Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures Museum

This guide to the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures Museum in Chicago starts with a single object in the case ahead: an ivory board cut with fifty-eight holes, every one of them meant to be played. It traces the board back to Megiddo, a fortress city in what is now northern Israel, where this institute's own archaeologists dug for nearly a decade and a half in the early twentieth century, pulling a hoard of carved ivory from a layer dating to the thirteenth century before our era. Look closely at the gold and blue paste inlaid around every fifth hole, and picture the players who once pushed pegs around this board by lamplight.