In Search of the Meaning of Senet, in Archaeology 33

Peter A. Piccione's In Search of the Meaning of Senet, published in Archaeology magazine, the Archaeological Institute of America's flagship publication, in 1980, is a scholarly article examining the ancient Egyptian board game senet's evolution from a purely secular pastime into a game with genuine religious and funerary significance, understood in later periods as symbolising the deceased's journey through the afterlife. Its strength is that it is written by a specialist Egyptologist for a peer-adjacent, editorially reviewed archaeological publication aimed at both scholarly and informed general readers. Its limit is that senet's religious symbolism developed and was understood differently across different periods of ancient Egyptian history, so a claim about the game's meaning should specify which period is meant rather than treating one article length overview as covering the game's entire multi-millennium history uniformly.