Long before chess, before backgammon, before almost any board game whose rules we can still read, an Egyptian official named Reniseneb was buried at Thebes with a small shrine-shaped board of ebony and ivory, a set of slender pegs, and no instructions. Nearly 4,000 years later, that board sits in the Metropolitan Museum of Art — one of the best-preserved copies of a game archaeologists call Hounds and Jackals, or, more cautiously, 58 Holes. It is one of the oldest games in the world, and one of the most honest reminders of how much we don't know.
A game with a borrowed name
Here is the first thing to be straight about: nobody knows what the ancient Egyptians called this game. The two names we use today were both invented by the archaeologists who found it. When Howard Carter uncovered the Met's set, he named it "Hounds and Jackals" for the little dog-headed and jackal-headed pegs that came with it. The Egyptologist W. M. Flinders Petrie, who published the game back in 1890, preferred the plainer, description-based name "58 Holes" — because that is exactly what the board has. Because the pegs on many boards are not actually hounds or jackals at all, most game historians now lean toward 58 Holes as the neutral, accurate term. We'll use both here.
What the archaeology actually shows
The game first appears in Egypt around 2000 B.C., in the Middle Kingdom. The famous Met board is dated to roughly 1814–1805 B.C., the reign of Amenemhat IV, and was recovered from Reniseneb's tomb during the Carnarvon and Carter excavations of 1910. That single find gives us the board, the pegs, and the physical shape of the game — but not a word about how it was played.
What makes 58 Holes remarkable is how far it traveled. More than 60 boards have turned up across Egypt, Mesopotamia, Israel, Syria, Iran, Anatolia, the Levant, and beyond. A 2013 study of 68 examples suggested the game spread along trade routes — reaching central Anatolia around 1950 B.C. and Mesopotamia from there — and it moved south into Nubia around 1980 B.C. In 2018, archaeologist Walter Crist identified 58-hole patterns carved into rock shelters at Gobustan in Azerbaijan, evidence that Bronze Age herders far from the Nile were playing it too. For a game whose rules are lost, it left an extraordinarily wide footprint.
The board and the pieces
The design is consistent enough across those 60-plus boards that we can describe it with confidence. A 58 Holes board has two curving tracks of 29 small holes — 58 in all — usually arranged so the two tracks run up the sides and meet at a single larger hole at the top, the finish. Many boards are shaped like a shrine, an axe-head, or a stylized animal; the Met's is a graceful little cabinet with a drawer to hold the pieces.
Each of the two players had five pegs — ten in total — that stood in the holes rather than sitting flat like modern counters. One player's pegs were topped with dog or hound heads, the other's with jackal heads, which is how the game earned Carter's name. Boards were made in everything from humble wood to ivory, ebony, silver, and gold, a sign the game was played from village households up to royal courts. On some boards a handful of holes are specially marked — a few carry the hieroglyph nefer ("good") — and on many, certain holes are joined to each other by engraved lines.
How Hounds and Jackals was (probably) played
This is where honesty matters most. No ancient rulebook for 58 Holes survives. Everything below is scholarly reconstruction, built from the board's layout, from comparisons to other Egyptian games, and from common sense — not from any text an Egyptian left us. Even the Met describes the play in careful, hedged language: it was "probably" a race, movement was "like" dice. Treat the following as one plausible, playable version, not gospel.
The broad agreement is that 58 Holes was a race game for two. Each player starts with their five pegs off the board (or at the bottom of their track) and tries to be first to move all of them along their 29 holes to the shared goal at the top. Movement was almost certainly decided by chance — most likely by casting knucklebones or short throwing-sticks, the standard randomizers of the ancient world, since the boards came with no obvious dice of their own.
The engraved lines linking certain holes are the game's most distinctive feature, and the most fun to reconstruct. The usual interpretation — the Met's own comparison — is that 58 Holes worked a little like Chutes and Ladders: land on a hole connected to a spot further ahead and you jump forward; land on the wrong marked hole and you may be sent back or made to wait. Holes marked with nefer are generally read as lucky or beneficial. A popular modern reconstruction, associated with game historian R. C. Bell, formalizes exactly this kind of race-with-shortcuts, and it plays quickly and cleanly. If you want to try it, use these safe, clearly-labeled house rules:
- Setup: two players, five pegs each, all starting off the board.
- Movement: throw four two-sided sticks (or four coins). Count the "marked" faces showing — that is how many holes you advance one peg. All four blank counts as a bonus move of five or six.
- Shortcuts: if a peg lands on a hole joined by a line to a hole further along, move it to the connected hole.
- Winning: the first player to bring all five pegs to the goal hole at the top wins.
Play it and enjoy it — just remember you are enjoying a modern reconstruction of an ancient shape, not a rediscovered original.
A game for this life and the next
Why bury a board game with an official? The Egyptians clearly valued these games beyond idle fun. As with Senet — the other great Egyptian game, often found in the very same tombs — some scholars suggest 58 Holes could have carried a symbolic charge, the pegs' climb to the goal echoing the soul's journey through the afterworld. That reading is tentative, offered in the same "could have" spirit the Met uses, and it may simply be that the Egyptians, like us, wanted a good game to hand for eternity. Either way, a plaything survived four millennia to reach a museum case — which tells you how much it meant to the people who carved it.
At Ancient.Games we handcraft playable versions of the world's oldest games — from Senet to the Royal Game of Ur — so you can bring a piece of that long history to your own table. Explore our collection of handcrafted ancient games at Ancient.Games.
Image: Game of Hounds and Jackals, Egypt, Middle Kingdom, ca. 1814–1805 B.C., ebony and ivory. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Purchase, Edward S. Harkness Gift, 1926; Gift of Lord Carnarvon, 2012). Open Access (CC0).