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.

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 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.