(c. 4th century BC). It is also mentioned in Book XVII of the Analects of Confucius and in two of the books of Mencius (c. 3rd century BC). In ancient China, Go was one of the four cultivated arts of the Chinese scholar gentleman, along with calligraphy, painting and playing the musical instrument guqin, and examinations of skill in those arts was used to qualify candidates for service in the bureaucracy. Go was brought to Korea in the second century BC when the Han dynasty expanded into the Korean peninsula and it arrived in Japan in the 5th or 6th century AD and it quickly became a favorite aristocratic pastime. Chinese Chess or Xiangqi seems to have been played during the Tang dynasty, any earlier attestation is problematic. Several Xiangqi pieces are known from the Northern Song dynasty (960–1126). It is unknown exactly how Xiangqi developed. Other traditional East Asian Chess variants include Shogi (Japan) and Janggi (Korea). Playing cards or tiles were invented in China as early as the 9th century during the Tang dynasty (618–907). The earliest unambiguous attestation of paper playing cards date back to 1294. The modern game of Dominoes developed from early Chinese tile based games. What appears to have been the earliest references to gaming tiles are mentions of kwat pai, or "bone tiles", used in gambling, in Chinese writings no later than 900 AD. The earliest definite references to Chinese dominoes are found in the literature of the Song dynasty (960–1279), while Western-style dominoes are a more recent variation, with the earliest examples being of early-18th century Italian design. The modern tile game Mahjong is based on older Chinese card games like Khanhoo, peng hu, and shi hu. The pre-modern Chinese also played ball games such as Cuju which was a ball and net game similar to football, and Chuiwan, which is similar to modern golf. Gallery Africa The most widespread of the native African games is Mancala. Mancala is a family of board games played around the world, sometimes called "sowing" games, or "count-and-capture" games, which describes the gameplay. The word mancala:منقلة comes from the Arabic word naqala:نقلة meaning literally "to move". The earliest evidence of Mancala consists of fragments of pottery boards and several rock cuts found in Aksumite in Ethiopia, Matara (now in Eritrea), and Yeha (also in Ethiopia), which have been dated by archaeologists to between the 6th and