The History of the Royal Game of Ur
Few games have a story this long. The Royal Game of Ur was played for thousands of years, forgotten, dug out of a royal tomb, and only decoded in the last few decades.
Ur, around 2600 BCE
Ur was one of the great Sumerian cities of southern Mesopotamia, in what is now southern Iraq. The game takes its name from where its finest examples were found: the Royal Cemetery of Ur, a burial ground for the city's elite that dates to roughly 2600–2400 BCE. “Royal” describes the find-spot, not the players. The game was widely played, and scratched or cheap boards turn up as often as precious ones.
The excavation
The British archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley excavated Ur in the 1920s and early 1930s, in a joint expedition of the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania Museum. Among the cemetery's treasures were several gaming boards with twenty squares, made of wood and inlaid with shell, red limestone and lapis lazuli. One of them is on display in the British Museum in London. Each player's seven pieces and the pyramid-shaped dice tell us how the equipment worked, but no rules were buried with the boards.
A game that travelled
Scholars call this family of games the “Game of Twenty Squares”. Boards with the same layout have been found across the ancient world, from the Mediterranean to Iran and beyond, and the game was played for well over two thousand years. Some of the most charming examples are casual ones. A board scratched into the base of a colossal winged bull from the Assyrian palace at Khorsabad, now in the British Museum, is thought to have been carved by guards passing the time. In Egypt, the game appears on the reverse of senet boxes, including ones buried with Tutankhamun.
The rule tablet
The rules survive thanks to a single Babylonian clay tablet, written in cuneiform by a scribe named Itti-Marduk-balāṭu and dated to 177 BCE, more than two thousand years after the Ur boards were made. Irving Finkel, a curator of cuneiform texts at the British Museum, deciphered it and worked out how the game was played: the route, the four dice, the rosettes and the captures. His reconstruction is now the standard way to play, and it is the version on this site. The tablet also ties squares of the board to fortunes, so the game may have carried a layer of divination as well as play.
No reconstruction can be certain. The tablet describes a late form of a game that was already ancient when it was written, and other rule sets exist. Finkel's is the best-attested, and it plays wonderfully.
The game that never quite died
Finkel later learned that the Jewish community of Kochi (Cochin) in southern India played a game on the same twenty-square layout into the twentieth century. If the line of descent is real, it is one of the longest-lived games in human history.
A modern revival
The game found a new audience online when the British Museum published a filmed match between Irving Finkel and the YouTuber Tom Scott, which has been watched by millions. Replica boards are now easy to find, and you can play it right here.
Keep exploring
- How to play: the rules, the board and the dice odds.
- Strategy guide: what the numbers say about good play.
- Printable board: play the ancient way, on paper.