Barakat Seoul presents The Game of Heh: Barakat Egyptian Treasures, an exhibition that reinterprets the
popular ancient Egyptian board game known as senet, from Tuesday, May 18 to Tuesday, August 31, 2021.
This exhibition, which brings together the finest Egyptian pieces from the 150-year-old Barakat collection,
includes a selection of historically valuable and spectacular antiquities: a portrait of an Old Kingdom Egyptian
elite official from more than 4,000 years ago, a Middle Kingdom stone stele inscribed with Egyptian
hieroglyphics, a carved stone head with the portrait of an Egyptian pharaoh, and a mummified cat prepared
during the Late Dynastic period. As such, Barakat Seoul reconstructs a monumental senet board where the
viewers are invited to take the role of a priest, playing a fantastical game with the gods where they are
provided with a rare opportunity to confront and behold the age-old antiquities.
The Game of Heh originated in an attempt to transcend the perspectives of the past century, which revealed
a tendency to objectify ancient Egypt’s civilisation and art. Antiquities at once, inspire the sense of awe
surrounding the millennia-old heritage and the subtle disconnect accompanied by their current setting in dry
museological space: this framed the Ancient Egyptian art in the milieu of the distant unknown and the realm of
abstruse scholarship. It thus never fails to astonish us to spot the similarities of our 21st-century ideas to those
of ancient Egyptians, who have become conceptualised for us in such alien terms.
One instance would be how many people would find it fascinating to learn that the origins of modern-day
board games can be found in the ancient Egyptian game known as senet. Described as the world’s oldest
board game, senet was enormously popular, appearing not only in reliefs by the Third Dynasty high official
Hesy-Re and the murals of Ramses II’s consort Nefertari, but also such occult writings as the Coffin Texts and
the Book of the Dead. The image of a recently departed person seated at a game board before an unseen
opponent alludes to another role of senet that functioned beyond as a secular game but as a religious tool for
achieving communion with the gods.
The underlying concept of 《The Game of Heh: Barakat Egyptian Treasures》 is the ancient Egyptians’
understanding of senet as a means of entering another world to compete with beings from the other realm.
Following the direction of the Egyptian hieroglyphs and the beckoning hand of the male sculpture from the
New Kingdom, the deified cat mummy and the bronze cat-headed goddess Bastet and her enchanting
gestures, we are led to confront the faces of the departed on mummy masks, and then to the Field of Reeds
where the god of eternity Heh sits upon his seat of gold. More information about the exhibition can be found
on the Barakat Seoul website (www.barakat.kr).
5.18.2021 (Tue) – 8.31.2021 (Tue)
10:00am – 6:00pm | Closed Monday
Barakat Seoul
58-4, Samcheongro, Jongnogu, Seoul, KR
