Mysterious stone spheres could be from an ancient Aegean board game

Stone spheres found at ancient settlements across the Aegean and Mediterranean Seas could have been playing pieces for a board game involving stone slabs

By Jeremy Hsu

Mysterious stone spheres could be remnants of an ancient board game played across Aegean and Mediterranean settlements thousands of years ago, according to an analysis helped by artificial intelligence.

“Similar stones have been discovered in Crete, in other Aegean islands, in Cyprus,” says Konstantinos Trimmis at the University of Bristol in the UK. “They’re all coming out of excavations and people are always puzzled about what the stones are.”

To weigh the evidence for competing theories about the stones’ purpose, Trimmis …