Beneath the worn stone of a ninth-century hammam step in Walīla, Morocco, a quiet game of strategy has been waiting more than a thousand years to be noticed—three neat rows of 13 shallow holes, carved with care into the rock where bathers once paused on their way to the cold plunge. This unassuming grid, discovered by archaeologists from the INSAP-UCL Volubilis Archaeological Project, is now rewriting what we know about play in early Islamic North Africa. While board games were a vibrant part of daily life across the medieval Islamic world—celebrated in poetry and preserved in ruins—physical evidence has been scarce in Morocco, especially finds that can be precisely dated. That makes this discovery exceptional. Carved into the top step of a bathhouse built in the late 8th or early 9th century and likely abandoned by the 11th century, the board offers a rare chronological anchor in a field often left guessing.
Led by Dr. Tim Penn of the University of Reading, the research team measured the board at 34 by 9.5 centimeters and analyzed its structure to determine its purpose. The shallow, evenly spaced holes ruled out mancala-style games, which require deeper depressions to hold seeds or stones. Instead, the layout closely matches that of tāb or sig, a two-player strategy game still played in parts of North Africa today. If confirmed, this would be the earliest known evidence of tāb/sig in the region—pushing back its documented history by centuries. The game’s presence in such a communal space speaks volumes: it wasn’t hidden away, but embedded in the rhythm of public life. Positioned where bathers would naturally rest, the board suggests that games were woven into the social fabric, a shared ritual as much as a pastime.
What makes this find so powerful is not just its age, but its accessibility. Unlike elite artifacts buried in palaces or tombs, this game was played by ordinary people in a public bath—a place of cleansing, conversation, and now, we know, quiet competition. The researchers note that such spaces were hubs of community interaction, and the game board reinforces the idea that leisure and connection were central to urban life in Idrisid Morocco. This discovery, published in Libyan Studies (2026), opens a new window into how people spent their downtime, revealing a culture where play was not a luxury, but a practice embedded in stone and tradition. As more sites like Walīla are studied, the everyday lives of medieval Moroccans are emerging—not in grand monuments, but in the small, human marks left behind. And somewhere in the echoes of that ancient bathhouse, a game may still be waiting for its next move.