Red and Black Senet Board

The picture doesn't really do this one justice.  We were playing around with color effects, and I quite like the way this one came out, though the dark staining is exaggerated.  This Senet board has a kind of burned-wood look.

Blue Senet Boxes

Two new Senet boxes.  No dark boarders for the game squares this time, and we used a brayer to apply the paint--really like the fading effect.  The markings and the sun disk on the scarab are copper leaf.

Senet Board with Geometric banding

The edging of this ebony-stained Senet box is inspired directly from a geometric pattern that was repeated often at least in 14th Century BC Egypt.  You see it on the neck piece of the bust of Nefertiti from El Amarna (circa 1340 B.C.), the feather decorations on King Tut's gold coffin and his duck head chair (both circa 1327 B.C.).

If you look at the top edge of the neck piece the bust of Nefertiti you'll see the pattern we used here.  The image was taken from the Wiki entry on Nefertiti, taken by Phillip Pikart, and is published here under the GNU Free Documentation License.

Casting Senet Game Pieces

Finally got around to casting the game pieces for the Senet and Tjau games.  We hand-carved and baked the original pieces out of modeling clay, then created a single mold for each piece. From these molds, we created five game pieces of each of style (2 different styles for each player, a simple cone and spool, and a more ornate set modeled after a bundle of reeds and a papyrus flower).  Below are pictures of the sets we've made so far--really at this point we're just playing with colors.  The bottom picture shows a five-piece mold for our cone-shaped game markers.

Senet Game Board Squares

We started experimenting with the game squares for Senet.  Here, we've simply painted the heiroglyphs onto the appropriate squares.  The meaning of the glyphs, as far as gameplay, is open to some interpretation.  I'll go into depth on gameplay in a later post.  The glyph in the center of the board (usually referred to as "square 15"), is usually called the House of Rebirth.  In some renditions of the rules, a player's piece must go back to this square if he lands on square 27, the House of Waters (4th from the last square).

20 Square (Tjau) board and pieces

This picture shows one of our 20-Square (Tjau) boards, with prototype game pieces and a set of knucklebones for dice.  The pieces were sculpted in clay and then cast in resin; we'll probably create molds to easily create complete sets for each game board.

Tjau boards were well known during the same time as Senet, and could be often found on the opposite side of Senet boards.  This particular set has a Senet board on the flip side of the lid.

Riverbank scene, draft to final

Variations of riverbanks scenes were the first styles we applied to our Senet boxes.  The concept is penciled in, then we paint it using it egg tempera.

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.