Seejeh is an ancient Egyptian game for two players, whose origins are uncertain, but which is still played by the Bedouins, the nomads of the desert, so the rules are known.
Tables of the Seejeh were found carved on the stone of several Egyptian temples dating back to 1300 BC, unfortunately ther...
Seejeh is an ancient Egyptian game for two players, whose origins are uncertain, but which is still played by the Bedouins, the nomads of the desert, so the rules are known.
Tables of the Seejeh were found carved on the stone of several Egyptian temples dating back to 1300 BC, unfortunately there is no way to know if these carvings were made by the workers at work during the construction of these temples or in later times.
This game, we said, being very old, has some variations in the name and in the rules due to the passage of time. Other names by which this game is known are: Seega and Sija, for example, and also denote the area of diffusion of the game, which went from North Africa to the Middle East.
The Seejeh was played above all by the poor and by the Egyptian nomads, it did not have a game board or sophisticated pieces like other ancient games such as the Senet, the game of 20 squares, the Mehen or the Dogs and jackals, all games, these, practiced for mostly by the rich and the pharaohs.
To play Seejeh, on the other hand, the peasants or the Bedouins carved the stone or drew it on the sand and used stones of two different colors. One thing that can be seen from the inscriptions is that while the nobles and the rich gambled a lot, the poor preferred to play strategy games without the random component.
The rules that have come down to us have been handed down orally since ancient times in the Egyptian Bedouin populations and among the peasants; were observed and noted in the nineteenth century by Edward William Lane, an English Arabist who spent a long time in Egypt in the 1920s and 1930s.
At the end of his travels, Lane published the essay “An account of the manners and customs of the modern Egyptians”, in which he described the rules of the game of Seejeh and many other games, however, while also recording some strategies, he did not understand them.
A strategic analysis of the game was made at the end of the century, in 1890, by H. Carrington Bolton in his article “Seega, an Egyptian game”, but lacked a study of the rules of the game.
Finally, in 1892, Edward Falkener combined both works in his book “Game ancient and oriental, and how to play them” which made many ancient games definitively popular in Europe and the Western world.
