The game of “58 Holes” is one of the oldest games in the world. According to traditional interpretations, the board game first appeared in ancient Egypt during the second millennium BCE, but recent excavations have also discovered evidence of the game in the South Caucasus during this period, challenging our understanding of its origins.

Sometimes called “hounds and jackals” due to some gaming pieces having animal heads carved into them, 58 Holes was played for centuries, from the middle of the Bronze Age and into the Iron Age. It consists of a board – sometimes a purpose-made object but sometimes simply a carving in a flat surface – which has rows of holes bored into it. These holes are designed to receive pegs.

In total, there are (you guessed it) 58 holes on the board, arranged in two parallel lines of 10 holes in the center, which are then surrounded by an arc of 38 holes. In order to play, players each have five pegs and take turns moving them along the holes from the starting point and then up their own respective sides to the endpoint. Some holes have lines going between them. These lines serve as “chutes” or “ladders”, giving a player a chance to advance forward quickly or to accidentally fall back.

The number of places a player can move per go is determined by the roll of a die, the throwing of sticks, or something similar. It should be noted that the game evolved over centuries, so it may have been played in different ways at different times or in different places.

At present, around 80 boards of the game have been collected and are exhibited in museums across the world. The shape of the board has generally been seen as indicating when and where it was created, and examples have been found across a wide region, including Egypt, the Levant, Mesopotamia, Iran, and Anatolia.

The oldest dated example comes from the tomb at el-Assasif, a necropolis near Luxor on the West Bank at Thebes, Egypt. The game probably belonged to one of the officials of the pharaoh Mentuhotep II, who reigned from 2060 to 2009 BCE.

Another example of an early board was found in Stratum II at Kültepe in central Anatolia which probably dates from around 1885 to 1836 BCE.

Given the oldest dated examples were found in Egypt, it is often assumed that this was where the game was invented. However, there is some debate on this point. Other scholars have argued that the game may have emerged from southwestern Asia, where it was popular and seems to have enjoyed a longer and more consistent period of use.

And now, new research conducted by archaeologists Walter Crist and Rahman Abdullayev offers stronger evidence to support that argument.

According to the study, there is evidence from Azerbaijan that people played the game during the late third to early second millennium BCE, long before it appeared in Egypt. Moreover, it seems those who did play it also participated in regional interactions that ranged across southwestern Asia at the time.

“The diversity of the fifty-eight holes board in south-western Asia—as well as its early appearance and longevity there—offers a stronger case for an origin further north than Egypt,” the authors explain.

The best-recorded version of the game comes from Gobustan National Reserve, near the western shore of the Caspian Sea, southwest of Baku. The game consists of a pattern “pecked” into a stone and was discovered by accident in 2015.

“Rendered as a series of shallow depressions, with narrow channels connecting certain holes, the pattern closely resembles boards found in south-western Asia and Egypt,” write Crist and Abdullayev.

Other examples of the game were found at sites in Ağdaşdüzü, Yeni Türkan and Dübəndi.

“These examples of the game of fifty-eight holes add to earlier findings and suggest a reorientation of our thinking about this game as a tool for interpreting the sites on which they are found,” the authors argue.

“Clearly the gaming cultures which spanned north-eastern Africa and western Asia during the Middle Bronze Age included the Caucasus region.”

Crist and Abdullayev believe the game spread through trade routes, rather than being objects or ideas spread through conquest. Although their work suggests 58 Holes may have originated in southwestern Asia before it became popular in Egypt, the authors stress that more information would be needed before any individual culture could be credited with its invention.

“Whatever the origin of the game of fifty-eight holes, it was quickly adopted and played by a wide variety of people, from the nobility of Middle Kingdom Egypt to the cattle herders of the Caucasus, and from the Old Assyrian traders in Anatolia to the workers who built Middle Kingdom pyramids,” they write.

The spread of the game is a testament to the ability of games to act as “social lubricants”, facilitating interaction across social and cultural boundaries.

“Games are particularly amenable to building relationships between traders because games are one way that people use to judge trustworthiness, informing future social and economic relationships,” the authors explain.

The nature of these game boards is somewhat “ephemeral”, Crist and Abdullayev argue. This suggests that their existence in the archaeological record may have been easily overlooked. Perhaps other versions of the game await rediscovery, especially in the Caucasus, which may shine a greater light on the history of this region and how the game came into being.

The study is published in the European Journal of Archaeology.