3/31/2023 0 Comments Mancala cool mathThere are many versions in Asia: in Malaysia it is “Congkak”, in Indonesia the game is called “Dakon”, and in the Philippines it is “Sungka”. In the central Asian Muslim regions it is known as “Toguz”, and in Islamic areas of India it is “Ali Guli Mane”. In Ethiopia it gained the name “Gebeta”, and “Tchouba” in Mozambique. In eastern Africa, Mancala is known as “Bao” in west Africa it is “Oware” (the name means “married”, and comes from the legend of a man and woman who played many games together, and eventually were married so they could finish their games). Mancala has been fashionable in the rest of the world for centuries, though, under a bewildering variety of versions and names. Renaissance Europeans seemed to prefer Chess and Backgammon instead. Mancala had certainly reached Europe by the 17 th century though and there are some records of it in England and Germany, but for some reason it never gained popularity in that continent. This has been taken by some to indicate that Mancala had not actually reached the Arab world by this time and was still confined to Africa. Unlike other African and Arab derived games such as Alquerque (Al Quirqut), there are no clear records of Mancala being taken from the Holy Land to Europe during the Crusades, or being introduced by Islamic Moors into Spain. Finally, West Africans who were taken to the New World as slaves after 1492 carried the game along with them. By this time the game had likely already spread to most of Africa, and Muslim Arab traders (who called it “Naqala”, from which we get the modern name “Mancala”) in particular adopted the game and spread it overseas to India and Southeast Asia. There is a brief mention in a 9 th century CE Arabic manuscript of a game which might be Mancala, but it is rather ambiguous.īut despite the game’s potential antiquity, the earliest unmistakable evidence that we have of the game’s existence comes from the 15 th century CE, when the Orthodox Christian monk Giyorgis of Segla, living in Ethiopia, mentions (in a book titled Mysteries of Heaven and Earth) a local game he calls “Qarqis” which sounds like a version of Mancala. Other researchers who were excavating a Roman bathhouse in the Judean city of Gedera, also dating to the 2 nd century CE, found what they have concluded are Mancala boards, molded into a glazed ceramic or carved into stone slabs. In Phoenicia, archaeologists found two rows of five holes carved into a piece of marble from the back of a broken statue from the 6 th century BCE, which has been attributed as a Mancala board-though this was found inside a 2 nd century CE Roman house as part of a plumbing system and may have been carved much later. Recognizable double rows of Mancala pits have been found carved into Egyptian temples, but while the temple may be old it is not clear that the carved gameboard is-it could easily have been done by a visitor from the Roman Era or even later. Similar pits have been found in Beidha in Jordan, dated to 5900 BCE, and in Ain Ghazal at 5800 BCE, which have also been interpreted as Mancala gameboards. A row of pits chiseled into a stone slab in western Iran, dating to around 6300 BCE, may have been part of a Mancala board (or they may have just been a series of holes). The earliest actual evidence for Mancala, however, is sketchy, which is not surprising given the ephemeral nature of the game material. Since the premise of the game is based on planting seeds in a garden or field, it is plausible that Mancala may have appeared at roughly the same time as human agriculture itself, at least 12,000 years ago and perhaps as long as 20,000 years. Its suspected history stretches back several thousand years, but because of the game’s simple construction-it can be played using nothing more than some beans and some holes scooped in the ground-it is possible that some version of this game was being played by people thousands of years before the first “cities” or “civilizations” ever appeared, and no trace of it would ever appear in the archaeological record. “Turkish Girls Playing Mancala”, an engraving from 1707
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