Carved Senet and Tjau Game Box Lids

These are some examples of our first Senet and Tjau game boards.  The squares, symbols, and edging are all hand carved.  These take more time and care to create, but are very much worth the effort.

Casualties of the Creative Process

When we started building game boxes about a year ago, specifically Senet and Tjau boxes, we went through a lot of designs and experiments to see what we liked.  This unseemly pile is the group of unfinished, some almost finished, boxes and designs.  Most of them we'll be able to complete in the coming days.  Some of them we'll probably quietly put away and use as utility boxes.

New Game Pieces for Senet and Tjau

Started to put the new molds through their paces again today.  Tried a few colors, and for a few added some gold leaf  touches.  The blue we're going for a lapis lazuli look.  We also really like the gold leafing at the base of the dark green pieces.

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 with carved lid and painted gold base pattern

Both the box and the Senet game board lid are made of pine. The 30-Square Senet board is hand-carved, and the heiroglyphs were also etched by hand.  The box was stained with an ebony wipe-on stain and then sealed. After sealing, the pattern along the bottom edge was hand-painted with gold leaf (the pattern is based on a pattern along part of King Tut's gold death mask).  A 20-Square Tjau board is carved on the flip-side of the lid.

Senet Board with side drawer 2

Following up on the last post, here is our side-drawer game board fully assembled and treated with a medium-walnut Danish oil.  I took my time putting this one together-- it was a lot of fun, but I think next time I'll do it a bit differently. Next step will be to apply the game squares (haven't yet decided if this will be a 30-Square Senet board or a 20 Square Tjau board) and the side panel paintings.

Senet board with side drawer

Just for something different, I thought I'd work on a Senet board with a built-in drawer.  Many of the recovered Senet games have a drawer on one of the box ends.  I came across a picture a while ago of a 20 Squares board with a drawer on one of the halves of the long side of the box, which I found incredibly interesting, if only because it was so different from the other, more 'common' boxes.  Anyway, this undecorated box is my first attempt at executing a similar design.  Still needs to be stained, painted, and sealed, and I also want to fix a suitable handle to the drawer.

Here's a picture of the original 20 Squares board, which dates back to the Egyptian New Kingdom.

Oriental Institute, University of Chicago

Game Piece Markers

These are some prototype game piece markers we've come up with.  Across the top are some Senet/Tjau game pieces.  In the center are two stylized throwing stick/knuckle bone pieces.  In the bottom left corner are some makers for a tic-tac-toe board we've thought of putting together (I really like the cuneiform-like x's and o's).  On the bottom right are some generic markers.

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.

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.