Board Game of Ur

The Royal Game of Ur, also called the Board Game of Ur or the Game of Twenty Squares, is one of the oldest known board games in the world. Its best-known example dates to roughly 2600-2400 BCE, and it was found in the ancient Sumerian city of Ur, in what is now southern Iraq. The game matters because it shows that structured, rule-based play was already a part of daily and ceremonial life in the earliest cities, and because it later spread across the Near East, surviving for thousands of years.

Ur was a major Sumerian city-state near the Euphrates, and its rulers and elites left behind rich burials. Between 1922 and 1934, the British archaeologist Leonard Woolley led excavations there, uncovering a cemetery that held tombs filled with jewelry, musical instruments, and fine objects. Among them were several game boards made of wood, shell, bone, red limestone, and lapis lazuli. The most famous board was found in a grave in the royal cemetery and is now in the British Museum.

The board has twenty squares arranged in two sections: a block of three rows by four squares, linked by a narrow bridge of two squares to a smaller block of two rows by three squares. Many squares are decorated with rosettes, eyes, or other patterns. Each player had a set of counters, and movement was determined by throwing tetrahedral dice, often described as pyramid-shaped, with marked corners. Players raced their pieces along a track, and some squares probably granted extra turns or protection.

The original rules were not recorded at the time. Our understanding comes from a cuneiform tablet written in Babylon around 177 BCE by a scribe named Itti-Marduk-balatu, which describes a version of the game and offers some clues about how it was played. Scholars, including the British Museum curator Irving Finkel, have used it to propose a modern reconstruction. Because the game changed over many centuries, the rules in 2400 BCE may have differed, and some details remain uncertain. Some scholars also suggest the squares had symbolic or divinatory meaning, though the evidence is limited.

The game was remarkably durable. Boards of the same basic layout have been found in places from Egypt to Iran, and in Crete and India, and a related version was played by Jewish communities in Cochin, India, into the twentieth century. It is also related to the Egyptian game of Senet, though the two are distinct. Today the Royal Game of Ur is reproduced in museums and sold as a modern game, offering a direct and playful link to people who lived more than four thousand years ago.