The archaeology of board games in digital archives at Oxford

Board games in North Africa have a long and vibrant history. This StoryMap explores some evidence for board games in photos held in the University of Oxford’s Manar al-Athar Digital Archive (Classics) and the Historic Environment Image Resource—HEIR (Archaeology), as part of a wider research project I am conducting into board games in ancient and medieval North Africa.

Archaeologists can study board games using many different kinds of evidence, including gaming pieces, dice, images (sculpture, painting and mosaics) as well as gaming boards which were scratched or carved into stone.

Archaeologists study board games from many different perspectives: sometimes we reconstruct board games using this material evidence combined with historical texts and also draw on the testimony of modern people who still play similar games. We can also look at where and when people played board games – and who played them – as a way to explore social history of past societies.

Now let’s look at some board games from Roman and medieval North Africa

Many games were played in similar ways in different parts of the Roman world. For example, marbles runs can be seen on games in both the City of Rome itself, and in Leptis Magna, Libya. In both cases, these gaming boards are located in public places. 

We don’t fully understand the rules of this game, but it was clearly popular, and is possibly mentioned by the late antique author St Augustine (Confessions, 1, 19, 30) when he talks about playing ‘piluli’ with other children during his boyhood.

People probably played games while waiting for important meetings or other business, and playing games in public – where people could see you, commentate, bet, offer advice, or even help you cheat – seems to have been an important part of ancient gaming culture.

Boards for playing a game known as XII Scripta or Alea—an ancestor of the modern game backgammon—comprise three rows of 12 markings, which can be squares, circles, letters or lines.

We don’t always know what games were played on markings on floors or pavements, or even if they were used for board games at all. For example, in several places in Leptis Magna, there are markings in the form of a circle with various different designs on the interior.

But others argue that this doesn’t lead to a very good game because the player who makes the first move basically always wins.

Alternatively, they might not be for playing games at all. Some people think they had a religious significance, or were used rituals and ceremonies, to mark out the paths of processions or as part of divination.

The truth is, at the moment, we just don’t know which is the best interpretation, and more work is needed!

Moving into the period after the end of Roman rule, we start to know both less and more about board games. This is because the available texts have received less attention from historians but at the same time, games played in the post-Roman period are often closer to the ones people still play today.  It is sometimes difficult to tell exactly when carved or scratched gaming boards were made because some of the designs were often in use for a very long time.

In such cases we can often only say that the gaming board was made after the floor was laid. Archaeologists call this a terminus post quem (Latin for "limit after which”).

The ancient city of Sabratha in Libya is best known for its Roman-period remains.

The game was first recorded in Egypt in the 19  ^th   century but it is probably older. It can be played on boards in a 5×5, 7×7 or 9×9 grid. At the start of the game, the board is empty, and players take turns placing two pieces in any empty cell, apart from the central cell. Then, players move their pieces trying to jump over their opponent's pieces to remove them.

Alternatively, it could be used for another game, called Zamma, which is also still played in North Africa. The game is similar to Alquerque and draughts and is played on 5x5 or 9x9 square grids.

Similar designs are known elsewhere in North Africa, particularly in Libya.

There is still a lot to find out of about board games in Roman and post-Roman North Africa, but as this StoryMap shows that these are both a way to think about the experience of everyday life and play in the past, and there are many questions that remain unanswered. I will be exploring these questions in relation to a larger dataset of published and unpublished gaming boards in my future work.