Origin of Snakes and Ladders
Snakes and ladders is a game with which most of us have grown up. To laugh with your family while you sit around a board, rolling the dice and laughing as someone climbs up a ladder and someone slides down a snake… that’s what joy feels like. It is such a happy feeling to reminisce times like this as well. But what if you go way back in time, past the memories of even your grandparents and their parents, to find out about the history of the game snakes and ladders? There is an interesting history to the game, so read on to find out what it is.
The game snakes and ladders is believed to have existed for thousands of years. Some say that the first instances of the game were found in the Second Century BC, but others say that it didn’t come about until the 12th Century AD. It was but initially a symbol of Hindu culture, a way to teach children morals, by showing them what was virtuous and what was evil, which is why it was thus called Mokshapat or Moksha Patamu, or Gyan Chaupar — which mean enlightenment, or the Game of Knowledge, respectively.
If you have played snakes and ladders, you would know that the gameboard consists of a number of tiles, where you must make your way to the top by rolling a dice at each turn. On the way, you may face ladders, which boost you towards a higher place on the board, or snakes, which push you down to a lower part of the board. The structure of the game has remained almost identical for the last thousands of years, except for one thing. Modern world snakes and ladders do not serve the purpose of teaching children the concepts of vice and virtue.
On the Mokshapat board, tiles where ladders commenced indicated something virtuous, and those where snakes opened their mouths were believed to be of evil. In the boxes between snake’s mouths and the bottom rung of a ladder were other life lessons, which were more or less neutral. In this way, snakes were considered to be vices, linked to certain negative concepts such as those of vain, conceit, sensuality, illusion, etc. The game was a depiction of the Hindu belief of Karma, in the simplest of words.
The game turned out to be such a great tool for teaching children the values of a culture that it is not only Hindus that used the game as a game for learning. Other religions, including Buddhism, Islam, and Jainism, also adopted the Mokshapat game as a method to teach their children the values of their culture in an engaging way. The game is such that it builds a level of curiosity about the vices and virtues of a culture, which it may not do as much when merely being read aloud from a book. You are also probably thinking what all vices and virtues these different religious groups used for their versions of Mokshapat or snakes and ladders, right?
This curiosity is not limited only to you, or even just to the children who were taught their morals in this way, but also to the rest of the Western world. The game Mokshapat was discovered by the British colonisers of India during their centuries-long stay in India. It was in the 19th Century that the British picked up this game from India and took their own adaptation of it back to the nation that they came from. In the process, Mokshapat became the mere ‘Snakes and Ladders’ as we know it today. Of course, from England, the game went on to the rest of the world as well.
What must have been going through the mind of the person who invented the game? Of course, because it was so many years ago, the inventor of the game is more or less unknown, but there is no doubt that that person was a rather curious one. Maybe he was trying to think of a better way to teach children morals, maybe he was one of those reformative and progressive teachers — there are always those kinds wherever you look.
Whoever invented the game of Snakes and Ladders was playing on their curiosity when they came up with the idea which has been carried forward in an almost identical manner for all these years.
Don’t you want to know where you could go if you play on your curiosity? Click here to find your Curiosity Type by taking the Curiosity Test.
