This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
For over a thousand years before the New Kingdom, Senet appears to have been simply a game, played for its own sake by people who could afford a board and pieces. Somewhere in that long history it acquired a second meaning, and by the New Kingdom the thirty squares of the board had become a map of the journey a soul makes through the afterlife, with named squares standing for hazards and blessings the deceased would encounter on the way to eternal life.
Queen Nefertari's tomb, painted around 1250 BC, shows her playing Senet alone, seated before an empty opposite side of the board, an image scholars read as the queen playing against fate itself for the right to pass into the afterlife. Chapter seventeen of the Book of the Dead makes the connection explicit in text, listing Senet among the trials the dead must complete. No text explains exactly when or why a race game turned into a religious rite, only that by the time the tomb paintings were made, it clearly had.