Mankala and geomancy display the relative indifference to local cultural specificity and change typical of formal systems; as such they are invaluable clues to cultural connections and continuities through space and time.
The paper thus demonstrates a diffusionist orientation; much attention is paid to patterns of distribution and spread. Yet even so he has no choice but to admit that a minority of board-games which we shall review shortly must have to do with festivals, calendars, funerals, and particularly with divination. But already he plays his greatest trump: board-games, he claims, must have originated in the relative security of food and shelter, the relative absence of burdening daily chores, such as would characterise the beginnings of civilisation.
In the light of his earlier emphatic dismissal, we hardly believe our eyes when Murray f in the end virtually endorses the theory of the divinatory origin of board-games!
For what does newly-civilised man do with all that hard-earned, and in fact largely imaginary leisure time? He playfully finds new meaning and new uses for familiar objects by which he has already been surrounded. Thus, for instance, he has offered the following ingenious but totally unconvincing hypothesis with regard to the origin of the mankala board:.
I find it difficult to believe that the mancala games can have been invented in vacuo and we seem to be driven back to the hypothesis that mancala arose out of experimentation with an already existing board. But what purpose the mancala board may have served is not easy to see when no use is made of it anywhere, now, except for a game [ we shall see that this is equally incorrect, some varieties of mancala being used for divination, as Murray himself repeated admits ].
It may be significant that the earliest boards all occur in the neighbourhood of building operations. May the board have been used for the calculation of the wages to be paid to workmen, and the board be originally a primitive kind of abacus?
When Murray wrote, the oldest examples in the way of mankala boards or what was then recognised as such came from Ancient Egypt: a few rows of cup-marks in inaccessible or vertical i. And without admitting this in so many words, it is the ritual sphere, and even more specifically the divinatory sphere, which he then identifies as likely origin for the game-boards:. His sound intuition, fed by an enormous erudition, has finally taken the upper-hand over his mistaken, Durkheimian theoretical position.
The enormous iconographic repertoire of these representations encompasses the entire range of objects from everyday life: bellows, slit drums, stools, utensils, etc. Not surprisingly in the light of our discussions, below, of geomantic divination, the concrete descriptions of the abbia game itself as furnished by these authors stress pairs and foursomes, and come close to patterns of binary arithmetic opposition underlying all geomantic practice however much its surface practices vary.
Here the exhaustive symbolic and iconographic description makes it very clear that the divinatory pieces, mostly fashioned out of wood with additions in other vegetal material, bone, ivory, metal and products of modern industrial manufacture among other items contain a fair catalogue of objects of everyday and ritual use as found in the village: a drum, a pestle, a fire-place, a fire-bore, a head-rest, a knife, etc.
A set published by Delachaux 70 pl. Or take cf. All four tablets are different from each other in terms of shape, notches at the basis, and markings distinguishing between the front and the back of each tablet ; each tablet has a distinct name and is identified as male or female, and as senior or junior.
Thus when the tablets, in the course of a divinatory session, are cast from the cupped hands of the diviner or the client, sixteen different configurations can form. But it is not only specialist diviners who own and use these tablets. This is already indicated by their ready availability at the medical sections of regional markets. We have already begun to narrow down the scope of our argument to, specifically, mankala board-games and geomantic divination. In this respect it is interesting to note that the few cases of board-games where Murray admitted to a possible ritual, including divinatory origin, often remind us of either mankala, or geomantic divination, or both:.
Some are associated with festivals of various kinds. Thus, the Kanakura tribe of northern Nigeria, plays canonical games at their annual festival at the end of the first millet harvest, September or October.
Seven elders of the town, five representing the chief and two, the commoners, take part. Chaturaji, the Indian four-handed dice-chess, was played in the eighteenth century at the festival of the New Moon, when worshippers kept vigil all through the night Women in Ceylon play olinda mancala at the New Year More often, board-games are played during wakes and funeral ceremonies, galat-jang Mancala boards form part of the furniture of Egbo houses in Calabar Murray saw at the shrine of Odudua in the village of lloru, Abeokuta Pr.
Since, however, fanorona was only invented about , this can only carry weight if it perpetuated a similar [ i. There is no evidence that this game, which is widely played in Asia, was ever played except as a pastime.
When we turn to the New World, there is more evidence that the race-games of the American Indian tribes had a religious aspect. Unexpectedly encouraging as all this may be, these disconnected and context-less ethnographic examples remain suspended in the air as long as we do not have a more systematic theory to tell us why, of the myriad possible manifestations of human culture, divination and board-games should be so similar in deep structure that to postulate a generic relationship between the two could ever become more than just wishful thinking.
In all these [ anders ] different regions where geomantic divination is practised, the material apparatus is very different, ranging from divination chains cf. More complex procedures may raise this number to any higher power of 2. A written or memorised key the catalogue provides the interpretation of each geomantic symbol, and of their combinations. The horizontal series of small dots merely connects each curved line with the corresponding single dot in case of an uneven number of bold dots or double dot in case of an even number of bold dots.
The latter is the value which the hitting produces on one of the four geomantic lines. The confusing thing about this figure is that the number of horizontal connecting dots, for no apparent reason, is consistently one below the number of bold dots.
By contrast, the first feature, the material apparatus serving as a random generator, shows enormous variation as well as a tendency towards localisation: the numerical outcomes needed for geomantic interpretation, can be elaborate or simple, involving dice, wooded or ivory tablets, stones, pebbles, grains, palm kernels, marks on the ground or on a rimmed board covered with sand, dots on paper, etc. It is at the level of the physical apparatus, of the manipulation of numerous identical elements using 2n-based combinatorial mathematics, that the links between geomantic divination and a board-game like mankala are particularly conspicuous.
A characteristic move in mankala consists of going around the various adjacent cupmarks, seeding one game element in each successive hole, and emptying the hole opposite the one in which this seeding sequence ends, provided the latter is found empty.
A comparable exercise of elimination is typical of geomancy: in most local forms one begins with one large and unstructured mass of elements dots, pebbles, marks etc. The closeness between mankala and geomancy is also suggested at the level of the physical apparatus, for instance in Zambia, where mankala cf.
Chaplin is played with mungongo seeds Ricinodendron rautanenii , which throughout Southern Africa are also used for geomantic divination along the lines of the hakata system. I have described the structure of one divination system; let us try to define an overall structure for both board-games and divination, thus accounting for their similarities.
The theoretical convergence of divination and board-games. So far we have proceeded as if our main operative terms have a self-evident meaning which does not need to be spelled out. However, if our ambitious and in the light of the existing literature controversial historical exercise is to inspire confidence, we should at least strengthen it by an attempt at definitional rigour.
Let us agree to designate by this term:. Of board-games, as a category of formalised human activity, Murray 1 offers a useful descriptive definition:. It is stimulating to compare the definitional characteristics of divination with those of board-games. Of course, board-games involve a material apparatus e however rudimentary for many games the entire apparatus can be summed up as a few pips or pebbles, and a few lines drawn on the ground ; they also involve formal rules g.
But the parallelism far from ends here. Little as we may realise this, board-games, too, are devices for the production of knowledge a not otherwise attainable d. In general games tend to involve two or more visible, human opponents, while divination is culturally constructed as the interaction between one or more humans and an invisible non-human agent. The advent of mechanical and electronic gaming machines including computers has blurred this distinction between human and divine interaction partners, which may be one reason why such games exert such fascination over the solitary humans playing them.
The amazing parallelism which exists between divination and board-games cannot be found between board-games and most other items of culture. Any slabs which display regular arrays of cupmarks tend to be paraded as ancient mankala boards.
But the alternative, spoil-sport, yet methodologically preferable, position is that we are dealing with non-ludic or proto-ludic artefacts unless there is unmistakable evidence as to a gaming context and practice. It is important to realise that the context of mankala-like artefacts characterised by two to four rows of cup holes, is formed not so much by the set of all certified mankala boards which could only lead to tautology , but by the set of all artefacts with cupmarks. The latter set is much larger, much more varied, has a much wider distribution in space and time, and is likely to include artefact which, while not yet mankala boards themselves, constituted the non-ludic prototypes for such boards.
Among Upper Palaeolithic and later rock art, cupmarks occur perhaps as frequently as grid marks. She writes:. A ritual use is often attributed to them, in the way of offerings, libation or anointment. They may occur singly or in groups, sometimes in aligned groups reminiscent of certified mankala boards. For a far more extensive and profound discussion of cupmarks and related topics, cf. It is tempting to link the cupmark theme, with its Palaeolithic and funerary connotations, to that of the circle-and-dot motif, which also has a very wide if patchy distribution, ranging from Nordic, circumpolar ivory-working to Celtic, Hittite and general Ancient Near East contexts Segy Besides the enduring contemplation by the worshippers it may indicate the introduction, and subjugation, of an earlier domestic cult of ancestors, in the domain of a later, more centrally institutionalised and universal deity.
In the iconography of the Southern African Hakata form of geomancy, a circle-and-dot motif often replaces the house icon in the senior female tablet cf. Figure 4. Much more typological and comparative ritual research is needed before we can arrive at conclusions. Meanwhile I submit that in the class of ritual vessels and slabs with multiple cup-marks we have found a non-ludic ritual context from which proto-mankala may have derived at least as plausibly as from the agricultural and pastoral context.
I would go even further and suggest that the early so-called mankala boards from the Near East and East Africa belong to the same family of cupped stones, and may again be nothing but non-ludic or proto-ludic.
In the light of this reasoning, one would no longer claim that, in general, board-games sprang from divination systems, but stress that they have probably a common origin in archaic ritual. Whatever multi-layered accretion of symbolism mankala may have taken on later, when we view the game-board as another variety of cupped stones this suggests an original context of funerary or commemorative ritual.
This would generally have revolved around the offering, to the dead and by extension to the spirits of the underworld, to the earth, or to heroes and gods associated with these beings , food stuffs or simulacrums of food stuffs, both fluids including beer, milk, blood, perhaps meat stock and solids grains, meat, bread etc.
Why was not just one vessel or one cupmark enough, why the multiplicity of holes or containers without which there would be no mankala? One possibility which was actual practice in Ancient Egypt and much later in the Eleusinian cult in Ancient Greece is that the one offering had to be composed of a considerable variety of food stuffs, in order to suggest respect and generosity, perhaps also in order to make of the offering a mirror-image of the cosmos in its variegated complexity.
This however leaves us to explain why there should be distribution and redistribution between holes. Perhaps the multiplicity of cupmarks, much like the multiplicity of officiants in the sacrificial procession, has to do with the familiar phenomenon57 that smaller constituent segments in a wider society tend to express their identity by reference to specific bonds with particular shrines and gods, in a context where these have proliferated even when taken from the overall national pantheon.
Ritual is among other things a way of producing group coherence. If funerary ritual is important for the group or organisation to constitute itself, one could do so by venerating only one ancestor or one deity through one offering.
Multiplicity of cupmarks then stands for a multiplicity of ancestors of deities and ultimately for the multiplicity of internal segments; and circulation of gifts from one cupmark to the other might then be a further expression of this ritual merging.
These funerary connotations could easily be combined with calendrical ones, defining the proper times for commemoration and offering. This is may be the reason why mankala is still played not only in funerary contexts but also at times of special calendrical significance.
Cult of the dead, of the earth, of fertility and of agriculture shade over into each other. Townshend a: , n. Indeed, this model, while strictly hypothetical, helps us to appreciate the emergence of certain forms of divination as a sister, rather than as a parent, of board-games. The contact with the earth is a contact with the dead as well as with the source of food. Having thus established, and duly qualified, the early context in which mankala and geomancy may have emerged, and having explored the parameters within which the multi-layered imagery of these cultural systems may begin to be understood, let us now turn to the distribution and diffusion of these cultural systems in later periods.
The available evidence allows us to map the geographical distribution of the geomantic family as in Figure 16, as a basis for the reconstruction of its geographical diffusion in Figure However, our present scope only allows a combined treatment of these features.
The Indian Ocean trade took care of any spread from China to the Persian Gulf; the land route via the Silk Road appears to have been less important in this exchange. After the geomantic system was formulated in Islamic circles, the Indian Ocean was again the main context for its broadcasting. Above I stressed, in general, the importance of the mathematical aspect of board-games and divination.
Their underlying mathematical structure can be a most effective pointer to otherwise hidden relationships, because this structure may well survive regardless of the transformations the systems go through at the surface. Thus a careful examination of the binary, 2k pattern dominating the mathematical structure of both the Southern African four-tablet divination system, and the more directly Arabian-derived forms of geomancy found in the Indian Ocean region including the well-studied Sikidy system at Madagascar led me to hypothesise historical connections which could subsequently be ascertained when I found identical items in the interpretative catalogues attending the divination system in these two more or less adjacent regions.
It turned out that the four horizontal lines of the standard geomantic symbols e. Figure 18 summarises the world distribution of mankala broken down into two-, three and four-row varieties of the game , while Figure 19 suggests the underlying pattern of diffusion. Townshend has extensively argued against the central role Murray had attributed to Asia and to Islam in the spread of mankala, and in favour of a uniquely African origin and transformation of the mankala family of board-games, so much so that even their distribution in Asia should be directly derived from African models alleged to be recently imported to South Asia by black slaves.
Already twenty years ago he complained Townshend 95 that everyone except Leakey61 seemed to be determined to find by all means a non-African origin for this family of board-games. In this point was repeated even more forcefully:. This demonstrates the analytical advantage of comparatively handling formal systems whose mathematical properties are so well defined and so easily classified.
Yet, in addition to his emotional Afrocentrism inspired by a condescending desire for political correctness,62 there are other theoretical and methodological flaws in his argument. Out of every minute variant of the mankala game he makes a separate genus, with its own logic and history presumed to be unique and without intersections with the other genera, as if the parallel invention, in various parts of the world, of minor variations in the rules, on the basis of reception of the overall package, is entirely out of the question.
And contrary to the diffusionist law of the preservation of archaic forms in the periphery of a geographical distribution, he claims that the origin of the game must be sought at the place where the rules are most elaborate and where most variants occur.
What would happen to our understanding of early Christian church history, or of the origin of Indo-European languages, or of wheeled traction, or printing, or the magnetic compass, if this view were adopted? It would make the North Atlantic region, where today the elaboration and variation on all these points is extreme, the unique origin of human culture.
Is that what we want? It forces him to manipulate the data. He has to close his eyes for such evidence as I have discussed above on four-row mankala outside Africa:. Moreover he has to deny that the Ancient Egyptian examples are mankala boards, not because context and information on the attending practices is lacking that would be an excellent point to make, and sums in fact up my own position in the matter , but simply because they are too early to fit his Afrocentric hypothesis; and he has to propose an unrealistically late date for the Ceylon artefacts, which he does accept as being genuine mankala.
How do we escape from this dead end, without resorting to the stratagem of simply calling a mankala board everything that has straight rows of cup-marks and that suits our theory?
How can we make the best of the by now substantial archaeological evidence, both from the Near East and from Eastern Africa, concerning regular rows of cupmarks in stone slabs, steles and rock faces? The East African examples are very difficult to date and may be Neolithic but then again they may be Iron Age.
Their vertical placement defies their being actually or finally used as mankala boards. And although we can always interpret this vertical position as a result of recycling, for funerary purposes as grave slabs , of pre-existing proper game-boards to be initially used in a horizontal position cf.
Simpson, in press , the devastating antiquity of funerary cup-marks in human history suggests otherwise. These mankala-like stone slabs from relatively independent corners of what now looks as one extended Asian-African Fertile Crescent teeming with the Neolithic productive revolution, are nothing more but evidence that by that time indeed suitable non-ludic material was available for the emergence of the mankala game as an expression of a revolutionised sense of time, space and the person.
The mankala game still had to crystallise out, but it was around the corner. The geographical parameters of the Fertile Crescent were formulated Breasted before it was generally realised that in Africa, both in the once fertile central Sahara and in the Ethiopian highlands, independent neolithic domestication of crops and livestock had taken place Camps ; Phillipsen I am therefore inclined, with Townshend who can judge the archaeological record just as little as I can and with the palaeontologist Leakey, to view the East African archaeological evidence on rows of cupmarks in this light.
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