game-piece
- Museum number
- EA24661
- Description
-
Blue glazed composition jackal-headed game-piece.
- Dimensions
-
Height: 4.80 centimetres
-
Weight: 14 grammes
-
Width: 3.50 centimetres
-
Depth: 3.50 millimetres
- Curator's comments
- Forms at set with 1893,0514.42-57.
This extraordinary set of moulded green glazed composition game pieces (seven jackals and ten Bes-headed figures) almost certainly accompanied an elaborate board, now lost, for the funerary 'senet' game. The jackals, which personify the "souls (or bas) of the west" were viewed as protectors of the dead and of the sun god whose ship they were thought to tow. In the same way they would have been thought appropriate allies of a player. As game pieces they would probably have been thought efficacious in defending the "deceased" player in his simulated journey with the sun god through the realms of night on the 'senet' board.
Bibliography:
W. Nash, "Ancient Egyptian Draughts-Boards and Draughts-Men", in ‘Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archaeology’ 24 (London, 1902), p. 346;
'Les amour d'une princesse égyptienne' (Saint-Gérard, 1997), p.127 [116].
- Location
- Not on display
- Exhibition history
-
Exhibited:
1982 Feb-May, Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, Egypt's Golden Age
1982 Jul-Sep, Houston, Houston Museum of Natural Science, Egypt's Golden Age
1982/3 Oct-Jan, Baltimore, Walters Art Gallery, Egypt's Golden Age
1991/2 Nov-Feb, Marseille, Musée de la Vieille Charite, Jouer dans l'Antiquité
1991 BM, G88, 'Board Games around the World'
1994 Jun-Jul, Norwich, School of World Art Studies & Museology, Go! A history of Boardgames
1995 Jul-Sep, Hastings Museum & Art Gallery, Bad Bishops & Red Rooks
1998/9 Oct-Jun, South Carolina, The Charleston Museum, Queens Commoners of the New Kingdom
2012 Nov. Paris, Cluny, Les Jeux de la Babylone a l'Occident Medieval.
- Condition
- good
- Acquisition date
- 1893
- Department
- Egypt and Sudan
- BM/Big number
- EA24661
- Registration number
- 1893,0514.42
