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The royal game of Ur, at the British Museum

The Royal Game of Ur, also known as the Game of Twenty Squares, refers to two game boards found in the Royal Tombs of Ur in Iraq by Sir Leonard Woolley in the 1920s. The two boards date from the First Dynasty of Ur, before 2600 BCE, thus making the Royal Game of Ur probably the oldest set of board gaming equipment ever found. The game is still played in Iraq to this day.^[1] One of the two boards is exhibited in the collections of the British Museum in London.

Playing the game

The Royal Game of Ur was played with two sets (one black and one white) of seven markers and three tetrahedral dice. The rules of the game as it was played in Mesopotamia are not known but there is a reliable reconstruction of gameplay based on a cuneiform tablet of Babylonian origin dating from 177–176 BCE. It is universally agreed that the Royal Game of Ur, like Senet, is a race game.

Both games may be predecessors to the present-day backgammon.

Graffito boards

A graffito version of the game in the British Museum in London

A graffito version of the game was discovered on one of the human-headed winged bull gate sentinels from the palace of Sargon II (721 - 705 BCE) in the city of Khorsabad,^[1] now in the British Museum in London (see illustration). Similar games have since been discovered on other sculptures in other museums.

References in popular culture

The television series Lost references the discovery of the game when John Locke explains the origins of Backgammon to Walt in the episode Pilot "Part 2" in Season 1.

References

• Jean-Marie Lhôte, Histoire des jeux de société, 1994 Flammarion
• Jack Botermans, Tony Burrett, Peter Van Delft, Carla Van Splunteren, Le monde des Jeux, 1987 Cté Nlle des Editions du Chêne
• Finkel Irving, La tablette des régles du jeu royal d'Ur, Jouer dans l'Antiquité, cat. exp., Marseille, musée d'Archéologie méditerranéenne, 1991.
• "Iran's Burnt City Throws up World’s Oldest Backgammon", Persian Journal, 4 December 2004.

External links

• The Royal Game of Ur, including history and suggested gameplay
• Royal Game of Ur pages, Rules history and links
• The Royal Game of Ur, playing the game with another player
• Time's article on the game
• Play online against human opponents
• Royal Game of Ur as Zillion of Games game
• Play online against human opponents

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