Senet Board--gold leaf

This board is a favorite of ours, stained ebony with gold-leaf bird silhouettes and gold-leaf playing squares.  We still need to paint the heiroglyphs, but we'll be playing around with more like this.

Senet Game Board

The first types of game boards we've decided to work on are the ancient Egyptian games of Senet and Tjau.  Senet boards have been found dating back more than 5,000 years. While no ancient documentation exists explaining the rules of Senet or Tjau, various scholars have worked out variations of how the game may have been played.

Below is a picture of one of the early boards we've put together.  Senet boards are composed of three rows of ten squares.  A similar ancient game, variously called 20 Squares, or sometimes, but apparently incorrectly, also called 'Tjau', was often found with Senet boards.  The game board we put together has a 30-Square Senet board on one side of the lid, and a 20-square Tjau board on the other (Tjau board is depicted below, the 20 playing squares being the dark squares).

Instead of decorating the box with images of Egyptian mythology, we decided to use other images of animals and depictions of scenery that were common to ancient Egypt.  For paints, we're mixing the colored pigments with egg yolk (egg tempera), an ancient technique that was familiar to the egyptians.