Games, Music and Entertainment in Ancient Egypt

Across ancient Egypt under the pharaohs, games and performances appear in tombs, temples, festivals and royal settings. Among Egypt’s surviving Objects and images are game boards and throwing pieces; tomb paintings preserve how owners wanted leisure remembered, and accounts identify festival performers.

Board games and movable pieces

Senet used a board of thirty spaces arranged in three rows of ten. Players moved small figures across the squares, using knucklebones, small bones cast like dice, or throw-sticks to determine movement. A game box in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (the Met), found at Thebes and dated around 1580–1458 BC, had a senet board on one side and a twenty-square game from the Near East, a region of southwest Asia, on the other. Both were races for position. Eight pieces and two bones survived in the box, which had a drawer closed by an ivory bolt. Only the ivory sections, bolt and copper-alloy bands survived; its wooden body is a modern restoration.

The precise rules of ancient senet are not preserved. The University of Michigan’s Kelsey Museum offers a modern playable reconstruction based on Timothy Kendall’s interpretation. In it, players roll dice, move counters along the board in an S-shaped path, and advance by the number thrown; landing on an opponent’s square swaps the counters and sends that opponent backward. If a counter lands on square 27, the House of Water, it returns to square 15, the House of Rebirth, on the next turn if that space is free. The first player to move all counters off the board wins. A New Kingdom tomb painting, dated about 1290–1224 BC, shows Queen Nefertari, principal wife of Ramesses II, playing in the Valley of the Queens. The Met describes senet as a popular game in life that took on symbolic meaning in a tomb, paralleling the journey into the afterlife and its obstacles.

Small movable objects could do more than sit on a board. A late Eighteenth-Dynasty ivory dog, dated about 1400–1350 BC, has a lever beneath its belly. Pressing it opens and closes the animal’s jaws, animating a carved hunting pose. The Met describes it as a hand-held luxury figure. Its lever mechanism shows how Egyptian makers could build movement into a carved object.

Wrestling, fishing and fowling

Tombs at Beni Hasan in Middle Egypt preserve painted scenes of games and physical activity. The Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities dates the site’s decorated upper-cemetery tombs to the Middle Kingdom’s Eleventh and Twelfth Dynasties, about 2055–1795 BC. A scene from tomb 15 shows two men wrestling.

A New Kingdom scene, dated about 1400–1350 BC, in the tomb of Menna at Thebes shows another kind of skilled activity. Menna spears fish in the marsh and throws sticks at birds; his wife, son and daughter appear beside him. A spear and throwing stick turn the marsh into a place of action, while the family’s presence makes the scene a durable image of household abundance. Egyptian tomb art could make such pleasures part of the owner’s afterlife, so the scene joins recognizable techniques with an ideal family memory.

Instruments and skilled performance

Egyptian music accompanied worship, processions, royal settings and banquet life. A harp’s strings were plucked, while a flute produced sound when a player blew through it. A New Kingdom wooden-and-reed flute, 42 centimetres long, was excavated at Deir el-Medina, the village near Thebes (modern Luxor) where royal-tomb workers lived. Its material and size give a physical example of an instrument used in the period. No pharaonic musical notation survives to preserve a melody.

Temple musicians also used the sistrum, a hand-held rattle associated with Hathor, an Egyptian goddess of music, love and joy. In a Late Period (664–332 BC) bronze-and-gold example in the Egyptian Museum Cairo, three rods cross the loop-shaped frame and carry rings. Shaking the handle sets the rings against the frame to make a rhythmic sound. The museum describes the sistrum’s use in temple music; a musician’s repeated movement supplied rhythm during ritual performance.

Titles and records show the people behind the sound. Some elite women held the title “chantress of Amun,” an Egyptian god worshipped at Thebes, identifying their connection to music in his cult. At Thebes, the Festival of the Valley carried Amun’s image from Karnak, his temple complex, to temples on the Nile’s west bank, where banquets for the dead accompanied the procession. Music therefore belonged both to trained performers and to public religious occasions.

A fragmentary late Middle Kingdom papyrus from Lahun in the Faiyum region records the days that dancers and singers served at festivals. The entries treat performance as scheduled work: entertainers gave time to an event, and an institution kept track of those service days. The papyrus and surviving instruments reveal different parts of a performance, from the people assigned to appear to the objects used to make sound.