Archaeologists Find 4k-Year-Old Board Game in Oman | Hacker News Reader

Archaeologists Find 4k-Year-Old Board Game in Oman

archaeologynewsnetwork.blogspot.com

88 pointsdiodorus37 comments

There is an unexplored archeological/anthropological investigation to be about the relationship between board games and counting boards in ancient history. Counting boards were used for (of course) counting large quantities and doing arithmetic, the classic example being the Salamis board [1].

Separately, were divination methods used to determine the will of the gods, an example of which were the Urim and Thummin of the Old Testament [2], apparently some form of dice. Senet, the Egyptian game, was also closely tied to religious belief and ritual [3].

At some point, no one knows when, these came together and became games that were played for fun.

IANAA, but perhaps some caution needs to be exercised before announcing that "XX ancient people were having fun playing gamez!" and consider whether they were trying to count bushels of grain or trying to find out if it would rain the next day.

[1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salamis_Tablet

[2]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urim_and_Thummim

[3]. http://www.eloquentpeasant.com/2010/10/14/its-not-just-a-gam...

PS: All that said, it sure looks like a Mancala board to me.

Reminds me of the Pythagorean tetractys and gnomen.

And didn't oracles make extensive use of knucklebones?

Slightly better article here: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/archaeologists-une...

Just FYI, folks…

Make sure your adblockers are set to “11,” before hitting thst site.

It even blocked the "go back" action of my browser.

Like, just, a nice f''k you for good measure.

Amazing

That seems to be a common thing on most sites these days to not be able to click back button on a browser. I'm noticing it more and more even on well-known sites like Microsoft.

On some sites now after you click a link to it and you're on the site the back button is not clickable to go back. Even a right-click on the button doesn't allow you to select page history. I thought it was a bug on Firefox and it seems people are reporting it as so. I'll have to use another browser to test to see if it's browser-related or site-related.

<alt><left-arrow> ... and never return, blacklist them.

TIL (I'm 52): <alt><left-arrow> equals the back button. Thank you tejtm!

It then makes the site unreadable by yelling about ad blockers.

Plain old Pihole works though.

It's surprising how much putting the following in one's hosts(5) file helps:

    0.0.0.0         adservice.google.com
    ::1             adservice.google.com
    0.0.0.0         ssl.google-analytics.com
    ::1             ssl.google-analytics.com
    0.0.0.0         www.google-analytics.com
    ::1             www.google-analytics.com
    0.0.0.0         www.googletagservices.com
    ::1             www.googletagservices.com
    0.0.0.0         www.googletagmanager.com
    ::1             www.googletagmanager.com
    0.0.0.0         partner.googleadservices.com
    ::1             partner.googleadservices.com
    0.0.0.0         pagead2.googlesyndication.com
    ::1             pagead2.googlesyndication.com
    0.0.0.0         googleads.g.doubleclick.net
    ::1             googleads.g.doubleclick.net
    0.0.0.0         securepubads.g.doubleclick.net
    ::1             securepubads.g.doubleclick.net

I recently got a new MacBook for work and when I was surfing there was all sorts of popups and ads and such. I got none of these things on my personal iMac. It took a day or two for me to realize that it wasn't about (e.g.) the different version of macOS or Safari that I was running.

Once I updated the work machine's hosts(5) file things it was a night-and-day difference.

I cannot believe that people tolerate surfing the web without any ad filtering / blocking.

> Plain old Pihole works though

Yup: I set up one the other day and it "Just Works [TM]". It's trivial to set up if you've got any experience with the Pi and in case you don't there are many tutorials out there. Highly recommended.

I’m doing it in Docker now days and it seems even easier than doing it ‘for real’.

A word of warning though, if you run it on a machine with lots of containers, is buggers up internet access for the other containers and it’s a complete pain to solve (and sometimes reverts to broken on reboot).

Just curious, is anyone intentionally not using an ad blocker?

Me. I want websites to actually face the consequences of excessive advertising, like driving me away. I'm not happy with the idea of more ads being shoved at a smaller fraction of the visitors.

On desktop sure, but just plain safari on iPhone. If I hit an article like this one I just click straight off it.

There is actually a fairly good ad blocker for safari available. It's called AdGuard and works quite well.

It got ad blocker blocker :(

I didn't notice that ad blocker blocker on Firefox + uBlock Origin.

Neither did I using Brave.

There need to be ad blocker blocker blockers!

If by ad blocker you mean a browser plugin, then I do not have one of these.

I use a hosts file that ignores many ad hosts at the DNS level.

No need for a low performance solution.

Do you regularly update the blacklist yourself? Ublock origin uses close to no memory or cpu for me, and offers instantaneous, effortless disabling in times where it is needed.

Of course I do update the list!

It is taken from here https://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm

And I have another ~40 entries not included in that list.

You should try it. It is another layer of protection in case you want to keep using uBlock Origin.

uBlock Origin does not noticeably affect the responsiveness of my T100 from 2013 with a Bay Trail atom CPU and 2GB RAM. What exactly are you browsing on?

Intel i7 1165g7

Anyway, I don't want to waste CPU cycles or battery life on such things.

Wow you weren't lying. There is literally an ad every 2 paragraphs.

And each paragraph is 1-3 sentences.

Disappointed there was no details about the game. The one image of the rock(board) seems like cups like mancala.

I count 6 holes in the row on top and 8 holes in the row below, perhaps it's a mancala board. Senet has three rows. More ancient board games are listed here: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/best-board-gam...

There’s another game trending on Reddit but they have some Babylonian documentation for rules (backgammon precursor) but it appears different from this one? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Game_of_Ur

OKOK, I'm going to add archaeologynewsnetwork to my rss reader.

I always wonder how they can be so sure what these things are. In this case, for example, it's described as a "carved grid" and "is hewn into the stone slightly clumsily". Perhaps it was made for storing some specific small item? Or maybe it was used to keep track of something (i.e. move the pebble to the next grid space every time X happens). Or maybe it was just someone bored and carving a design?

Same here. All I see is a pile of rocks, but the archaeologist can see the holy grail.

Was the instruction booklet there too?

I'll bet there's a version on the app store within a month.

Easier to find than a PS5, apparently

Dont worry about it, my PS5 has been collecting dust since a year since there are very few relevant games to play anyway.

i am so used to 4k being a resolution :)

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