The game was popular among all social classes. These boards came with small boxes to store dice and game pieces and many had senet boards on the reverse sides so that the same board could be used to play either game and merely had to be flipped over. Four gameboards bearing a very close resemblance to the Royal Game of Ur were found in the tomb of Tutankhamun. The Game of Ur was popular across the Middle East and boards for it have been found in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, Sri Lanka, Cyprus and Crete. History A graffito version of the game from the palace of Sargon II (British Museum in London) A game box for playing senet and Twenty Squares, 1635–1458 BC Like modern backgammon, the game combines elements of both strategy and luck. The object of the game is to run the course of the board and bear all one's pieces off before one's opponent. A partial description in cuneiform of the rules of the Game of Ur as played in the second century BC has been preserved on a Babylonian clay tablet written by the scribe Itti-Marduk-balāṭu.īased on this tablet and the shape of the gameboard, British Museum curator Irving Finkel reconstructed the basic rules of how the game might have been played. Copies of the game have since been found by other archaeologists across the Middle East. The Game of Ur received its name because it was first rediscovered by the English archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley during his excavations of the Royal Cemetery at Ur between 19. It was eventually forgotten everywhere except among the Jewish population of the Indian city of Kochi, who continued playing a version of it called 'Asha' until the 1950s when they began emigrating to Israel. The Game of Ur remained popular until late antiquity, when it stopped being played, possibly evolving into, or being displaced by, a form of tables game. The Royal Game of Ur is sometimes equated to another ancient game which it closely resembles and which is called the Game of Twenty Squares or Game of Twenty (see below).Īt the height of its popularity, the game acquired spiritual significance, and events in the game were believed to reflect a player's future and convey messages from deities or other supernatural beings. 2400 BC, making it one of the oldest game boards in the world. One board, held by the British Museum, is dated to c. The game was popular across the Middle East among people of all social strata and boards for playing it have been found at locations as far away from Mesopotamia as Crete and Sri Lanka. The Royal Game of Ur is a two-player strategy race board game of the tables family that was first played in ancient Mesopotamia during the early third millennium BC.
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