The history of the Royal Game of Ur

Found in a royal cemetery

Between 1922 and 1934, the archaeologist Leonard Woolley excavated the Royal Cemetery at Ur, in southern Iraq. Among the gold, the lyres and the mass burials he found several game boards, inlaid with shell, lapis lazuli and red limestone, dating to around 2600–2400 BCE.

The boards were beautiful and completely mysterious. There were twenty squares in a distinctive shape, five of them marked with rosettes, along with pieces and tetrahedral dice — and no instructions of any kind. For half a century the Royal Game of Ur was an object rather than a game.

It was not a local curiosity either. Boards of the same design have been found across the Near East and beyond — in Egypt, Cyprus, Crete, Syria and Iran — and a version was carved into the pavement slabs of the palace at Nineveh, presumably by bored guards. This was one of the most widely played games of the ancient world.

The tablet that brought it back

The rules came from a completely different direction: a small cuneiform tablet in the British Museum's collection, written in Babylon around 177 BCE by a scribe named Itti-Marduk-balāṭu. It is a text about a game of twenty squares, with astrological associations attached to the squares — and, embedded in it, enough mechanical detail to reconstruct how the game worked.

Irving Finkel, a curator and cuneiform specialist at the British Museum, read the tablet and matched it to the boards. The reconstruction is not certain, and it describes a form of the game roughly two thousand years younger than the Ur boards — but it produces a game that works: tense, balanced, and decided by a genuine mix of luck and judgement.

Finkel's public demonstrations of the game — including a famous televised match against the YouTuber Tom Scott in 2017 — turned a museum curiosity into something people actually play. There are now apps, tournaments and an online community built around a game recovered from a royal tomb.

A game that never quite died

The most surprising part of the story is that the game may never have stopped being played. In the twentieth century, Finkel encountered a game played by the Jewish community of Kochi in southern India that closely resembles the ancient twenty-squares game — suggesting a line of transmission stretching from Mesopotamia, through the trade routes, to the Indian coast, and lasting into living memory.

The game's wider family did continue in a different form. Race games with dice, safe squares and capture — senet in Egypt, nard in Persia, tabula in Rome — are the tradition that eventually produced backgammon. Ur is not backgammon's direct ancestor, but it is its oldest surviving relative, and playing it makes the family resemblance obvious within about three turns.

Is it the oldest board game?

Close, and it depends what you mean.

• Senet, from Egypt, has older surviving boards — around 3100 BCE — but its rules are far less certain, and modern reconstructions are more speculative.
• Ur has slightly younger boards but a surviving rules text, which is why it is usually described as the oldest board game we can still play properly.
• Go has been played continuously for around 2,500 years with essentially unchanged rules, which is a different kind of record.

The honest summary: Ur is the oldest playable game, Go is the oldest continuously played one, and senet is the oldest object. All three claims are true, and the argument is mostly about the adverb.

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