Thanks for the link to the Senet site, Ramsekh. Very timely for me.
A friend from the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago recently gave me a copy of the rules of Senet as written by the Egyptologist Peter A. Piccione. This guy actually wrote his doctoral thesis on Senet (can you imagine!) and was able to find parallels between the game and certain spells from the Book of the Dead.
Piccione's rules were picked up by the game manufacturer Cadaco, Inc. which produced Senet for retail. I think the company has sense gone out of business.
Anyway, in our exhbit at the Field Museum we have a Senet gameboard and pieces out on the floor so people can play it, and the rules the curators posted for it seemed pretty artificial. I've been trying to get a better understanding of the rules of the game, in so far as we can actually understand them 3000-plus years later. Piccione's rules are incredibly complex and there's more to Senet than I ever dreamed!
I would like to play the game more when I'm at the museum, but sometimes it's kind of hard to do because people keep stealing the pieces.
How awesome!! ^__^
How does it FEEL to lose the one who understood you the MOST? He died to protect you, and YOU were supposed to protect HIM. What a shame...
