There's a lot of human behavior that, looked at from a perspective as if you were studying us from the outside -- say, as an alien anthropologist -- is mighty weird.
One example is our fondness for playing games. We make up lists of often arbitrary rules, then individuals or groups compete against each other while following those rules to achieve some sort of goal -- which almost always is itself symbolic (other than professional sports and gambling, most games don't actually involve winning some sort of tangible reward). Despite the fact that there's every reason to care very little about the outcome, from a very early age we learn to care deeply. Many of us have the attitude imbued in me by my high school track coach -- "Second place is first loser" -- and that applies to everything from the Olympics to a game of Monopoly.
This drive is so strong that a lot of us become seriously invested in vicariously playing games by watching other people play them -- i.e., sports. There have been fan riots when the home team doesn't win; people are willing to go on the rampage, destroying property and risking injuring others or themselves, because they're so angry that "their team" lost. (A guy who's a friend of a friend once actually went outside and smashed a chair when the Buffalo Bills lost.)
And as I've written about before, the tendency to take sports extremely seriously isn't limited to the industrialized world. The Mesoamerican ball games of the Classical Mayan civilization were deadly serious, and I mean that quite literally.
The losers were sacrificed to the gods.
Game-playing is one of those ubiquitous behaviors that's so common it's taken for granted, and is odd only when you think about it too hard -- but once you do, it seems so weird you have to wonder why it's nearly universal in all human cultures. Sociologist Jonathan Haidt speculates that it's what psychologists call sublimation -- that it's a way of processing aggression harmlessly. "Sports is to war as pornography is to sex," Haidt says. "We get to exercise some ancient drives."
Whatever the explanation, there's no doubt that game-playing is not only widespread, it's very, very old. A paper this week in the European Journal of Archaeology describes the discovery of what appears to be one of the oldest known examples of a board game, painted onto rock surfaces in what is now Azerbaijan. The pattern is very similar to a game known from Ancient Egypt they called "Hounds and Jackals" (from the shapes of the game pieces). The rules aren't known, but it appears to be a chase game, with potentials for pieces to jump ahead or get set back -- so perhaps a little similar to the familiar games of backgammon, parcheesi, and "Snakes and Ladders" (more commonly known in the United States as "Chutes and Ladders").
The archaeologists who authored the paper, Walter Crist of Leiden University and Rahman Abdullayev of the Minnesota Historical Society, found six game boards (if that's what they turn out to be) at sites in Azerbaijan -- three at Ağdaşdüzü, and one each at Çapmalı, Yenı Türkan, and Dübəndi. It's difficult to date stone artifacts accurately, but carbon dating of organic remains in the area suggests that they're about four thousand years old. The similarity between all six strongly suggests that playing this particular game was widespread at the time -- and that the pattern would have been as as familiar and instantly recognizable to them as a Scrabble board is to us.
"Whatever the origin of the game of [Hounds and Jackals], 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," the researchers write. "The fast spread of this game attests to the ability of games to act as social lubricants, facilitating interactions across social boundaries." |
No comments:
Post a Comment