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. 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. One board, held by the British Museum, is dated to 2600 – c. 2400 BC, making it one of the oldest game boards in the world. and boards for it have been found in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, Sri Lanka, Cyprus and Crete. Four gameboards bearing a very close resemblance to the Royal Game of Ur were found in the tomb of Tutankhamun. These boards came with small boxes to store dice and game pieces

The Game of Ur eventually acquired superstitious significance and the tablet of Itti-Marduk-balāṭu provides vague predictions for the players' futures if they land on certain spaces, by the time they started emigrating to Israel in the 1950s after World War II. shows the surviving photos of the lost tablet "DLB," which described a ruleset for The Royal Game Of Ur.|left]]The British archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley discovered five gameboards of the Game of Ur during his excavation of the Royal Cemetery at Ur between 1922 and 1934.

All five boards were of an identical type, but they were made of different materials and had different decorations.]]

When the Game of Ur was first discovered, no one knew how it was played. Then, in the early 1980s, Irving Finkel, a curator at the British Museum, translated a clay tablet written 177 BC by the Babylonian scribe Itti-Marduk-balāṭu describing how the game was played during that time period, based on an earlier description of the rules by another scribe named Iddin-Bēl.

Footnotes

References

Further reading

  • Botermans, Jack (1988). Le Monde des jeux. Paris: Le Chêne. .
  • Crist, Walter, Anne-Elizabeth Dunn-Vaturi and Alex de Voogt (2016). Ancient Egyptians at Play: Board Games Across Borders. UK: Bloomsbury.
  • Finkel, Irving (2007), "On the Royal Game of Ur," in Ancient Board Games in Perspective, ed. Irving Finkel. London: British Museum Press, pp. 16–32.
  • Finkel, Irving (1991). La tablette des régles du jeu royal d'Ur. Jouer dans l'Antiquité, Catalogue de l'Exposition. Marseille: Musée d'Archéologie Méditerranéenne.
  • Finkel, Irving (2005) [1995]. Games: Discover and Play Five Famous Ancient Games (3rd ed.). London: British Museum Press.
  • Lhôte, Jean-Marie (1993). Histoire des jeux de société. Paris: Flammarion. .
  • Parlett, David (2018) [1999]. History of Board Games. Brattleboro, VT: Echo.
  • Deciphering the world's oldest rule book – Irving Finkel – The British Museum
  • Tom Scott vs Irving Finkel: The Royal Game of Ur – The British Museum
  • Play the Royal Game of Ur on GouziGouza