History

A game from the dawn of cities

The Royal Game of Ur is one of the oldest board games we can still play. The boards that give it its name were buried in the ground of southern Iraq for more than four thousand years before anyone alive had seen them played.

Born in the city of Ur

The game is named for Ur, one of the great cities of ancient Sumer in southern Mesopotamia — modern Iraq. The finest surviving boards date to roughly 2600–2400 BC, in the Early Dynastic period — roughly as old as the earliest Egyptian pyramids.

It is also known as the Game of Twenty Squares, after the board pattern it shares with a wider family of games played across the ancient Near East and Egypt.

Unearthed at the Royal Cemetery

Between 1922 and 1934, the British archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley excavated the Royal Cemetery of Ur and found five of these gameboards among the grave goods — objects of shell, red limestone, and lapis lazuli, made for people of high rank.

The best-preserved board is now in the British Museum in London (museum number 120834). The lapis-and-shell look of this site's board is an original rendering inspired by it — not a copy.

Three thousand years, many lands

The game did not stay in Ur. Boards and traces have turned up across Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Cyprus, Crete, and as far as Sri Lanka, and people went on playing versions of it for roughly three thousand years, into late antiquity.

A late descendant called Aasha survived among the Jewish community of Kochi in India, who still played it — with twelve pieces a side and cowrie shells for dice — until they emigrated to Israel in the 1950s.

The rules, read from a clay tablet

Nobody had written down how to play — until Irving Finkel, a curator and Assyriologist at the British Museum, reconstructed the rules in the early 1980s. His key source was a Babylonian clay tablet (British Museum, BM 33333B), written in cuneiform around 177 BC by a scribe named Itti-Marduk-balatu, following an earlier account by the scribe Iddin-Bel. The tablet itself was dug from the ruins of Babylon in 1880.

The rules on this site follow Finkel's reconstruction. It is a careful, well-argued reading rather than a certainty: the ancient tablet actually describes a more elaborate game, bound up with omens and fortune-telling, so the exact original play is not known for sure.

A likely ancestor of backgammon

Race games where you dash your pieces around a track and bear them off never really went away. The Game of Ur is widely thought to be a probable ancestor of the "tables" family of games — the line that leads, eventually, to backgammon.

A quick timeline

Watch it played

Tom Scott vs Irving Finkel: The Royal Game of Ur
The British Museum · International Tabletop Day 2017 — opens on YouTube

Sources & credits

The modern rules are a scholarly reconstruction; the exact original rules are not known with certainty. Board and piece artwork are an original stylised rendering inspired by British Museum object 120834, not a reproduction.

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