Games
Royal Game of Ur
Also Known As The Game of Twenty Squares The scholarly name for the wider game family the Royal Game of Ur board belongs to, used since Irving Finkel deciphered a cuneiform rules tablet for it.
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The Royal Game of Ur is an ancient Mesopotamian race game for two players, named for the royal tombs of the Sumerian city of Ur, in modern Iraq, where several game boards were excavated in the 1920s by the British archaeologist Leonard Woolley. It is played on a distinctive board made of two rectangular sections of squares joined by a narrow bridge of squares, with pieces moved along a marked path according to throws of pyramidal dice. It is among the oldest board games with a securely dated physical archaeological record, and is long treated as standing at the deep root of the later family of race and dice games that includes backgammon, although the historical line of transmission across the many centuries between the two is undocumented and debated.
Facts
Origin YearGame boards recovered from the Royal Cemetery at Ur, excavated by Leonard Woolley beginning in 1922, are dated to approximately 2600 to 2400 BC, among the most securely dated board games known from archaeology. A later cuneiform tablet, attributed to the Babylonian scribe Itti-Marduk-balatu and dated to around 177 BC, records rules for a later form of the same game, showing it remained in play for over two thousand years. Originating Region Game TypeBoard game, race and dice, archaeologically attested 1 Governing BodySociete internationale d'Ur, founded fall 2022 at MIT; organizes tournaments, standardizes rule sets and maintains member player statistics for the game internationally. 2 Cross-Tradition Connections
Ancestor Of
Backgammon, Games Why this is disputed. The Royal Game of Ur is long treated as standing at the deep root of the race and dice game family that includes backgammon, but the historical line of transmission across the many centuries between the two, and through the intermediate Roman game tabula, is undocumented and debated among game historians.
Sources
1. The Oxford History of Board Games
Oxford University Press, 1999
2. Societe Internationale d'Ur, Official Site
Societe Internationale d'UrHome pageQuote, Home page
The societe internationale d'UR was born during the 2022 fall semester at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology when MIT Visiting Professor Wasalu Jaco introduced the game to colleagues... we organize Ur tournaments, standardize rule sets (Engines), manage SIU member player statistics and acts as an information platform for any and all things Ur.
Encyclopaedia Britannica
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