Sources page biographical material

4.B.13. MANCALA GAMES
This is a very broad field and I will only mention a few early items. Four row mancala games are played in south and east Africa. Three row games are played in Ethiopia and adjacent parts of Somaliland. Two row games are played everywhere else in Africa, the Middle East and south and south-east Asia. See the standard books by R. C. Bell and Falkener for many examples. Many general books mention the game, but I only know a few specific books on the game -- these are listed first below.

One article says that game boards have been found in the pyramids of Khamit (-1580) and there are numerous old boards carved in rocks in several parts of Africa.

An anonymous article, by a member of the Oware Society in London, [Wanted: skill, speed, strategy; West Africa (16-22 Sep 1996) 1486-1487] lists the following names for variants of the game: Aditoe (Volta region of Ghana), Awaoley (Côte d'Ivoire), Ayo (Nigeria), Chongkak (Johore), Choro (Sudan), Congclak (Indonesia), Dakon (Philippines), Guitihi (Kenya), Kiarabu (Zanzibar), Madji (Benin), Mancala (Egypt), Mankaleh (Syria), Mbau (Angola), Mongola (Congo), Naranji (Sri Lanka), Qai (Haiti), Ware (Burkina Faso), Wari (Timbuktu), Warri (Antigua),
Stewart Culin. Mancala, The National Game of Africa. IN: US National Museum Annual Report 1894, Washington, 1896, pp. 595-607.

Chief A. O. Odeleye. Ayo A Popular Yoruba Game. University Press Ltd., Ibadan, Nigeria, 1979. No history.

Laurence Russ. Mancala Games. Reference Publications, Algonac, Michigan, 1984. Photocopy from Russ, 1995.

Kofi Tall. Oware The Abapa Version. Kofi Tall Enterprise, Kumasi, Ghana, 1991.

Salimata Doumbia & J. C. Pil. Les Jeux de Cauris. Institut de Recherches Mathématiques, 08 BP 2030, Abidjan 08, Côte d'Ivoire, 1992.

Pascal Reysset & François Pingaud. L'Awélé. Le jeu des semailles africaines. 2nd ed., Chiron, Paris, 1995 (bought in Dec 1994). Not much history.

François Pingaud. L'awélé jeu de strategie africain. Bornemann, 1996.

Alexander J. de Voogt. Mancala Board Games. British Museum Press, 1997. ??NYR.

Larry (= Laurence) Russ. The Complete Mancala Games Book How to Play the World's Oldest Board Games. Foreword by Alex de Voogt. Marlowe & Co., NY, 2000. His 1984 book is described as an earlier edition of this.
William Flinders Petrie. Objects of Daily Use. (1929); Aris & Phillips, London??, 1974. P. 55 & plate XLVII. ??NYS -- described with plate reproduced in Bell, below. Shows and describes a 3 x 14 board from Memphis, ancient Egypt, but with no date given, but Bell indicates that the context implies it is probably earlier than  1500. Petrie calls it 'The game of forty-two and pool' because of the 42 holes and a large hole on the side, apparently for storing pieces either during play or between games.

R. C. Bell. Games to Play. Michael Joseph (Penguin), 1988. Chap. 4, pp. 54-61, Mancala games. On pp. 54-55, he shows the ancient Egyptian board from Petrie and his own photo of a 3 x 6 board cut into the roof of a temple at Deir-el-Medina, probably about  87.

Thomas Hyde. Historia Nerdiludii, hoc est dicere, Trunculorum; .... (= Vol. 2 of De Ludis Orientalibus, see 7.B for vol. 1.) From the Sheldonian Theatre (i.e. OUP), Oxford, 1694. De Ludo Mancala, pp. 226-232. Have X of part of this.

R. H. Macmillan. Wari. Eureka 13 (Oct 1950) 12. 2 x 6 board with each cup having four to start. Says it is played on the Gold Coast.

Vernon A. Eagle. On some newly described mancala games from Yunnan province, China, and the definition of a genus in the family of mancala games. IN: Alexander J. de Voogt, ed.; New Approaches to Board Games Research: Asian Origins and Future Perspectives; International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden, 1995; pp. 48-62. Discusses the game in general, with many references. Attempts a classification in general. Describes six forms found in Yunnan.

Ulrich Schädler. Mancala in Roman Asia Minor? Board Games Studies International Journal for the Study of Board Games 1 (1998) 10-25. Notes that mancala could have been played on a flat board of two parallel rows of squares, i.e. something like a 2 x n chessboard, but that archaeologists have tended to view such patterns as boards for race games, etc. Describes 52 examples from Asia Minor. Some general discussion of Greek and Roman games.

John Romein & Henri E. Bal (Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam). New computer cluster solves 3500-year old game. Posted on www.alphagalileo.org on 29 Aug 2002. They show that Awari is a tie game. They determined all 889,063,398,406 possible positions and stored them in a 778 GByte database. They then used a 144 processor cluster to analyse the graph, which 'only' took 51 hours.