Picture a lane in Mohenjo-daro around 2300 BCE, a narrow, mudbrick-lined passages that still trace the lower town today, just as remarkable in their orderliness as the city's famous covered drains. Someone sets down a handful of small objects: a few cone-shaped pieces in terracotta, a carefully polished cubical die, perhaps a stick of ivory incised with concentric circles. A game is about to begin. We don't know the rules. We may never know them. But archaeologist Elke Rogersdotter's close analysis of the gaming assemblage from Mohenjo-daro suggests we have been underestimating how much these scattered little objects can actually tell us and how much ancient Indus people played games, adults and children.
The challenge of studying ancient gameplay is partly philosophical. Since almost anything can serve as a game utensil, and games by their very nature are improvisational and ephemeral, the material record has always seemed elusive, even to those who excavated it. The great early excavators of Mohenjo-daro, John Marshall and Ernest Mackay, gathered hundreds of items they placed under the heading "Games and Toys" like cubical dice, tetrahedral gaming pieces, ivory stick dice, balls, marbles, rattles, and a few fragmentary game boards scratched into brick. They treated them largely as isolated curiosities rather than social evidence though Marshall himself observed that dicing was clearly common, given the sheer number of pieces recovered, all of them exceedingly well made.
What Rogersdotter adds is a spatial and comparative dimension in this paper. Working from the old field registers for DK-C, HR, and DK-G areas she finds that gaming remains were not scattered randomly across the site, as the reports implied, but tended to cluster in distinct concentrations, with different types of objects appearing in different localities. Stick dice and other stick objects, for instance, clustered markedly apart from cone-shaped gaming pieces.
"Both Mohenjo-daro and Harappa yielded cubical dice, a type of object that was rarely found at sites further westwards" (p. 92) writes the author. Mohenjo-daro's cubical dice were numbered with 1 opposite 2, 3 opposite 4, and 5 opposite 6 rather than the modern convention of opposite sides summing to seven (see also (see An Ancient Indus Die). The Harappan sites of Harappa, Lothal, and Alamgirpur have all yielded similar examples. The famous Royal Game of Ur, discovered by Woolley at about the same time Mackay was working at Mohenjo-daro, represents a game tradition that early archaeologists seem to have spread from the Iranian plateau through Sistan and perhaps into the Indus world, but given the preponderance of game-like objects in Indus cities, it is possible that the game or an early version of the game spread west from the Indus. Possible "throwing sticks" found in Mohenjo-daro were also found as far west as Tutankhamun's tomb in Egypt. It makes sense that games would have spread far and wide in ancient times, as they are the most interesting and novel things that could be introduced in places from traders, travelers and nomads.
The Indus world was one of small, exquisitely made things: standardized weights and measures, tiny unicorn seals, faience beads in brilliant blue-green, delicate etched carnelian. The gaming assemblage fits this pattern perfectly. Rogersdotter notes that many pieces show careful craftsmanship. Polished stone marbles, ivory stick objects with strikingly regular incisions, gaming pieces adorned with trefoil ornamentation are found.
The paper which looks at the extensive finds of what are likely game pieces, boards and other related artifacts from Mohenjo-daro. The author tries to relate finds at the site with contexts, and while this is difficult given poor documentation from earlier excavations, it does seem as if game play was extensive and "a majority of the finds show traces of much wear, which mostly tend to be of similar constitutions. One such example is seen in the stick dice, which obviously, through frequent use, have received a bluntly pointed end (Mackay 1931c; 1938b). A consistency in usage seems therefore implied as well, which is further hinted at by the spatial distribution (p. 99).
Games are an indirect indication of how sophisticated culture(s) in ancient Indus cities must have been.
Images: 1. Possible burnt brick gameboard from Mohenjo-daro. 2. Brick with scratched grid of rectangles, suggested by Mackay as part of a game board; from the site of Mohenjo-daro (After: Mackay 1938a: Plate CXLII.82). 3. Brick tablet possibly used as gameboard from Lothal (S.R. Rao, Lothal, Pl. XXXII D [2]).