Today the name of the Royal Game of Ur, sometimes called a game in 20 fields, from the five boards, found in the tombs of the city of Ur. Centuries ago it was an important Sumerian port, located near the mouth of the Euphrates to the Persian Gulf. Kits for the game in the 20th century found a team of Sir Leonard Woolley, who led excavations there.
one of the boards lay in the tomb of the princess. Developed with shells, red limestone and lapis lazuli imported from Afghanistan, the board had to be a luxury that very few people could afford. Its age is estimated at about four thousand five hundred years.
board the Royal game consisted of two rectangles measuring three to four and three in the two fields combined two fields as bridge. In addition to the game board you were needed tetrahedral dice, like the pyramids and two sets of checkers. It all remained silent, however, only an artifact of unknown purpose, such as the board of the Egyptian Senetu, if not for Irving Finkel.
Finkel from an early age was fascinated with antiquity, the orient and board games. Also he dreamed of working in the British Museum. In college, where he obtained a doctorate in Mesopotamian exorcisms, he learned to read the cuneiform writing. It helped a lot to get a job in your dream institution.
One of the entertainment Finkel was viewing the museums and not put for visitors tablets with cuneiform. The museum’s collections there are about 130,000, but Finkel had time and a lot of stubbornness. On the back of one of them museologist saw a drawing of the board.
Once translated, the inscription of the tablet turned out that this was a statement game. It was not as full as today’s counterparts, but enough to play several possible variants of the game in the Royal game of UR. Like the later Backgammon is well known to us Chinese, it was a racing game.
Two players had, throwing bone, move all their pieces of the calculated route to the finish line. Difficulty was the possibility of capturing the enemy pawns, by not jumping at his own pawn. Kostka had the shape of a tetrahedron and had the tops marked white or black. The result was not a line so the number and color.
With the discovery of the British Museum, at the instigation of Finkel, could spend the Royal game of Ur in the modern version of the reconstructed rules. Available today are also several cyforwych variants of the game.
This simple by today’s standards, but still a nice play, copied in many cultures. From Mesopotamia she wandered with traders and soldiers. Game board in 20 fields were found among others in the tomb of Tutankhamun, who ruled Egypt in the fourteenth century BC. This finding was so over a thousand years younger than the boards of Ur.
We suspect that Kings game there was no entertainment only for kings. Lamassu on the sculpture, winged bull with a human head from the palace of Sargon II (VIII century BC), found engraved with a sharp object drawing, which according to archaeologists is “cheap” version of the board game in 20 fields.
long considered that the Royal game of Ur has been supplanted by backgammon and forgotten for centuries. Finkel saw, however, accidentally wooden board with the coming of the twentieth century, the city of Kochi in India. It turned out that the game has preserved the local Jewish minority. Irving Finkel sought originating from those parties retired teacher who returned to Israel. Over the millennia, the number of pieces increased to 12 and the system 20 fields on the board has changed, but without a doubt it was the Royal Game of Ur, still popular after more than four years of existence.
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