Ancient Games of Asia
by Bruce Whitehill
published as “Ancient Amusements — Asia’s Antediluvian Distractions” in Asian Geographic magazine, June 2010
It’s hard to imagine that board games were played well over 8000 years ago. The ancient artisans who created game boards carved them in wood, etched or drew them on stone and slate, sewed them into fabric, and even wove them into baskets. Trade routes provided a pathway for games to reach other lands. Memories or personal possessions of travelers would serve to establish a game in a new culture. Some of these ancient games survived only in or near the area in which they were introduced, while others were carried around the world and are still played today. Identifying the earliest dates and countries of origin of ancient games is difficult because the games have evolved over the centuries, and sometimes the modern successor bears little resemblance to its early ancestor. In looking for origins, historians examine implements and play patterns. Some ancient games did not survive over time and distance, and the knowledge of how to play them has been lost.
Early games were usually dice games, mostly chance. Games that were not for wagering were likely to be “race games” played on a board. Sometimes the games, predominantly for two players and often strategic in nature, represented table simulations of conquest, requiring the capture or entrapment of the opponent’s pieces, or the positioning or alignment of one’s own. Such games allowed one player to best another without the loser suffering perilous consequences. As one avenue of providing mental stimulation, the playing of board games was an alternative to the more physical activities of competition normally relegated to sports and skill-and-action pastimes.
In some cultures, certain board or table games were only for the nobility or just for the rich or privileged. In other cultures, they were only for the men. Even today in parts of Africa and India, some games are culturally restricted to certain sects or to a particular sex.
Many of the traditional classic games still played around the world today in one form or other had their origins in Asia, especially in India, China and Egypt: games such as chess, draughts (called checkers in the United States, Europe and elsewhere), pachisi and dominoes. The exact origins of some others, such as mancala and merels or morelles, also known as mill, mühle and nine men’s morris, are more obscure.
Mancala is a name used to describe an entire grouping of games that includes wari, oware, owale and chuba, among others. It could possibly be one of the first board games, between 7,000 and 10,000 years old. The game consists of scooping stones or seeds out of a row of hollows, or pits, and putting, or “sewing”, them one at a time in each neighboring pit. Mancala game “boards” can be created easily by scraping out holes in the dirt, and using shells, pebbles or seeds as the game pieces. The variations in play are mostly determined by the number of rows of hollows, and the number of hollows in each row. There are mancala versions in India, Sri Lanka (where it’s called olinda kaliya), Indonesia, Malaysia (where it’s called congkak, pronounced “Chon-ka”) and the Philippines.
Egypt, considered by some ethnographers to be a part of Asia, has been a great source of early gameboards. Mancala, for example, was definitely played there before 1400BC, and boards have been found carved into stone roofs of temples at Luxor and Thebes. The game board of senat was unearthed in 1922 in the tomb of King Tutankhamen where it had been buried for over 3200 years. Egypt was also home to one of the oldest (though undated) boards of morelles, a game highly popular throughout the world for centuries. The simple structure of the game—three concentric squares attached at the middle and the corners—allowed it to be etched into steps or the stone base of statues where it could be played upon, using pebbles. Alquerque, said to be the forerunner of draughts, is also thought to have originated in Egypt, though its history is still not agreed upon. Though alquerque boards have been dated as far back as 1400BC; their 5 x 5 board, upon which pieces were played on the intersections, did not evolve into the modern 8 x 8 or 10 x 10-space (“Polish” or “Continental”) checkerboard until the 12th century.
India is also a land of ancient games. Chess, a game whose history is still unclear, was said to have originated there in 600 A.D., but some argue that it might have been played in China before 200 A.D.; it’s difficult for researchers to agree on origins, dates and locations because the early forms of chess morphed into very different games in different parts of the world. The origin of Pachisi, on the other hand, has been much easier to trace, though its date of origin is still a matter of speculation. Known as The Game of India, it is centuries old and one of the most widely played games in the world. The game went to the U.S. in 1867 where it was sold as Parcheesi, and later, in 1896, a simplified version was played in England under the name Ludo. Snakes and ladders, from India in or before the 16th century, was a morality game: players landing on the base of a ladder, symbolizing virtue, moved up the ladder to a space closer to the end, said to represent nirvana, whereas landing on the head of a snake, a space of evil and vice, sent the player down to the snake’s tail, closer to start. The ancient name of the game, moksha patamu, referred to the struggle between “salvation” (Moksha) and the path of evil leading to being reborn as a lower life form (Patamu). Other Indian titles include vaikuntapaali and paramapada sopanam (the ladder to salvation).
The origin of many ancient games can be traced also to the Far East. Go, an ancient game from China, became the national game of Japan, and has earned a great following throughout the world. Dominoes, another world favorite, has a more clouded beginning: it is probably Chinese, its origin being between the 1st and 12th century; dominoes are considered “flattened dice”; the early sets and most Far Eastern versions do not have any blank halves. Mah jongg, the tile game that became a craze in the U.S. in the early 1920s and Europe soon after, is thought to have ancient roots, but it has been the game of China for little more than a century—the game as we know it today dates back only to the late 1800s. Its ancestry lies in card-set games and dominoes.
Sumer, a region in southern Mesopotamia (now Iraq), is an area referred to as the Cradle of Civilization. Naturally, one would expect to find games from there, and perhaps the most famous is The Royal Game of Ur (see main text).
Many other ancient games were born in Asia, but most of these are art treasures and relics for historians rather than games that have lived on to be played by new generations.
