Board Games in Ancient Fiction: Egypt, Iran, Greece

Konstantakos's study argues that board games have served as a structuring device in narrative since antiquity, and that this relationship between games and literature has long been mutually productive. Tracing the pattern from ancient Egypt through Hellenistic Greece to Sasanian Persia, the essay contends that the board game becomes a central symbol of narrative's transformative and innovative power, a device that renews traditional forms and drives dramatic action. Its scope spans three ancient cultural traditions, with the analysis extending forward to modern works such as Calvino's tarot-based The Castle of Crossed Destinies, Carroll's chess-structured Through the Looking-Glass, Verne's jeu de l'oie novel, and Pérez-Reverte's chess-based mystery.

The essay's central case concerns the Egyptian Tale of Setne Khaemwaset, in which a contest between two wizards is staged as a game of senet, likely though never explicitly named in the text. Winning a round enables a damaging spell, so that the game's mechanics directly drive magical attack and mirror the protagonist's fate. The author argues that this fuses the ancient Near Eastern contest-of-magicians folktale with a board game while stripping away political stakes, leaving self-interested rivals whose irresponsible magic brings personal ruin. The senet's funerary and netherworld symbolism, the tomb setting, and the text's connection to a book of sacred power are read as reinforcing this interpretation.

Beyond Egypt, the study examines Apion's Hellenistic gloss, which invents a fictional marble game, pessoi, played by Odysseus' suitors and attributed to an unattested Ithacan informant, transforming the epic bow contest into a courtly amusement. The essay's richest analysis, however, concerns the Sasanian tale of Wuzurgmihr, where chess and backgammon are invented as intellectual puzzles in a riddle contest between Khusrau I and the Indian king Dēwišarm. Here the games are treated as serious and meaningful: chess allegorizes battlefield conflict, while backgammon represents the cosmos, time, and fate. The author concludes that this Iranian tale offers the most elevated and spiritual portrayal of board games in ancient fiction, and that across ancient and modern narratives alike, games function as dramatic catalysts that renew traditional narrative forms.