page_title: Mancala
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Mancala / History
context_page_description: Mancala is a generic name for a family of two-player turn-based strategy board games played with small stones, beans, or seeds and rows of holes or pits in the earth, a board or other playing surface. The objective is usually to capture all or some set of the opponent's pieces.
  Versions of the game date back to the 7th century and evidence suggests the game existed in ancient Egypt. It is among the oldest known games to still be widely played today.
context_section_description: Evidence of the game was uncovered in Israel in the city of Gedera in an excavated Roman bathhouse where pottery boards and rock cuts were unearthed dating back to between the 2nd and 3rd century AD. Among other early evidence of the game are fragments of a pottery board and several rock cuts found in Aksumite areas in Matara (in Eritrea) and Yeha (in Ethiopia), which are dated by archaeologists to between the 6th and 7th centuries AD; the game may have been mentioned by Giyorgis of Segla in his 14th century Ge'ez text Mysteries of Heaven and Earth, where he refers to a game called qarqis, a term used in Ge'ez to refer to both Gebet'a (mancala) and Sant'araz (modern sent'erazh, Ethiopian chess). 
  The similarity of some aspects of the game to agricultural activity and the absence of a need for specialized equipment present the intriguing possibility that it could date to the beginnings of civilization itself; however, there is little verifiable evidence that the game is older than about 1,300 years. Some purported evidence comes from the Kurna temple graffiti in Egypt, as reported by Parker in 1909 and Murray in his A History of Board-Games Other Than Chess. However, accurate dating of this graffiti seems to be unavailable, and what designs have been found by modern scholars generally resemble games common to the Roman world, rather than anything like mancala.
  Some historians believe that mancala is the oldest game in the world based on the archaeological evidence found in Jordan that dates around 6000 BCE. The game might have been played by ancient Nabataeans and could have been an ancient version of the modern mancala game.
  The games existed in especially eastern Europe. In the Baltic area, it was once very popular ("Bohnenspiel"); in Bosnia, where it is called Ban-Ban and still played today; Serbia; and Greece ("Mandoli", Cyclades). Two mancala tables from the early 18th century are to be found in Weikersheim Castle in southern Germany. In western Europe, it never caught on, but was documented by Oxford University orientalist Thomas Hyde.
  The United States has a larger mancala-playing population. A traditional mancala game called Warra was still played in Louisiana in the early 20th century, and a commercial version called Kalah became popular in the 1940s. In Cape Verde, mancala is known as "ouril". It is played in the Islands and was brought to the United States by Cape Verdean immigrants. It is played to this day in Cape Verdean communities in New England.
  Recent studies of mancala rules have given insight into the distribution of mancala. This distribution has been linked to migration routes, which may go back several hundred years. There is evidence that the game was played in Egypt before 1000 B.C. It spread from Egypt through other parts of Africa, probably with traders moving up and down the Nile. Excavations in Lebanon uncovered  Phoenician mancala pieces dated from the 6th century B.C. The statue was discovered lying on her stomach on a marble floor covering a drainage channel from the Roman period (second century AD). Two rows of five holes etched into the back revealed that "it was also used to support a board game called mancala, derived from the Arabic word naqala, meaning literally move", said the lead archaeologist, thus referring to the explanations provided by Irving Finkel, an expert on ancient games in the British Museum.
caption: Pit marks presumed to be ancient Gebeta (i.e. mancala) boards in the base of an Aksumite stele, Axum, Ethiopia
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