What We Learn From One of the World's Oldest Board Games

The New Yorker featured this article on the ancient game of Fifty-eight Holes in March, 2019.  

What We Learn from One of the World’s Oldest Board Games

Samanth Subramanian
March 26, 2019

This ivory Fifty-eight Holes board was dug up by Howard Carter, in 1910, out of a pit tomb in Thebes. “We have before us,” Carter wrote, “a simple, but exciting, game of chance.”

Photograph Courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art

A few years ago, almost by accident, Walter Crist happened upon one of the oldest board games in the world. Crist, who was then working toward a doctorate on ancient Cypriot board games, at Arizona State University, was searching the Internet for images of a game called Fifty-eight Holes. In the second millennium B.C., Fifty-eight Holes was the most popular game of its kind across Egypt, the eastern Mediterranean, and elsewhere in the Middle East, and roughly eighty boards of the game, in various degrees of incompleteness, rest in museum collections around the world. Images of these boards are well known to scholars, but the photo that Crist eventually found, on the Web site of a magazine called Azerbaijan International, was unfamiliar.  Taken at an archeological site near Baku, it showed a rock carving that bore a strong resemblance to the game’s board: two parallel rows of indentations and an outer, horseshoe-shaped run of more holes. It looked like a four-year-old’s sketch of a tree.

The site, Crist learned, had been destroyed to make way for a housing development, but he eventually got in touch with an archeologist in Azerbaijan’s Gobustan National Park, who told him that the park held a similar carving. “I think he knew that it was a game, or that people thought it was,” Crist said. “There were other people arguing that it could be an astronomical chart, or a calendar—but nobody that had studied games in any kind of depth.” So Crist decided to go to Gobustan and find out for himself.

Crist, who completed his Ph.D. in 2016, works at the New York Public Library, as a librarian. “I’m on the academic job market, which is terrible and difficult,” he said. When he went to Azerbaijan last spring, he paid for the trip himself, appending it to a visit to Athens to attend the Twenty-first Board Game Studies Colloquium. At Gobustan, near the Caspian coast, he found a vast moonscape of rocks, caves, and mud volcanoes. Archeologists visit the park for its six thousand petroglyphs: carvings of hunting parties, bulls, boats, and dancing stick men. The glyphs date back at least four thousand years; some might be as old as forty thousand years, reaching back into the Upper Paleolithic age. Not much is known about the artists. Most likely, they were nomadic hunters who lived in rock shelters, charted the heavens, and buried their dead.

Members of the park’s staff took Crist to a horizontal slice of stone set by an upright wall of rock. Nearby, two other slabs leaned against each other at an angle, forming a shelter in which a grown man could sit. The presumptive game board, which measured thirty-seven by twenty-one centimetres, lay near one edge of the flat surface, its holes picked out of the floor. There was no method to determine when these marks were made, but the Gobustan archeologist told Crist that the glyphs of goats and herders on the adjacent rock face were carved around four thousand years ago. At first, the board, which was exposed to the elements, appeared to contradict one of Crist’s theories: that when ancient gamers began a game outdoors, they did so in the shade. But then he peered at the rock face and saw four bigger, deeper holes punched into it. They were used, he guessed, to hold one end of a canopy that stretched, over the platform of stone, to the rock shelter on the other side. Screened in this way from the rain and the sun, the nomads of Gobustan could have sat down to play.

A series of depressions taking the form of the game of Fifty-eight Holes on a horizontal rock surface in Azerbaijan’s Gobustan National Park.

Photograph by Walter Crist / Gobustan National Preserve

Dr. Irving Finkel on The Great Flood

I wasn't even going to read this story (yawn...another flood story...) until Irving Finkel's name caught my eye.  He's the real deal.  I first became familiar with his name many years ago in connection with my study of ancient board games.



^{The Ark Tablet in the hands of its decipherer, Dr Irving Finkel (Benjamin McMahon)}                                        

From The Telegraph Online

Irving Finkel: reader of the lost Ark

Tom Chivers meets the man who deciphered a 4,000-year-old blueprint – for the original Noah’s Ark

By Tom Chivers

7:00AM GMT 19 Jan 2014

 

Four thousand years ago, a millennium and a half before the first Jewish scholars put pen to parchment on the Book of Genesis, a scribe in what is now Iraq carved the story of a great flood on to a clay tablet, in the strange and beautiful script known as cuneiform. The story told of how a god came and warned a great man to build a boat, and to take his family on that boat, and two animals of every kind, because the world was to be cleansed with a flood.

 

About 30 years ago, one Douglas Simmonds wandered in to the British Museum, and handed the tablet to a man called Irving Finkel, who immediately recognised it as one of the most important archaeological finds of recent years. Dr Finkel, an Assyriologist or student of the civilisations of ancient Mesopotamia, begged Simmonds to leave it with him, but he would do no such thing. It took him until 2009 to convince Simmonds to let him have it; when he did, what he discovered was a piece of the flood story – the Assyrian story of the Ark, centuries before Noah.