Daily life and cultural appropriation in Early Bronze Age Canaan: Games and gaming in a domestic neighbourhood at Tell eṣ-Ṣâfi/Gath, Israel

ABSTRACT

Discussions on daily life in Early Bronze Age society in the southern Levant often focus on subsistence or ritual phenomena, while aspects relating to entertainment and leisure are rarely discussed. This paper presents evidence for gaming behaviour, in the form of game boards and game pieces, that were recovered in the excavations of the Early Bronze Age (early to mid-3rd millennium bce) residential neighbourhood at Tell eṣ-Ṣâfi/Gath, Israel. All the objects discussed are considered to be part of games (playing pieces, casting pieces, and boards) based on their resemblance to game boards and pieces published from various Early Bronze sites in the southern Levant (e.g., Arad, Megiddo, and Bab edh-Dhra), serve as the backdrop for: 1) a perspective on the social and cultural relationships reflected in these games; 2) an examination of the origins of the 'Senet/30 Houses' game; and 3) the appropriation of foreign cultural facets in Early Bronze Age Canaan.

KEYWORDS:

• Leisure
• Games
• '30 Houses'
• Senet
• Early Bronze Age
• Southern Levant
• Egypt
• Cultural appropriation
• Game Board
• Knuckle Bones
• Casting pieces
• Astragalus Die
• Dice

Acknowledgements

In particular, we gratefully acknowledge the help of Jon Ross in the stratigraphic data analyses. We also would like to thank Maria Enuikhina for the photographs and Yulia Rudman for the object drawings. We want to thank the Israel Exploration Society for permission us to use illustrations from the Arad report, and to Israel Finkelstein for permission to use illustrations from the Megiddo report. Finally, this study could not have come to fruition without the host of colleagues, volunteers, and students from around the globe and their efforts, during and after the excavations. Any errors are the responsibility of the authors.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 There are games with variation on the ‘standard' arrangement (e.g., three rows and sixteen columns, two rows and sixteen columns, four rows and ten or seven columns). While Sebbane relates to these as versions of the Egyptian Senet game (Sebbane 2001, 213–20; 2012, 53), they may likely be different types of games (e.g. Crist, Dunn-Vaturi and de Voogt. 2016, 77-80).

2 The average size of game board is according to the published dimensions of game boards from different sites in the Southern Levant (Fig. 6), as Megiddo (Guillaume 2013) and Arad (Amiran, Ilan and Sebbane 1997, 85-84).

3 There are different types of bedrock at Tell es-Safi/Gath, but the "Eocene deep-water chalk belonging to the Maresha member" (Ackermann and Bruins 2012, 123) is the specific geological layer related to the game boards stone type.

4 Such bones are often incorrectly termed ‘knucklebones'. This term has been inappropriately adopted into colloquial English usage from the diminutive colloquial Germanic term knökel that is applied to the small bones of animal feet (www.etymonline.com/word/knuckle). However, in English, a knuckle refers to the joint between the first and second phalanges in the human hand. Such bones are therefore better called ankle bones, since the astragalus (plural astragali, also known as a tarsal bone) is found in the posterior (hind) limb’s distal joint in mammals, which connects the tibia/fibula with the foot.

5 Six additional astragali were found in post-EB contexts in Area E. One was found in a mixed EB-LB fill between Stratum E4-5 (and which is probably EB in date), three were recovered in LB deposits (Stratum E4), and two were found in the topsoil (Stratum E0). This might indicate that astragali continued in use as playing pieces throughout the Bronze Age, but once again, other functions for these objects are possible as well.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded in part by the following: Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada Partnership Grant to Haskel J. Greenfield and Aren M. Maeir (Grant #895-2011-1005); Faculty of Arts, St. Paul’s College, and Near Eastern and Biblical Archaeology Laboratory of the University of Manitoba; and Bar-Ilan University.