Senet magic for enduring

Footnotes :

92 As quoted in Marshall Clagett: "Ancient Egyptian Science", Volume 1, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, 1989, page 461.

93 Kendall: "Passing through the Nether- world ...", cited above, see page 10 middle, pages 20 top and 22 bottom.

94 Sir E. A. Wallis Budge: "An Egyptian Hieroglyphic Diction- ary", first published 1920, edition consulted Dover Publications, New York, 1978, Volume 1, page 297a and b.

95 Sir E. A. Wallis Budge: "An Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictionary", cited above, Volume 1, page 299a middle.

96 Sir E. A. Wallis Budge: "An Egyptian Hieroglyphic Diction- ary", cited above, Volume 1, page 298a top.

97 Raymond O. Faulkner: "A concise Dictionary of Middle Egyptian", first pub- lished 1962, edition consulted Griffith Institute, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 1981, see page 108 middle and "Addenda and Corrigenda", page 3, entry for page 108.

Picture credits :

Senetboard redrawn from a picture in Edgar B. Pusch: "Das Senet-Brettspiel im Alten Ägypten", Volume 1, Deutscher Kunstverlag, München, 1979, Plate 76.

The mastaba ground plans are redrawn from pictures in I. E. S. Edwards: "The Pyramids of Egypt", Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England, 1975, pages 40 and 44.

Animals playing Senet is redrawn from a picture in Edward Falkener: "Games Ancient and Oriental and how to play them", 1892, edition consulted Dover, New York, 1961, page 14. A high-resolution color photograph of the original, is now available online at the

British Museum

The illustrations of the festival hall are redrawn from Sigfried Giedion: "The Beginnings of Architecture", Princeton University Press, 1981, pages 369 and 370.

The Religious Board Game on the Phaistos Disk.

4.3. Senet magic for enduring

Some of the early rich Egyptians expressed this importance of Senet to their corpses or souls on a grand scale: at least two of the large First Dynasty mastaba tombs, built in Nagada around 3000 BCE, appear to imitate that Senet grid with their ground plans.

	A typical Senet gameboard, now in the Cairo Museum.
This example was found in Saqqara and dates from about the time of Sethos I (1306 to 1290 BCE). Redrawn from Push, Plate 76.


Ground plans of two First Dynasty mastabas at Nagada, both about 3000 BCE. Redrawn from Edwards.

Other tomb owners, throughout the next three millennia, consistently had their artists paint elaborate versions of that gameboard on the doors to the innermost crypt and/or carve it on their coffins. Many of them also took lavishly produced actual Senet games with them into the afterlife.

During the Old Kingdom, the departed may simply have counted on this recreation to help them spend the idle eons of their afterlife. After all, eternity might get a bit boring at times, especially the long parts.

For New Kingdom mummies, however, Senet became the ticket to Paradise. Their owners took this simulation of their lives and afterlives on the gameboard so seriously that they used it for their most important magic. Many tomb paintings and vignettes in mortuary papyri from that time depict the deceased playing Senet against an unseen opponent for the ultimate stake of his admission to eternity.

According to the captions, none of the tomb owners ever lost that crucial contest. Tomb painters who did not comply with this odds-defying rigging of the results in a game of chance did probably not stay in business long. However, the patrons of painters who wanted to get paid always won the game. This win gave them the desired abilities to join the sun god in his travels and to continue playing Senet, as Spell 335 in the Book of the Dead describes their idyllic afterlife:

"... going forth by day, assuming whatever form one will, playing Senet, sitting in a pavilion, going forth as a living soul ..."⁹²

Those tomb owners did not acquire their taste for Senet only after death, to judge from the eagerness with which many of the living played it wherever and whenever they could. Even kings played Senet with their daughters and queens in carefully designed scenes and will continue to do so for millions of years, according to the typical captions.

More informally, a sixteenth century BCE schoolboy dropped his recopying from the moralizing and exhorting "Maxims of the Sage Ptah-hotep" in mid-sentence to devote the rest of his tablet to a hastily ruled Senet board⁹³. Similar grids incised on the roof slabs of various temples suggest that the stone masons played Senet during their lunch hour, if any, or while waiting for the next blocks to arrive.

Even animals played Senet: the "Satirical Papyrus" from the 20th Dynasty (1196 to 1070 BCE) shows a wide-eyed and eagerly open-mouthed lion competing against a gazelle. (The gazelle looks clearly less confident, but more research is needed to find out why.)

A lion and a gazelle play Senet three thousand years ago in the "Satirical Papyrus".

And when pharaoh Thutmosis III (1479 to 1425 BCE) erected a hall in the great temple of Amun at Karnak for his Heb-Sed festival of rejuvenation, to assure the renewal of his life force and the continued duration of his reign, he used the Senet grid for the ground plan of the raised central portion in that hall.

Ground plan and cross-section of the festival hall built by Thutmosis III (1479 to 1425 BCE) in the great temple of Amun at Karnak. The elevated main part has ten pairs of columns which divide that central space into three aisles, just like the track on the Senet board. The section through this hall shows the importance of the three middle aisles.
	Side view of Thutmosis III's Heb- Sed festival hall in Karnak. Picture from Corel Photo CD 161000 on Egypt

There was a simple reason for this vogue of Senet among the mummy set, and among all classes of the living up to their aging kings who sought to prolong their vigor and reign. The picture of a Senet gameboard, with its pieces lined up on top, was the hieroglyph for the Egyptian word "men" which means "to endure".

The ancient Egyptian hieroglyph "men" = "to endure" (Gardiner sign Y 5)

Even some of the words in which the Senet-board hieroglyph seems to appear only for its phonetic value had meanings related to the astronomy from which the game had been derived, or to the duration it embodied.

One of the ancient Egyptian names for the sky was "men" or "that which endures", written with the "enduring" Senet- board hieroglyph plus the sky-sign determinative.

The same Senet-board meant "men" = "calculations" when followed by a papyrus roll sign to denote words related to writing⁹⁴. Calculations, of course, were specially enduring because the result of a correct calculation remains the same for all eternity.

The "men" sign was also used to designate daily offerings or ceremonies, probably in the hope to perpetuate these. And two Senet boards plus the determinative for "male" formed the name of the god Menu-Amen, the everlasting "bull of his mother"⁹⁵ who sired himself and so traveled through time both forward and back.

Paired with the sign for things of stone, the "men" gameboard hieroglyph designated stone structures built to endure such as stelae, monuments, obelisks, colossal statues and temples⁹⁶; it also referred to stone as enduring material, particularly quartz which is one of the hardest and most durable types of stone⁹⁷.

This consistent use of the "men" hieroglyph illustrates the depth of its link with duration in the ancient Egyptian minds.

The most cherished goal of the ancient Egyptians was to endure, and the incorporation of that potent word into their tombs and temples by means of its gameboard hieroglyph helped them to achieve this goal by symbolic magic.

Hieroglyphs were "the gods’ words" and had supernatural powers. They did not merely convey the word sound or picture of the object or idea represented, but the Egyptians believed that each hieroglyph contained the essence of what it depicted and was identical with it, or at least equally effective in the realm of magic to which these powerful signs belonged.

This belief was so strong that many tomb painters carefully mutilated the pictures of potentially threatening animals among their hieroglyphs so that these would not be able to harm the defenseless occupant.

The presence of the hieroglyph for "enduring" in the tomb design or decoration guaranteed therefore a long afterlife for the dead. That association, in turn, assured the special religious status of the game.