Mancala boards may have been scooped into floors nearly 8,000 years ago
Mancala names a family of two-player pit-and-seed strategy games aimed at capturing stones. Versions likely reach past the third century and into ancient Egypt; some claim Neolithic boards at ‘Ain Ghazal ~5870 BCE, though that dating is disputed.
Undisputed Roman-era boards appear at Gedera. The tenth-century Kitab al-Aghani mentions the game; Ethiopian texts may allude later. Variants thrived from Estonia’s Bohnenspiel to Bosnian Ban-Ban and Greek Mandoli; eighteenth-century tables survive at Weikersheim. Early Aksumite boards and rock cuts at Matara in Eritrea and Yeha in Ethiopia date from the sixth and seventh centuries, and traces have turned up in Kenya too.
Enslaved Africans carried versions to the Americas—Louisiana’s Warra, Cape Verdean ouril—using play to build community. Kalah popularized a commercial set in 1940s America. Rule maps today trace migration routes centuries deep. Archaeologists may have found signs of play at the Hermitage Plantation in Nashville, and Cape Verdean immigrants still play ouril in New England.
The name comes from an Arabic tool noun built on naqala, to move. A turn means lifting every seed from one pit and sowing them one by one into the following pits, then capturing depending on where the last lands, hence the phrase count and capture; in capture mode, ending in an empty pit on your side takes the seeds opposite. Boards usually have two or four rows of pits, sometimes with larger stores at the ends, and counters may be beans, cowries or half-marbles. Sizes vary enormously: Mozambique's Tchouba uses 160 holes and 320 seeds, and Tanzania's En Gehé up to 100 pits and 400 seeds. Western Europe never adopted it, though Oxford orientalist Thomas Hyde described it.
Source: Mancala
