Footnotes :  

172  Photograph of a board now at the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden, Leiden, Holland, and reproduced here with that museum's kind permission.
 

173 Marco Fittà: “Spiele und Spielzeug in der Antike”, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt, 1998, pages 144 to 148.
 

174 Oxford, 1960, edition consulted Dover, New York, 1979, page 12.
 

175 Timothy Kendall: "Passing through the Netherworld the meaning and play of Senet, an ancient Egyptian funerary game", Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Department of Egyptian and Ancient Near Eastern Art, and KIrk Game Company, 1978, see page 3, note 1, and pages 9 11 for game of "Mehen"; for spiral gameboards, see "Additional Notes and Comments", page 5, bottom, citing Cypriote Archaeologist Stuart Swiney in "Report of the Department of Antiquities of Cyprus", 1976, pp. 43 ff.

See also Edward Falkener: "Games Ancient and Oriental and how to Play Them", first published 1892, edition consulted Dover Publications, New York, 1961, pages 10 12, quoting and reproducing Lepsius: "Denkmäler", 11.61, Tomb 16 on "Mehen".
 

176 Utterance 332, § 541, as quoted in Henry Frankfort: "Kingship and the Gods: A Study of Ancient Near Eastern Religion as the Integration of Society and Nature", first published 1948, edition consulted University of Chicago Press, 1978, page 119 middle.

Sethe translated the same, but in Faulkner’s translation, the king “escaped from the coiled serpent”, without reference to the game. However, the relevant hieroglyphs include the picture of the Mehen game as a determinative to indicate the nature of the coiled serpent. Also, Faulkner’s version would make Mehen a hostile force which she was not.
 

177 Timothy Kendall: "Passing through the Netherworld”, 1978, see pages 50, 53, and 56 57.
 

178 in Raymond O. Faulkner: “The Egyptian Book of the Dead”, Chronicle Books, San Francisco, 1994, page 147.

 The Religious Board Game on the Phaistos Disk  
  by Peter Aleff         Scroll 22

6. Parallels with the Game  of the Snake and Goose

Two other games that show significant parallels with the Phaistos Disk are the ancient Egyptian spiral game called “Mehen”, after a female divine protector snake of that name, and the still popular spiral “Game of the Goose” which appears to be its successor.

6.1. The ancient spiral Snake Game

The game of that “Mehen” snake is known in Egypt from at least two Old Kingdom tomb paintings and from several surviving gameboards carved out of limestone slabs. These boards had a spiral track that represented the rolled-up snake and was separated into fields which were often made to resemble its scales. The center was typically fashioned as the head of the snake, and its tail ended the outside of the spiral.

Some particularly noteworthy copies of Old Kingdom Mehen boards also display the head and neck of a goose on the outside of the track, looking forward from the end of the snake tail.

The earliest Mehen boards come from pre-dynastic deposits in Nagada and are even older than the oldest known Senet boards; so far, they are probably the oldest gameboards ever found anywhere¹⁷³.

From those early times on, this Snake Game was quite common in Egypt until about the end of the Old Kingdom, just before the third millennium BCE turned into the second. Around that time, the durable boards for Mehen seem to have disappeared from the Nile valley but became popular farther north, in Canaan and Syria and in the islands.

This pattern may invite speculations that a cultural group associated with this game emigrated northward from Egypt during the political unrest that followed the collapse of the Old Kingdom. However, spiral race games survive also south of Egypt, in the Sudan where the Baggara Arabs are still playing their Hyena Game on “boards” which the game researcher R. C. Bell describes in his book “Board and Table Games from Many Civilizations”¹⁷⁴ as somewhat less elaborate, and less likely to leave archaeological traces than those made from stone :

“The board is made by tracing a spiral groove in the sand and making a random number of holes along its course. Each hole represents a day’s journey. A larger hole at the center is a well, and the beginning of the track is a village.”

Also, despite the apparent exodus of the stone boards for the Snake Game from Egypt, many of those found in the islands retained their close connection with Egypt. As of 1976, at least 37 such stone slabs were known from Cyprus, Crete, and other Aegaean Bronze Age sites, mostly from the second millennium BCE.  These usually had the spiraling line of holes for Mehen on one side whereas the reverse bore a three-by-ten grid of holes for playing the specifically Egyptian Senet¹⁷⁵.

6.1.1. The functions of the Mehen snake

The main role of the divine Mehen snake was to protect the sun god as well as his travel companions from their enemies, particularly from the evil male serpent Apep who sought to destroy the sun-boat during its nightly journey back to the east through the darkness of the underworld.

Because Mehen helped the sun god whom the deceased hoped to join, she was automatically also a friend of the dead in general and helped them in whichever way they chose to desire.

One of the magic spells in the Pyramid Texts from the late Old Kingdom obtains Mehen’s help through her game. The buried king Unas exclaims there, in Henri Frankfort’s translation of Utterance 332 :

"I have come forth from the snake game.
I have risen as a heat wave and have returned.
I have gone, O Heaven, O Heaven!
(...) I walk on the Roads of Heaven." ¹⁷⁶

An obvious reason why a snake might be deemed to help the sun and the mummies with their renewal is the snake’s own skin-shedding power of self-renewal. This made her a demonstrably successful expert in this rejuvenation business and thus a valuable companion and protector in the nightly fight against death.

In New Kingdom times, when those Egyptians who left us records no longer played Mehen’s own spiral game on durable boards, that good-guy snake became known as the patron deity for the funerary version of Senet.

By that time, Senet had acquired the same function of getting the deceased to heaven as the Snake Game in the above Utterance from the Pyramid Texts. In her new capacity, Mehen helped the tomb owners to win their Senet game against the unseen underworld enemies who tried to block the souls’ entry into Paradise¹⁷⁷.

6.1.1.1. Encircling magic

Another one of the ways in which Mehen protected her clients was to surround them with her coils. Obviously, encircling something is the most basic step in protecting it, from walls around a village to guards around a throne, and the same principle applied in the mirroring world of gods and ghosts.

Under the heading “The Significance of Encirclement”, the Egyptologist Ogden Goelet discussed this magical practice as a common method for disarming evil forces¹⁷⁸. For instance, many of the Egyptian temple festival processions

“would go around an area several times with the intent of rendering malevolent beings and forces harmless by encircling them. (...) The most important encircling of all occurred daily when the sun god Re traversed the firmament above the world, then continued through the night sky beneath the earth. This daily journey, particularly the nocturnal component, was the central theme of most of the royal underworld books.”

Encircling (pekher) was such a generic means of protection against all ills that it was also the root of the word for medical prescriptions (pekhert); these often consisted of or at least contained an array of protective spells, forerunners of the fine- printed inserts with disclaimers and warnings that accompany today’s prescription drugs to protect their users as well as their makers.

The same idea of encircling as protection survived into medieval and later times when sorcerers such as Dr. Faustus typically drew magic circles around themselves, or around the conjured devils and demons, to keep these at a safe distance during their dealings with these otherwise uncontrollable and dangerous powers.