Long before chess, backgammon, or playing cards existed, people gathered across ancient Mesopotamia to roll tetrahedral dice and race their tokens along a track of twenty carved squares.
Unearthed from royal tombs
In the 1920s, British archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley led excavations in modern-day southern Iraq at the site of ancient Ur. Among the treasures of the Royal Cemetery, Woolley discovered five ornate gameboards crafted from wood, inlaid with shell, carnelian, and lapis lazuli, dating to around 2600 BC. Similar boards were later discovered from Crete to the Indus Valley, proving that the game had swept across the entire ancient world.
Deciphering the lost rules
For decades, nobody knew how the game was played. The breakthrough came in the 1980s when Dr. Irving Finkel, assistant keeper of Ancient Mesopotamian script at the British Museum, identified a fragmentary cuneiform clay tablet written in 177 BC by a Babylonian scribe named Itti-Marduk-balāṭu.
Finkel translated the delicate cuneiform signs, which recorded the exact rules: a two-player race of seven pieces, four four-sided dice, and safe-haven rosette squares granting extra turns.
Play Ur today
On The Gamepire, you can play The Royal Game of Ur right in your browser against Ea-Nasir, or with a friend online. Forty-five centuries later, the dice still roll.