In Phoenicia, archaeologists found two rows of five holes carved into a piece of marble from the back of a broken statue from the 6 th century BCE, which has been attributed as a Mancala board-though this was found inside a 2 nd century CE Roman house as part of a plumbing system and may have been carved much later. Recognizable double rows of Mancala pits have been found carved into Egyptian temples, but while the temple may be old it is not clear that the carved gameboard is-it could easily have been done by a visitor from the Roman Era or even later. Similar pits have been found in Beidha in Jordan, dated to 5900 BCE, and in Ain Ghazal at 5800 BCE, which have also been interpreted as Mancala gameboards.
#Mancala games series#
A row of pits chiseled into a stone slab in western Iran, dating to around 6300 BCE, may have been part of a Mancala board (or they may have just been a series of holes).
The earliest actual evidence for Mancala, however, is sketchy, which is not surprising given the ephemeral nature of the game material. Since the premise of the game is based on planting seeds in a garden or field, it is plausible that Mancala may have appeared at roughly the same time as human agriculture itself, at least 12,000 years ago and perhaps as long as 20,000 years. Its suspected history stretches back several thousand years, but because of the game’s simple construction-it can be played using nothing more than some beans and some holes scooped in the ground-it is possible that some version of this game was being played by people thousands of years before the first “cities” or “civilizations” ever appeared, and no trace of it would ever appear in the archaeological record. “Turkish Girls Playing Mancala”, an engraving from 1707 "Hidden History" is a diary series that explores forgotten and little-known areas of history. There is a good possibility that Mancala is the oldest-known board game ever played by humans.
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