July 25, 2007 — Throwing stone balls along a lane might have been a popular game in ancient Egypt, according to evidence unearthed some 56 miles south of Cairo by Italian archaeologists.
A mixture of bowling, billiard and bowls, the game was played at Narmoutheos, in the Fayoum region, in a spacious room which appears to be the prototype of a modern-day bowling hall.
The room was part of a structure, perhaps a residential building, which dated from the Roman period, specifically between the second and third century A.D.
"We first discovered a room with a very well-built limestone floor. Then we noticed a lane and two stone balls," Edda Bresciani, an Egyptologist at Pisa University, told Discovery News.
Measuring about 13 feet long, the 7.9-inch-wide, 3.8-inch-deep lane featured a 4.7-inch square opening at its center.
Beneath the opening, Bresciani and colleagues from the Universities of Messina and Trieste, found a large terracotta vase filled with fine sand.
They also noticed that the balls had different diameters — one fitted exactly the square opening, the other could run smoothly along the lane.
According to Bresciani, the game was played by two players positioned at the two ends of the lane. One would throw the smaller ball, the other the bigger one.
"They would throw the balls at the same time. Most likely, the bigger ball was thrown along the lane to prevent the smaller ball from entering the hole at the center. When this happened, the smaller ball could be easily recovered from the sand-filled terracotta vase below," Bresciani said.
