Early Mancala and Tāb Boards Found in Israel (and in Some Other Countries)

Thierry Depaulis's article argues that a number of stone boards found in Israel and elsewhere in the eastern Mediterranean and Near East, long labelled as mancala, are more plausibly tāb boards, a race game, and that the Arabic game known as "arba'ata 'ashar" (fourteen) was likely tāb rather than mancala. The central claim is a revision of identification and chronology: the evidence for early mancala in the region is weaker than previously assumed, while tāb appears to have been established well before its first literary attestation in 1310.

The Israeli evidence is central to this reassessment. Three-row boards, such as those from Horvat 'Aqav (3×7) and the Western Wall (3×14), are judged better suited to tāb, whereas the two-row examples from Achziv, Bir el-Isyar, and Geva remain uncertain in both date and identity. By contrast, the earliest securely dated mancala boards are identified at Matara in Eritrea, from the 6th to 8th centuries.

The study's geographic and chronological scope is broad. Archaeological boards with rows of fourteen holes or squares are surveyed from sites including Hammat Gader, Capernaum, al-Yamāma in Saudi Arabia, Petra, Ephesus, Alcoutim in Portugal, and Memphis in Egypt, mostly dating from the 7th to 14th centuries CE. A clear pattern emerges of three or four rows of fourteen, with the earliest examples consistently showing three rows, which the author takes as evidence for tāb.

The argument also draws on medieval Arabic sources, including Ibn Sa'd, Ibn Abī Shaybah, al-Utrūsh, and al-Qābūnī, whose 9th-century accounts align with the archaeological finds from the 7th to 10th centuries. Surveys of two-row mancala boards by Murray (1952) and Russ (2000) reveal boards with 12, 15, and up to 20 holes per row but none with fourteen, which strengthens the case that "fourteen" refers to tāb.