Tea at Trianon: The World’s Oldest Board Games

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, May 10, 2019

The World’s Oldest Board Games

From The New Yorker:

When modern archaeologists first chanced on a board of Fifty-eight Holes, they mistook it for an inkwell. The board, which was discovered in Egypt, early in the nineteenth century, occupies the back of a carved hippopotamus, its hollows set amid inlaid glass on blue faience. The hippo lives at the Louvre, where Anne Dunn-Vaturi, who is something of a Fifty-eight Holes obsessive, previously worked. “Because there were big holes, they thought they were for the ink,” Dunn-Vaturi, now a researcher at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, said. She told me about Flinders Petrie, the British Egyptologist who found another board later in the nineteenth century, and who proposed that it was a game. More boards emerged from excavations in Anatolia, Israel, and Iran, the oldest dating back to the dawn of the second millennium B.C.

The game’s rules became clearer after 1910, when Howard Carter dug an ivory board out of a pit tomb in Thebes. Carter’s set is held by the Met, and Dunn-Vaturi took me to see it one morning, before the museum opened. The board, perched on legs sculpted like a bull’s, is the size of a paperback and shaped in the manner of a violin. (Another board that is held at the Met is even tinier, brother to a matchbox.) In the tomb, Carter also found ten slim, toothpick-like playing pieces, which can be stored in a small drawer built into the board. The heads of five of the pieces have been whittled to resemble jackals; the other five bear the heads of hounds. At the apex of the board is the goal: a hole marked by the Egyptian Shen symbol, a circle nuzzled by its tangent. (Read more.)