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Ancient Egyptian Games: Hounds & Jackals

pic12752 md Ancient Egyptian Games: Hounds & Jackals

Hounds and Jackals is a bit like Senet but instead of moving pieces on a board like Senet, the players plug hound-headed and jackal-headed pegs into holes in the board.

Thought to be the origin of the modern game of Snakes & Ladders, Hounds and Jackals was also known as the ‘Game of 58 Holes’ for the number of holes that are used to move around the board.

Each player has five pegs and they compete with each other to be the first to move their pieces around the palm tree and onto the ‘Shen’ hieroglyph for ‘encircling’, or ‘eternity’. The number of places a player can move is determined with a set of two dice formed from knuckle bones.

HoundsJackals Ancient Egyptian Games: Hounds & Jackals
Hounds & Jackals game, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Hounds Ancient Egyptian Games: Hounds & Jackals
Click on the image to play 'Hounds & Jackals' at the Cleveland Museum of Art

More Information:
You can find information on the rules at the Game Cabinet website

Download a PDF with a lot more information on the game.

The University of Waterloo’s Eliot Avendon Museum & Archive of Games: Hounds and Jackals

Photo of the Hounds & Jackals game board at the Metropolitan Museum of Art by Mary Harrsch. Some rights reserved

Visit Mary Harrsch’s website.

Purchase Ancient Egyptian Games online: Games and Puzzles

Still want more ancient Egyptian games?
Visit the Ancient Egyptian Games blog for more fun and games.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, April 24th, 2008 at 11:21 am and is filed under Entertainment, Interactive. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

One Response to “Ancient Egyptian Games: Hounds & Jackals”

  1. If someone is still interested in this game – just try this:
    http://www.xmission.com/~psneeley/Shareware/houndsja.htm

    This is a portable shareware. The restriction is that this game only has 16 colors ;) No time-limit at all or something else!

    It even works on windows7 – I’ve tested!

    Just answer to this post if it doesn’t work and I’ll get a notification about that.

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