CHESMAYNE
Senet
01 National game of ancient
02 The board itself is composed
of 30 cells (3 rows of 10 cells each):
01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10
20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11
21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30
03 The path of the mps follow a
reversed ‘S’ across and down the board.
04 Cells 26, 27, 28, 29 and 30
had symbols placed on
them.
05 Cell 26 had the sign ‘sfr’
(considered beneficial).
06 Cell 27 had the sign
associated with water (considered negative).
07 Cell 15 was called ‘the cell of rebirth’ and
might have been the starting cell.
08 The Hesy painting shows a game with 7 mps for
each contestant. Some boards gave 10
mps to each player.
09 The movement of the mps was decided
by throwing 4 two-sided sticks. Later,
knucklebones were used to determine the moves of the game. It seems that Senet began as a simple game
but later acquired a symbolic,
ritual function.
10 Lhote noticed that the first
pictures show two humans. Later, a human
player is shown alone with an invisible adversary.
11 The original rules of Senet
are not now known with no record of the rules on papyrus or tomb wall having
ever been discovered. A summary of the
rules of Senet (by Timothy Kendall) is given in a book by Lhote:
12 At the start of the game the
7 mps alternate along the 14 first cells.
13 The starting cell is counted
as cell 15.
14 Cell 15 featured an ‘ankh’
(symbol of life).
15 The mps move according to the
throw of four sticks.
16 When a mp reaches a cell
already occupied by an opposing mp, they exchange position.
17 The special cells (26 to 30) have the following
effect on play:
18 Cell 15 (House of Rebirth), is the starting cell
and the return cell for the mps reaching cell 27.
19 Cell 26 (House of Happiness),
a mandatory for all of the mps.
20 Cell 27 (House of Water), a
cell that can be reached by mps located on cell 28 to 30 which move back when
their throw does not allow them to exit the playing field. They must start again on cell 15.
21 Cell 28 (House of the Three Truths), a mp may only leave
when a 3 is thrown.
22 Cell 29 (House of the Re-Atoum),
a mp may only leave when a 2 is thrown.
23 The winner is the first
player to move all of their mps off the board.
24 R.C.
25 Each player has 10 mps. Four two-sided sticks (one side being
painted) are thrown to determine the movement.
26 One side visible = 1
point. Two sides visible = 2
points. Three sides visible = 3
points. Four sides visible = 4 points. With no sides visible = 5 points.
27 At the start of the game
there are no mps on the board.
28 Each player throws the sticks
(in turn) and places h/her mps on the board on the cells 26, 27, 28, 29 and 30,
according to the number of points thrown.
Only one mp may occupy each cell.
If a mp is already present the turn is lost.
29 A player may move one mp or
add a new mp to the board, if possible, with each throw of the sticks. The mps located on the marked cells are in
shelters.
30 Mps cannot
be stacked. When a mp arrives on a cell
that is occupied by an adversary’s mp, the opponents mp is removed and
restarted from the beginning. This
particular rule does not apply for the marked cells (shelters).
31 The first mp to reach cell 1 earns a bonus of
five points and it fixes the goal of the game, this players other mps have to
reach odd cells. The opponents mps have
to reach even cells. The game ends when
the mps of both players are alternately placed on the first and second rows.
32 When a mp reaches its last
cell it cannot be attacked.
33 The first player to place all
of h/her mps on h/her own cells wins the game and earns 10 points. S/he also receives one point for each move
h/er adversary makes while placing all of the remaining mps.
Senet link
Welcome to the game of Senet, where you test your knowledge of King
Tutankhamen and Egyptian history against the spirit of Tut. It’s your knowledge and skill against Tut’s
luck and cunning. Senet was a popular
board game played by the Egyptians.
Several senet boards were even found in King Tut’s tomb. It is possible that the game had some
connection to the afterlife, but researchers do not know for sure. Also, no one knows exactly the ancient rules
of the game. After viewing the exhibit
on King Tut, you can play our version of senet by answering the following
questions. Playing Senet is simple. After reviving the spirit of Tut, you are
presented with a game board, as shown below.
Each participant has five game pieces.
You, the player, are represented by a pyramid. The spirit of Tut is
represented by a reel. The objective
of the game is to move each of your pieces onto the board, then over the board
in the path indicated by the red line, below.
The first competitor to remove all five pieces wins the game. In this special, ‘learning edition’ of
Senet, you must answer a question about King Tut or Egyptian history in order
to move. Simply click on the piece you
wish to move - it will automatically advance the correct number of squares, in
the correct direction. If your move
lands on a square occupied by one of Tut’s pieces, you ‘bump’ Tut’s piece back
up to the entry area. Tut is not
allowed to bump you.
It is not necessary to roll an exact number to exit the board. If your piece is two squares from the end,
any roll of three or higher will count as a valid exit. The ancient game had several ‘special’
squares, indicated by hieroglyphs.
Although these squares have no interpretation in the ‘learning edition’
of Senet, they are important from a historical perspective.
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You need not be concerned with these squares in the current game. Since all moves are checked and executed for
you, it is impossible to make an incorrect move! So, learn the rules while you learn about
ancient
Senet has been designed with Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 and
above. Please download it from here if
you do not have it. Download the latest
Internet Explorer. Move quickly. The spirit of Tut is anxious to test your
skill.
Mehen – spiral game board…
The Egyptian Heaven and Hell,
The Eighth Division of the Duat - where the Sun God passes in the Eighth Hour
of his journey. It reads, “The Majesty
of this great god taketh up its place in the Circles of the hidden gods who are
on their sand and he addressed to them words in his boat whilst the Gods tow
him along through the City by means of the magical powers of the serpent Mehen”
- Wallace Budge. The divine snake whose
coils protected Ra as he journeyed on his boat through the waterways of the
kingdom of night. Mehen is usually seen
draped in protective coils about the deck-house in which Ra stands. The earliest mention of the god occurs in a
Coffin Text of the Middle Kingdom.
Detailed representation of the ‘coiled one’ can be found in vignettes of
funerary papyri and on the walls of tombs in the
Mehen means coiled one or as a
verb, to coil, in ancient Egyptian was played on a spiral game board - most often explicitly in the form of a snake with varying numbers of slots (playing squares), six
sets of differently colored marbles (the playing pieces, with six marbles to a
set), and six special playing pieces in the form of a dangerous, predatory
animal - most often lions (but sometimes dogs or even hippos). It is the only multi-player ancient Egyptian board game known - the others
were contests between two players (or teams),
while Mehen could accommodate as
many as six contestants. Strangely, it also seems to have ceased being
played in ancient
The Sun Cult envisioned the god
Mehen as a huge serpent
who wrapped the Sun God Re in its coils when
he set in the west and protected him on his journey, on the river of night,
from the evil forces of the underworld.
But at some point, perhaps even before the
Now this taking on of a
religious aspect would have been a natural thing and not in and of itself
dangerous - this also happened with the game of Senet, which in spite of this, or
maybe because of it, survived
until the very end of Egyptian civilization. But by the early Middle Kingdom the cuts
used on the snake’s back of the Mehen board to mark, to separate, the playing
squares would have been seen to kill the snake - which would have been a very
threatening and evil thing. Tim Kendall
writes: “Mehen’s role was essential, for if Re were not protected from these
enemies, he might not rise in the morning, which would result in the cessation
of all life. In Egyptian belief, ‘life’
applied not only to the living but also to the dead, who were believed to
travel with the sun and to rise, reborn, with him at dawn”.
From that time forth, the game
apparently ceased to be played (possibly
banned and forbidden) and the god Mehen
became associated with another, more well-known, Egyptian game - Senet - and
the game of Mehen became lost in the mists of time . . . or was it?
In the 1920s, anthropologists,
explorers, and adventurers found a curious, spiral based, game being played by
Baggara Arabs of the
Mehen was played formally in
ancient Egypt since before at least 2700 BC up until perhaps a little after
2000 BC., and probably elsewhere even later, in the form of crude boards pecked
in the stones of Cyprus and in fleeting, hastily scratched-out boards in the
sands of the deep, trackless deserts surrounding Egyptian and Nubia - and
possibly just preserved down through the long ages, as a faint echo of the
mighty Egyptian empire, by Arab nomads and Bedu.
This ancient
Egyptian game, forbidden, distant, but not ever entirely lost, is here again in
the present.
above: Mehen Snake Board
above: Queen Nefertari playing Senet