Trench One 5: From landscape to Netscape
Trench One 6: Written in stone
Trench One 7: Save our heritage
Trench One 8: Game on
Trench One 9: Time Team on the web
Trench One 10: The great Barbie hoax
Trench One 11: Studying archaeology on the web
Trench One 12: Magical history tour: schools resources on the web

Game on

From Trench One 8

Computers, as every PC superstore salesperson is well aware, were developed with the sole intention of enabling people to play ever more elaborate and graphically sophisticated games. So why not use the world wide web to discover a little about the sorts of games that were played long before the Sony GameStation had been dreamt of? Why not, indeed, try your hand at some of these games online?

The British Museum website (www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk) includes COMPASS (www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk/compass/index.html), a database which includes illustrations and information on some 1,500 objects selected from the huge range of the museum’s collections. You can make your own search, look at the museum’s suggested objects of the month, or take a virtual tour.

These special tours include the Toys and Games Family Tour. This comprises six main sections: dolls and models; kites; board games; games equipment (dice, counters, incense sticks and knucklebones); puppets; and card games. There are illustrations of various exhibits and details of where to find them in the museum, plus background information and references, including what is known about how the games might have been played.

Among the featured board games are:

1. The Royal Game of Ur, dating from about 2600–2400 BC. It gets its name from two board games found in the ancient city of Ur, in modern-day southern Iraq, by Sir Leonard Wooley, who carried out excavations there in the 1920s. The board featured on the British Museum website is lavishly decorated with shells, lapis lazuli and limestone.
2. The Lewis chessmen, a set of walrus ivory chess pieces found buried in a sand dune on the Isle of Lewis, in the Outer Hebrides, Scotland. They date from the second half of the 12th century AD.
3. The Pachisi game board, from Sri Lanka. Pachisi was the ‘national game’ of India. It was simplified in the 19th century when it was imported into Britain, where it was renamed Ludo.
4. Senet, a board game from ancient Egypt, the rules for which have been reconstructed by experts making educated guesses about how the game would have been played.

You can actually play some of these games on the web. The rules and an online version of Senet, for example, can be found at the British Museum-run website ancientegypt.co.uk. This is an interactive learning site aimed at children but worth visiting by adults too for its lively and entertaining approach to categories such as Egyptian life, geography, gods and goddesses, time, trades, writing, pyramids, temples and the pharaoh.

The site includes a 'challenge' in each section. Under 'Temples', for instance, the visitor is challenged to perform the role of a priest in an important temple in ancient Egypt. This involves using ancient Egyptian systems of measurement and counting to record the required offerings of food from farmers who work the temple lands and then distributing the appropriate portions of these to the priests at the end of each day. Other challenges include, in the section on ‘Writing’, playing the part of a head scribe whose job is to check the work of the other scribes for errors. You are asked to check over a papyrus just received from the youngest scribe in the workshop.

The online version of Senet can be accessed direct at www.ancientegypt.co.uk/life/activity/main.html. Using sticks rather than dice, it is a variation on the familiar board game race, sometimes described as an ‘Egyptian backgammon’. All the games and challenges on this site need Shockwave software to run; a link is provided for free download. There is also a special ‘Staff Room’ section of the site for teachers wanting to use it with pupils. The site is intended for upper Key Stage 2 schoolchildren and their teachers but the British Museum hopes that other groups may find it useful too.

Another interactive educational website featuring ancient games can be found at students.itec.sfsu.edu/edt628/dstorz/games1.html. The activities here are designed to support the California State curriculum framework for sixth-grade social studies. They are intended as ‘enrichment activities’ to the study of ancient civilisations.

Among the ancient games featured are Senet, the Royal Game of Ur, Dogs and Jackals, Mancala and Go, a board game that originated in China more than 4,000 years ago and is now played throughout the world, including in a variety of online tournaments. The website has a range of links to other sites, including ones where you can play the games online or download the software to enable you to play them on your home PC.

One such site at imagiware.com/mancala/ offers the chance to play Mancala, variations of which are popular throughout Africa in particular today. A mathematical game of counting and strategy, whose more sophisticated versions can rival chess in complexity, it dates back at least 3,500 years; stone Mancala boards have been found carved in the roofs of temples in Memphis, Thebes and Luxor.

The word ‘Mancala’ is Arabic for ‘to transfer’; the game involves the transfer of different pieces from one pit, or position, on the board to another. It is thought that it evolved from boards and counters used for accounting and stock taking, evidence for which has been found in ancient Sumeria as well as Egypt. African people today often play using hollows scooped into the earth as the board, with pebbles, shells or seeds used as pieces.

Steve Neeley’s personal website at ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/PSNeeley/ is one of those hidden treasures of the web, serving up freeware versions for Windows of a whole range of ancient board games: the Moorish game Quirkat; the Mayan game Bul; the ancient Egyptian Meen (the ‘Forbidden Game of the Snake’); the Chinese Shap Luk Kon Tseung Kwan (‘Sixteen Pursue the General’; the Viking Halatafl; the Axtec Patolli; plus the Royal Game of Ur, Senet, and Dogs and Jackals. Don’t expect state-of-the-art graphics here, but these are perfectly functional versions for anyone wanting to try out these ancient games.

Another personal website at www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/Realm/8522/games.htm offers ‘An Alternative Games Page: links to nifty extinct or foreign board games’. Its author describes it as ‘mostly my testing out writing in HTML, but I figured I might as well do something useful while I was at it’ – which doesn’t detract from the fact that it contains some useful and interesting links to other ancient games sites.

Finally, if you’re not all gamed out by now, there is a good collection of detailed information about Roman board games at www.personal.psu.edu/users/w/x/wxk116/roma/rbgames.html. The Romans played a wide variety of board games, many of which are featured here. These include: Knucklebones (Tali and Tropa), Dice (Tesserae), Roman Chess (Latrunculi), Roman Checkers (Calculi), the Game of Twelve Lines (Duodecim Scripta), the Game of Lucky Sixes (Felix Sex), Tic-Tac-Toe (Terni Lapilli) and Roman Backgammon (Tabula and others).

Little could the ancients have guessed that the games they enjoyed all those centuries ago would still be played via such a medium as the internet today.