Conical Gaming Piece from Neferkhawet's Tomb

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

A family tomb, established by a man named Neferkhawet, was excavated by the Egyptian Expedition of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1935. One of the last people buried in the tomb was a woman whose name was not recorded on any of the objects in the tomb. Inside her wooden coffin was a set of ten gaming pieces, five conical like this one and five spool-shaped. These would have been used to play the games senet and 20-squares. No trace of an accompanying game box was recorded by the excavators. The coffin itself was badly damaged by rot and insects, so remains of a wooden game box may have been indistinguishable from the coffin. The five conical game pieces are quite uniform in shape, size, and color. Four of the spool-shaped pieces are also quite similar, but the fifth is different enough that it may have been a replacement piece.

Egyptian Art

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

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.

Metropolitan Museum of Art