sn.t

The Egyptian game senet — from Egyptian sn.t, meaning 'passing' or 'the game of passing,' from the verb sn, to pass or to go through — is attested from before 3100 BCE, making it the oldest known board game for which physical boards and pieces survive. The basic game equipment consists of a rectangular board divided into thirty squares arranged in three rows of ten, with cone-shaped and spool-shaped playing pieces (typically seven of each type for two players) moved according to the throw of knucklebones or casting sticks. The earliest senet boards are small flat slabs with squares scratched into the surface; later examples include elaborately carved ivory and ebony boards with gilded legs, game boxes with drawers for storing pieces, and the spectacular box-with-drawer set found in Tutankhamun's tomb. The game was played at every level of Egyptian society from pharaoh to village scribe.

For most of its early history, senet was probably a pure game of chance and strategy whose cosmological significance was secondary or nonexistent. But by the New Kingdom (1550–1070 BCE), the thirty squares of the senet board had been assimilated into Egyptian funerary theology with remarkable thoroughness. The board's three rows of ten squares were identified with aspects of the afterlife journey: certain squares were named for gods and cosmic locations (the square of Ra, the square of Thoth, the house of Osiris), and the movement of pieces across the board was understood as mirroring the soul's movement through the Duat, the Egyptian underworld. Vignettes in the Book of the Dead show the deceased playing senet against an invisible opponent — against death itself, or against chance — and winning, a image that appears in dozens of New Kingdom papyri.

The identification of senet with the afterlife journey was not merely metaphorical. Religious texts explicitly state that the ability to play senet in the afterlife was a skill worth cultivating in life, and that the game could be played with the gods themselves in the Field of Reeds (the Egyptian paradise). Chapter 17 of the Book of the Dead includes a vignette of the deceased playing senet, annotated with the theological statement that the deceased 'passes through as one who is justified' — passing through the game as through the underworld trials. The word sn.t thus carried a double meaning that Egyptian players would have recognized: passing through the game's squares, and passing through death into the next life. The pun was not accidental.

Senet survived the end of pharaonic civilization as a game. It continued to be played in Egypt into the early centuries of the common era, outlasting the temples and the hieroglyphic writing system that had given it theological meaning. The game's precise rules were not written down in a form that modern scholars have been able to fully reconstruct — there are competing interpretations of the movement rules and the significance of specific squares — making senet a game whose form survives but whose rules require reconstruction. In the 1970s and 1980s Egyptologists including Timothy Kendall worked to reconstruct playable rule sets from board iconography, game piece archaeology, and textual clues. Modern reproductions of senet boards are sold worldwide, and the game has entered popular consciousness as an ancient puzzle to be decoded as well as played.