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The Religious Board Game | |||||||||||||||||||||
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Front cover :
Product details: 381 pages, 175 illustrations, 40,000 words Editorial review: This e-book offers the first verifiable and externally confirmed interpretation of the Phaistos Disk, a famous archaeological puzzle from Bronze Age Crete. The pretty pictures in the spiraling sequences of fields on that Disk were not writing signs, as most of its many "translators" assumed. It turns out that those pictures were instead the marks for the fields of a board game that closely resembled the ancient Egyptian games of Senet and Snake Game. Senet was a popular pastime in ancient Egypt from late pre-dynastic times on and is well documented because it became an important part of the funerary magic and then evolved into today's Backgammon. Its pieces simulated the passage of the player through life and, even more importantly, through death and the soul's perils on the way to the blessed afterlife. On the last field of the gameboard, they were reborn into the eternal afterlife, just as the Backgammon pieces are still "born" at the end of their pursuit. The Snake Game appeared even earlier in the record and left us the oldest surviving copies of any known board game. In the Old Kingdom Pyramid Texts, it enabled at least one king to ascend to heaven. It seems therefore to have represented the same journey as that on the Senet board, except that its path was not folded, as in Senet, but coiled into the spiral of a snake's rolled-up body. On one of its sculpted stone boards, the tail of that snake ended in the head of a goose, emblem of the earth god Geb and of the heavenly ruler Amun. That spiral is the same as in the "modern" children's Game of the Goose which is in some countries known as Snake Game and which also represents the players' path through life and death before their pieces are also "borne" into heaven. In either version, many of the gameboard fields are consistently marked with certain special events that have remained the same in most of the many editions published since the alleged invention of this game in modern Renaissance times. That spiral is also the same as the inner part of the path on each side of the Disk, and the signs on these paths include the same rosette with eight petals that marked the significant fields on many ancient gameboards, from ancient Sumer to Canaanite Megiddo and beyond. This rosette appears in other contexts typically with a meaning of "birth", "death", and "rebirth". Two of the four rosettes on the Disk, near and at the center of one side, are paired with a picture of a bald head that stands in marked contrast to the head with a prominent crest of hair which is the most frequent sign throughout the rest of the path. Hair was a symbol for life-force, as in the biblical story of Samson. Its absence meant death, so the bald head plus rosette shortly before the center matches the "death" square in Senet and in the Game of the Goose, and the same group of bald head and "rebirth" rosette in the center itself fits the rebirth of the bald head from Phaistos into the afterlife at the end of the journey. Moreover, when you combine the paths on both sides of the Disk, the bald heads wind up on fields 58 and 61 which is the end, excellent matches for the "death" in field 58 of the Goose and Snake Game, and for the "rebirth" in 63 at their modern end. The other rosette on that side is on field 31 where the Goose features a "well". Wells, from the baptismal font to the fountain of youth, were and are a common symbol for rebirth and renewal, so the match with the Goose game is again perfect, and it fits also the "renewal" field in the middle of the Senet track. These and many other parallels between Senet, the Goose and Snake Game, and the Disk supply now the key for the meanings of many signs and fields on the latter. Woven into the journey of the players towards their rebirth, this gameboard illustrated also the cycles of sun and moon which the gamepieces re-enacted. It provides us now a clear visual record of the ancient and often still surviving beliefs the maker of that Disk associated with these celestial lights, particularly with their perceived rebirth which sustained the players' hopes for their own resurrection.
The symbols from the gameboard fields on the Disk
now give us a uniquely detailed portrait of these
religious and astronomical beliefs and organize many of the mythological fragments known from ancient Egypt into a coherent story
preserved on the Disk from Crete. The clues from the Disk shed also new light on the early roots of some later Greek and Christian beliefs,
including still familiar ideas about death and resurrection, which we can
now see already illustrated on this Disk from more than 1,600 years before the birth of Christ.. Review by Candida Martinelli, Reviewer
Reviewer: Andy Weisberg from Richfield, MN USA, This is by far and away the best interpretation and application of the possible meaning of the symbols on the Cretan disk that has baffled layman and specialist alike for a century. If you don't know about the Phaistos Disk, check it out... it's a great mystery. Peter Aleff has done an incredible job of applying a variety of research methods and drawing from dozens of disciplines to make the case for the disk being a type of ancient board game, heavily influenced by the Egyptian game of Senet, and possibly one of the forerunners of all board games we know today. With plenty of direct examples, referenced texts, and illustrations, I believe he has the most convincing theory of all, and in many ways it makes the most sense. * Examine the Table of Contents at PhaistosOnecontent.htm , You can download the HTML ebook free from our downloads page and read the open chapters, then buy your personal password for the locked ones through Clickbank, as explained in the ebook. To obtain your copy of this ebook in PDF, simply click on the blue "make payment" link at the bottom of this page. Your click there will connect you to Clickbank, a secure online payment service which handles the authorization of your credit card and the billing. They will ask you to fill in your card details and contact information, then they will charge US$9.95 to your card. The name that will appear on your card statement is CLICKBANK / KEYNETICS, not our phaistosgame.com. We have no access to your credit card information, and Clickbank does not record the card numbers. Clickbank is certified by the Better Business Bureau. They process Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover, Euro card, and Novus cards. Immediately after your card is approved, Clickbank will send you automatically to a hidden webpage where you find the link to your download of the PDF e-book. Click on that download link and fill in where you want this e-book to be stored on your computer or removable disk, and then sit back while the 3.6 MB of text and pictures in this book are transferred. You will not be able to copy that download to another computer or to another disk, but if you have it on a separate disk you can read it on other computers from that disk. You are licensed to print one copy of the e-book for your personal use. After the download, click on the title, and enjoy your reading. You have our guarantee : if you tell us within ten days that this ebook was in your opinion not worth its price, then we will refund you the full amount you paid. |
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This site was last updated on February 27, 2012
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