Game Box for Playing Senet and Twenty Squares

Game Box for Playing Senet and Twenty Squares

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The upper and lower surfaces of this box are each configured for a different board game. The side visible in this photograph has twenty squares for a game that was introduced into Egypt from the Ancient Near East. The other side has thirty squares for the Egyptian game known as Senet. These were both games in which two players raced each other for position, using knucklebones or throw sticks as dice to determine each play. For this game box, eight of the original gaming pieces and two bones are preserved. The pieces would have been stored in a drawer that could be closed with an ivory bolt. Only the ivory sections of the box, the ivory bolt, and the copper alloy bands used to hold the bolt in place were preserved when the box was discovered. It has been restored using modern wood. Two other game boxes may be seen in galleries 117 and 118. A facsimile of a scene in the tomb of Nefertari in the Valley of the Queens depicts the queen playing senet in the afterlife.

Egyptian Art

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Game Box for Playing Senet and Twenty SquaresGame Box for Playing Senet and Twenty SquaresGame Box for Playing Senet and Twenty SquaresGame Box for Playing Senet and Twenty SquaresGame Box for Playing Senet and Twenty Squares

The Met collection of ancient Egyptian art consists of approximately 30,000 objects of artistic, historical, and cultural importance, dating from about 300,000 BCE to the 4th century CE. A signifcant percentage of the collection is derived from the Museum's three decades of archaeological work in Egypt, initiated in 1906 in response to increasing interest in the culture of ancient Egypt.