- Museum number
- EA66669
- Description
-
Ivory game-board/box for senet. This rectangular games box is formed from a hollowed out block of wood, which has been fitted with a drawer (its back wall restored), with a wooden floor and decorative walls, to contain the gaming pieces. A bolt on the front of the drawer, held by two copper rings, can be passed through an identical ring at either side of the box's front in order to hold the drawer closed.
The back of the box has also been restored, but its long walls and its top surface have been faced with a decorative material, the latter divided by ridges into thirty hollow squares arranged in three columns of ten. The underside of the box is of plain wood marked in ink with a system of twenty squares; twelve in a single central column, flanked at each side from squares nine to twelve by four squares. Only the two corner squares, and a long plain section at one side of the central column (level with squares one to eight), are still faced with this decorative material.
- Production date
- 1400BC-1200BC (circa)
- Dimensions
-
Height: 4.50 centimetres
-
Width: 28 centimetres
- Curator's comments
-
A number of gaming boards and boxes with the same disposition of squares are known, but may have been used for senet, or "twenty" or "twenty squares".
Bibliography:
'Sotheby Sale Catalogue', 11 Nov 1924 1st 73;
'Sotheby Sale Catalogue', 16 Nov 1964 1st 13;
'The British Museum Report of the Trustees', (1966), pl.IX, p.35;
'Musees de Marseilles, Jouer dans l'antiquite', (1991), fig.122;
M.A. Corzo, 'Nefertari Luce d'Egitto' (Rome, 1994), p. 181 [44].
W. Decker & M. Herb, 'Bildatlas zum Sport im alten Ägypten : Corpus der bildlichen Quellen zu Leibesübungen, Spiel, Jagd, Tanz und verwandten Themen' Vol. I (Leiden, New York & Cologne, 1994);
M. Stead, 'Egyptian Life' (London, 1994), p.62, fig.83;
Getty Conservation, Nefertari, (1995), p.181.
I. Shaw and P. Nicholson, 'British Museum Dictionary of Ancient Egypt' (London, 1995), p.107;
C. Andrews, 'Egyptian Treasures from the British Museum' (London, 1998), p.236, cat.no.73;
'Egyptian Treasures' [exhibition catalogue] (Shanghai, 1999), p. 226-7 [67];
H. Brugsch, 'Brettspiel', p.287-8, Br.50, pl.74.
-
For examples of a range of gaming boards from New Kingdom Egypt, see Egypt’s Golden Age (exhibition catalogue, Boston, 1982): 263-72
- Location
- On display (G61/dc4/sA)
- Condition
- fair
- Acquisition date
- 1965
- Department
- Egypt and Sudan
- BM/Big number
- EA66669
- Registration number
- 1965,0213.1
