & Dragons with friends who were even more obsessive than me, as well as turn-based, email board game about the Pacific Theatre campaign of the Solomon Islands. This game was so detailed that you had to specify the exact area where your spotting planes would be flying and the times of takeoff and landing on their bases or carriers.

That’s why I find the issue of who designed the first board game pretty fascinating. I discussed the way Egyptians popularized the game Senet, for many winner of that particular award, in The World's First (Cuddly) State, a post that is very much focused on the development of a shared Egyptian and culture and nationhood in a country that was and remains pretty unique:

The whole Nile Valley with the Delta has been fairly described as ‘an extremely elongated oasis’ with an area, including the Delta, of a mere 37,540 square kilometers – a third of modern Greece's. Close to 80% of arable land in modern Egypt is in the Delta. That goes to show the extreme importance of that particular region, which has perhaps been more extensively modified by humans than any other on the globe.

The narrow valley is long, 1,360 kilometers by river from the granite barrier of the first cataract at Aswan to the Mediterranean, but very easy to traverse downriver; even below the first cataract, the Nile remains tame and easily navigable southwards until one reaches the Sudd marshes of South Sudan, which have marked for millennia the divide with Sub-Saharan Africa. The marshes, a formidable barrier to travelers, have been generally shrinking over the last 7,000 years or so, so they were even more impassable for long periods in history. 

This led to a remarkably homogenous culture with relatively little cultural differences: it's almost certain that Egyptians from a very early age spoke the same language, with regional differences only, and had a fairly standardized culture based on the same religion, and the same modes of dress, industry, trade and taxation; Egyptians even played the same game: Senet, perhaps the earliest board game in history, with tokens and pieces that players had to shift to one side of the board, while thwarting your opponent's attempts to do the same by using a complex combination of strategies.

Senet came in expensive sets of board, tokens and pieces for the wealthy, while the poor made do with grids scratched on stone surfaces or the floor. In a reflection of all-encompassing Egyptian religiosity and mysticism, the game came in later eras to be associated with divination and visions of the underworld, which contributed to its becoming Egypt's most popular board game, ahead of rivals like Mehen, which allowed for up to six people to play at the same time. In Mesopotamia, a suspiciously similar game, probably a local copy of senet, was played from around the mid-3rd millennium BC.

This, in turn, inspired multiple similar board games across the Levant, Cyprus and Crete. Patolli, a board game popular among the Aztecs that probably had much earlier roots in Mesoamerica, is similar to Senet in that it revolves around moving a set of pieces to one side of the board, from the other. China's Go/Weiqi, possibly the first game depicting battle, was invented around 1000 BC.

So, the concept, in a nutshell, is that Egyptians came up with the first board game because they were the first nation of any size with shared cultural reference points, and everyone could understand the rules and ideas behind the game; and, just as importantly, there was a sizeable public that could play the game.

Now, the idea that Senet was the first board game has been challenged by the discovery of what may be a very old version of Hounds and Jackals, the main contender for the position as oldest game ever:

The most recent breakthrough in the story of Hounds and Jackals came in 2018 when archaeologist Walter Crist and his team unearthed a game board carved into rock in Gobustan, Azerbaijan, near the Caspian Sea. The board closely resembled the Egyptian Fifty-Eight Holes, consisting of two parallel rows of 29 holes. Players used small sticks with carved dog and jackal heads, moving their pieces from the starting point to the end—much like a Bronze Age version of cribbage.

The Azerbaijani game board has been dated to the Middle Bronze Age, which could place its creation before the Egyptian examples. Pottery shards found at the site suggest that local shepherds likely played the game during the winter months, sheltering from the elements in rock caves. This discovery, combined with the existence of similar game boards in other parts of the region, points to a wider spread of the game across Asia before it appeared in Egypt.

More than 60 examples of Hounds and Jackals have been uncovered across Egypt, Mesopotamia, Israel, Syria, Iran, and Azerbaijan. The oldest known Egyptian version of the game dates to the reign of Mentuhotep II (2064–1952 BCE), making the Azerbaijani find even more significant. The existence of game boards in both Asia and the Middle East suggests that the game spread rapidly between regions, facilitated by trade and cultural exchanges.

We’re going to have to wait to know more about the Azerbaijani discovery. The truth is, if that set dates from earlier than the current examples, there’s a very good chance that Hounds and Jackals was developed much, much earlier than that, because Azerbaijan at the time was, even more than it is now, and out-of-the-way place of very little relevance at the time. Before a game arrived there, the game had to be very, very popular in the main states of the time.

Now for the questions from paying subscribers, on the revolutions of 1848, Antony and Cleopatra and the first democracy-destroying democratic ruler: