The discovery lands at a time when games of chance are treated as pure leisure. A British player who compares welcome offers at a top UK casino today does so under rules set by the Gambling Commission, with odds published and outcomes left to certified random number generators. For the people who built the pyramids, a throw of the sticks could mean something far heavier: a message from the gods, or a step on the soul’s journey after death.
What the Abu Ghurab excavation actually found
Nyuserre ruled during Egypt’s Fifth Dynasty, around 2420 to 2389 BC, and his sun temple is one of the oldest known buildings dedicated explicitly to the sun god Ra. German Egyptologist Ludwig Borchardt pinpointed the Valley Temple’s location in 1901 but could not dig because of the high water table. More than a century later, the Italian team has exposed a monumental structure of over 1,000 square metres, with a ramp that probably linked it to the Nile.
The senet pieces, however, do not date from the temple’s religious heyday. According to the excavators, the sanctuary was turned into a small settlement after its cult use ended, around the close of the First Intermediate Period. Nuzzolo told Live Science that the former temple became a dwelling and that senet was probably one of the residents’ favourite pastimes. In other words, the find captures the game in its everyday, secular form, inside a building that had once been sacred. That tension between play and the divine is exactly what makes senet so important to the history of gambling.
Senet: from village pastime to the passage of the soul
Senet is around 5,000 years old, with roots in Egypt’s First Dynasty. Its board has 30 squares in three rows of ten, and two players race their pawns across it. Moves were decided not by skill alone but by chance: players threw casting sticks, flat on one side and rounded on the other, and counted how many landed face up. The exact rules have never been fully recovered.
By the New Kingdom, which began around 1550 BC, the game had taken on a clearly religious meaning. Senet appears in the Book of the Dead, where playing it is linked to the deceased’s passage through the afterlife. Tomb paintings show the dead playing against unseen opponents, most famously Queen Nefertari in her tomb in the Valley of the Queens. Boards from this period mark the final squares with signs for water, beauty and the numbers three, two and one, as if each square were a stage of a ritual journey.
A 2020 study by archaeologist Walter Crist of a senet board held at the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum in San Jose, California, suggested that this shift happened gradually. The board’s layout appears to bridge the Middle Kingdom and New Kingdom versions of the game, capturing the moment when a pastime began turning into a sacred symbol. Tutankhamun took several senet sets into his tomb, a sign of how seriously the elite treated the game by the 14th century BC.
Casting sticks, knucklebones and the will of the gods
The tools of chance were the same ones used to look for divine answers. Across the ancient Near East and Mediterranean, people cast lots, sticks and the ankle bones of sheep and goats, known as knucklebones or astragali, both to play and to seek guidance. Knucklebones have turned up at many Egyptian sites, and the line between consulting fate and simply playing with it was rarely sharp.
This is the heart of the religious theory of gambling’s origins. When an outcome cannot be controlled, a society that believes the gods shape everything will read meaning into it. A good throw in senet could be taken as favour from the gods; a bad one, as a warning. Over time, the habit of casting for meaning became the habit of casting for fun, and eventually for stakes.
Gods and kings who gambled
Egyptian myth itself is full of wagers. The best known is preserved by the Greek writer Plutarch in his essay on Isis and Osiris. In his account, the god Thoth played a board game with the Moon and won a seventieth of her light. From his winnings he created five extra days, added to the 360-day year so that the sky goddess Nut could give birth to Osiris, Isis, Set, Nephthys and the elder Horus. A gamble, in this telling, shaped the Egyptian calendar.
The Greek historian Herodotus records a similar story about a king he calls Rhampsinitus, who was said to have descended alive into the underworld and played dice with a goddess there, winning some games and losing others, before returning with a golden gift. And in a Ptolemaic-era Egyptian tale, the hero Setna, a literary version of Ramesses II’s son Prince Khaemwaset, plays senet against the ghost of a dead magician for possession of the magical Book of Thoth. He loses game after game and sinks deeper into the ground with each defeat, a vivid picture of stakes that were literally life and death.
Did ancient Egyptians bet for profit?
Here the evidence becomes thinner, and historians remain cautious. Egypt did not use coinage widely until its Late Period, and direct records of commercial betting are scarce. Most of the wagers that survive appear in myth, literature and funerary art rather than in tax lists or court records. What the evidence does show clearly is a culture in which chance was neither neutral nor random in the modern sense. It was a channel to the divine, and games built around it carried that weight.
That makes Egypt a strong candidate for one of the earliest places where play, chance and belief merged, rather than proof that gambling was invented there. Similar race games, such as the Royal Game of Ur in Mesopotamia, were circulating at the same time, and the board game Twenty Squares travelled between both regions.
From sacred board to modern table
Senet faded as Egypt’s traditional religion gave way to new beliefs in the Roman era, but the idea at its centre survived: that a roll of the dice could be thrilling precisely because it felt meaningful. Later race games around the Mediterranean, and arguably backgammon itself, carry echoes of that structure.
Today’s regulated gaming industry has stripped chance of its spiritual role and replaced it with mathematics, licensing and player protection. For anyone who plays, the lesson from the Nile is still worth keeping in mind: outcomes are out of your hands. Set limits, play only with money you can afford to lose, and if gambling stops being fun, free confidential support is available in the UK from GambleAware and the National Gambling Helpline . Gambling is for adults aged 18 and over.