Royal Game Of Ur – One Of The Oldest Game Boards Discovered

AncientPages.com   - Question: What was the Royal Game Of Ur?

Answer: In the ancient world, board games were as popular as they are today. Board games were very common in ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia and other parts of the world.

The Royal Game of Ur is a board game made between 2600 and 2400 BC. It means the game is at least 4,400 years old!

It was discovered in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) in the 1920s when the British archaeologist Leonard Woolley was digging into the ruins of a long-buried royal city. Among many amazing treasures, he found several games and the Royal Game Of Ur is one of them.

The board's wood has decayed, but the hard, decorative pattern of shell, red limestone and lapis lazuli (a blueish mineral) has survived. The counters were made from shale and shell.

See also: Ancient Egyptian Toys And Games In Focus

The Ur-style Twenty Squares game board was also known in Egypt as Asseb, and has been found in Pharaoh Tutankhamen's tomb, among other places. Discovery of a tablet partially describing the game play has allowed the game to be played again after over 2000 years, although reconstructions of the detailed rules have differed widely.

The Royal Game of Ur was played with two sets, one black and one white, of seven markers and three tetrahedral dice. After around 1000 BC, the layout of the twenty squares was altered to make the end course for the markers a straight line.

The rules of the game as it was played in Mesopotamia are not completely known but there have been a number of reconstructions of game play, based on a cuneiform tablet of Babylonian origin dating from 177–176 BC by the scribe Itti-Marduk-Balāṭu. It is universally agreed that the Royal Game of Ur, like Senet, is a race game.

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