Hounds and jackals

The modern name was invented by Howard Carter, who found one complete gaming set in a Theban tomb from the reign of ancient Egyptian pharaoh Amenemhat IV that dates to the 12th Dynasty.

[4] In the 1956 movie The Ten Commandments, Pharaoh Seti (Cedric Hardwicke) and Nefretiri (Anne Baxter) are shown playing the game.

[5][6] Hounds and jackals, also known as 58 holes, is a well-known Bronze Age board game which was invented in Ancient Egypt 4,000 years ago.

More than 60 examples of the game have been revealed in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Israel, Syria, Iran, Azerbaijan, around the Levant and Mediterranean since that time.

[13][15] The complete set of this Egyptian game discovered in 1910 by the British archaeologist Howard Carter is now displayed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

During the archaeological excavations, boards were found from remains of Assyrian merchant colonies in Central Anatolia dated 19th-18th centuries B.C.

[7] More than 68 gameboards of hounds and jackals have been discovered in the archaeological excavations in various territories, including Syria (Tell Ajlun, Ras el-Ain, Khafaje), Israel (Tel Beth Shean, Gezer), Iraq (Uruk, Nippur, Ur, Nineveh, Ashur, Babylon), Iran (Tappeh Sialk, Susa, Luristan), Turkey (Karalhuyuk, Kultepe, Acemhuyuk), Azerbaijan (Gobustan) and Egypt (Buhen, El-Lahun, Sedment).

[20] In April 2018, archaeologist Walter Crist from the American Museum of Natural History discovered the examples of 58 holes in Gobustan, Azerbaijan.

In his speech at the annual meeting of American Schools of Oriental Research in November, Crist linked this close relation as: “Bronze Age herders in that region must have had contacts with the Near Eastern world.

[25] Twenty squares was widely spread to other territories such as Palestine, Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Syria and Cyprus as hounds and jackals games.