Scientific American online
Games
In the study of a major city in ancient Pakistan, one of every 10 finds is related to playing games.
Cynthia Graber reports
February 9, 2011
Many of us have plenty of leisure time to devote to trying out the latest Wii game or even watching
others play poker on TV. But this focus on play is nothing new, says a researcher at Sweden's
University of Gothenburg.
For her doctoral thesis, Elke Rogersdotter studied a 4,000-year-old city called Mohenjo-Daro in the
Indus Valley, in what is now Pakistan. ["Gaming in Mohenjo-daro—an Archaeology of Unities"] It was
the largest Bronze Age urban settlement in the region, thriving at the same time as the ancient
Egyptian Middle Kingdom.
Play is not generally studied for its significance to ancient peoples. Rogersdotter says that
archaeologists do often find game-related relics at dig sites, but they're usually discounted as
unimportant or considered a ritual object. But at this site, almost every tenth find was related to
leisure—dice or gaming pieces.
And they're not uniformly scattered. The artifacts are clustered together in what might have been
ancient, say, gaming halls or courtyards. Rogersdotter says that these games may have had real
social significance and might be used to give us a better view of the lives of these Bronze Age
individuals. Who very well might have hoped to roll double-sixes four millennia ago.
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