Mehen (game)
| Mehen in hieroglyphics | |||||
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Mehen man rolled up |
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Mehen ( ancient Egyptian for "rolled up") is the name of a parlor game in ancient Egypt that has been used since around 3,000 BC. It is documented and was particularly popular among the upper class . The exact rules of the game have not been handed down and are therefore almost unknown. For reasons unknown, the game disappeared from everyday life of the Egyptians during the First Intermediate Period .
description
Mehen was played on a plump, plate-shaped board or stone shaped like a coiled snake . Rectangular indentations were engraved at regular intervals along the serpent's back. Apparently there was no fixed number for the recesses, nor for the game pieces. In some versions of the game, the tail end of the snake had the head of a duck or goose . Mehen games are also known in which both ends were snake-headed. There were also mehen game boards with stands and those that could be comfortably carried and carried with you.
Rules of the game
The exact rules of the game are not handed down in detail and can therefore only be reconstructed. Apparently each player had a fixed number of marbles and pawns with flat, rectangular bases. Lion figures seem to have been particularly popular . The game was played either clockwise or counter-clockwise. Possibly the number of squares that the respective player was allowed to move on was negotiated by throwing differently striped sticks or by guessing the marbles that happened to be hidden in the opponent's hand. The aim of the game was probably to be the first to bring your game pieces either from the tail end of the snake to the snake head in the center or the other way around.
Mythological meaning
The Pyramid Texts of 5th and 6th Dynasty indicate that the game with the journey of the sun god Re through the underworld on the "road of Mehen" associated was. According to Egyptian mythology , Mehen was a snake god who protected both Re and the late king on his dangerous journey through the underworld by literally wrapping the wearer around the body. This also explains the design of the game boards and tables.
Well-known representations and finds
Well-known artistic representations of Mehen game boards and game scenes come mainly from the Old Kingdom . The best known are the representations from the grave of the high official Hesire from the 3rd dynasty . Hesire had several colored representations of Mehen game boards attached to the grave walls of his mastaba . The remaining colors show black and white striped and yellow, black and green striped boards. Another well-known depiction is preserved in the grave of the high official Idu ( 6th dynasty ) from Saqqara : The relief shows a game scene from the Mehen game, but other board games such as Senet can also be seen. A faience board comes from the grave of Peribsen ( 2nd dynasty ) in Abydos . The oldest specimens of Mehen game boards come from predynastic graves in Deir el-Ballas near Thebes . A total of ten complete and four fragmentarily preserved specimens from different eras are known.
See also
- Senet . A board game in which the same pieces and pieces were used as in Mehen.
- Twenty fields game . Also a board game similar to Senet and introduced by the Hyksos .
- Mehen : an afterlife god to whom the game was dedicated.
- L'ib el Merafib : a game popular in North Africa and Sudan.
literature
- Peter A. Piccione: Mehen, Mysteries and Resurrection from the Coiled Serpent. In: Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt. Vol. 27, 1990, ISSN 0065-9991 , pp. 43-52.
- Benedikt Rothöhler: Egyptian board games except Senet. Würzburg 1997, pp. 10–23 (Würzburg, Julius Maximilians University, Faculty of Philosophy I, unpublished MA thesis), online as PDF; 282 kB ( memento from September 1, 2012 in the Internet Archive ).
- Joyce Tyldesley : Egyptian Games and Sports (= Shire Egyptology. Vol. 29). Shire, Princes Risborough 2008, ISBN 978-0-7478-0661-5 , pp. 15-16.
- Joyce A. Tyldesley: Myths and Legends of Ancient Egypt. Allen Lane, an Imprint of Penguin Books, London 2010, ISBN 978-0-14-196376-1 , pp. 92-93.
Individual evidence
- ↑ after: Adolf Erman , Hermann Grapow (ed.): Dictionary of the Egyptian language . Volume 2. Hinrichs, Leipzig 1928, p. 128, no. 14, the last character actually represents the game board, but is not present in the local hieroglyphic font.