Known as ‘Senet’ in ancient times, the game was played by all in Egyptian society regardless of social standing.
In some circles, it is described as the “board game of death”, intended to be played between two people.
Each player would have had five pawns that they could place on a grid of 30 squares set out in ten rows.
A dice was then thrown into the mix, with the aim of a player moving all five pawns to the lower right-hand corner of the board.
While not all games of Senet are believed to have been involved in speaking to the dead, Ancient Egyptian texts tell an eerie story of how players often used the moves to reflect their belief in the afterlife.
Walter Crist, an archaeologist at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, has written about the game in research published in The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology.
He and others think Senet wasn’t created as it was in its final form but evolved from another board game that grew into something more spiritual over time.
Mr Crest points to a Senet board in the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum which could have been used to connect with the dead.
A hieroglyphic symbol for water that adorns the board is, he says, a clear sign that it was used for spiritual reasons.
Egyptologists believe the symbol represents the body of water through which Ancient Egyptians believed their soul would enter the Underworld, also known as Duat.
“It may be one of the first times that this aspect of the journey through the afterlife is visually rendered on the board,” he wrote in the 2020 paper.
The researchers involved in the paper view the hieroglyph as signifying the evolution of Senet from a benign game into something more serious.
Jelmer Eerkens, an archaeologist at the University of California, Davis, believes the Rosicrucian board is a rare find since it seems to chronicle a late-stage change in progress.
She told Science Magazine: “This is unlike what we expect for other kinds of technologies.”
