Hounds and Jackals

A two-player game with a board of fifty-eight holes, played by advancing pegs topped with the heads of hounds and jackals. It dates to roughly four thousand years ago and has long been said to have been born in Egypt. Recently, though, a board of the same layout carved into rock was found at Gobustan in Azerbaijan, raising the possibility that pastoralists in West Asia were playing it before Egypt was. Neither account is settled yet — this map writes only as far as the Egyptian-origin story is now in question, and waits for a decision. Here too, it seems, someone was there before the thing called first.