Royal Game of Ur

Royal Game of Ur

One of the five gameboards found by Sir Leonard Woolley in the Royal Cemetery at Ur, now held in the British Museum[1]
Years active	Earliest boards date to c. 2600 – c. 2400 BC[a] during the Early Dynastic III, being played popularly in the Middle East through late antiquity and in Kochi, India through the 1950s
Genres	Board game Race game Dice game
Players	2
Setup time	10–30 seconds
Playing time	Usually around 30 minutes
Chance	Medium (dice rolling)
Skills	Strategy, tactics, counting, probability
Synonyms	Game of Twenty Squares Game of Ur

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 c. 2600 – c. 2400 BC, making it one of the oldest game boards in the world.^[2]

The Royal Game of Ur is sometimes equated to another ancient game which it closely resembles, the Game of Twenty Squares.

At 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. 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. 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.^[3]

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 1922 and 1934. Copies of the game have since been found by other archaeologists across the Middle East. 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.

Based on this tablet and the shape of the gameboard, Irving Finkel, a British Museum curator, reconstructed the basic rules of how the game might have been played. The object of the game is to run the course of the board and bear all one's pieces off before one's opponent. Like modern backgammon, the game combines elements of both strategy and luck.

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