Cabinet · Case VI — The oldest boards

The Royal Game of Ur & Senet

Two boards, five thousand years old, both racing pieces by the throw of dice or sticks — and one of them came with its rulebook written in clay.

Board games are older than writing. The two most ancient of them that we can still, in a limited way, play — Egypt’s senet and Sumer’s Royal Game of Ur — are both race games: pieces set at one end, a finish at the other, and the movement decided by chance. That marriage of luck and position, sealed in the third millennium BCE, structures an enormous share of all gaming since, from the tables family to every “roll and move” board of the last century. To look at these two boards is to watch the entire genre being invented.

Senet: the game of passing

Senet appears in Egypt around 3100 BCE — a slab of thirty squares in three rows of ten, pieces of two colours or shapes, and movement by throwing sticks (two-sided, unlike dice: see the dice drawer). For two thousand years it was Egypt’s game, painted in tomb after tomb: nobles seated at the board, playing against an unseen opponent. Because senet appears in funerary contexts with such insistence — the dead playing senet for eternity — Egyptologists read it as carrying religious weight: the square marked with the nfr sign (“good, beautiful”) and others with water, rebirth and union hieroglyphs suggest the pieces enacted the passing of the soul through the perils of the underworld. Scholars such as Timothy Kendall and Peter Piccione have argued that the later religious texts — the so-called Coffin Texts — turn the game explicitly into a combat between the soul and its enemies. When Tutankhamun was buried in the 14th century BCE, four senet boards went into the tomb with him — the best-equipped player in the archaeological record.

Ur: the game of twenty squares

Leonard Woolley, excavating the Royal Cemetery of Ur in southern Iraq between 1922 and 1934, found several game boards of extraordinary luxury — lapis lazuli, shell, red paste and bone — among graves dated around 2600–2400 BCE. The board is a rosette-marked track of twenty squares in a distinctive shape: a block of three-by-four, a bridge of two, and a tail of three-by-two. The Royal Game of Ur spread astonishingly far: boards or fragments from Iran to the Levant, and later copies as far as Crete and Cyprus; kings of Ur played it, and scribes copied it for two millennia.

The tablet that spoke

For decades the boards were mute. Then Irving Finkel, a curator at the British Museum, worked through a cuneiform tablet written around 177 BCE by a Babylonian scribe named Itti-Marduk-balatu — a self-declared game enthusiast — which sets out, with schoolmasterly exasperation at players who do it wrong, the rules of “the game of twenty squares.” With the tablet and the boards together, the game can be played again today: two players race pieces from off-board through the track to the end, throwing tetrahedral dice (only the marked points count), landing on the rosette squares for another throw, capturing enemy pieces on open squares — except on certain marked “safe” squares. A modern curiosity follows: the reconstructed rules have even been implemented in video games and studied for their balance, a nice instance of probability thinking meeting the deepest past.

What the boards prove

Three things, at least. First, that chance-as-mechanism is as old as cities: both games need a randomizer, and both chose a different one, evidence that the idea of generating fate mechanically was general, not a local invention. Second, that games travelled with trade: the twenty-square game’s board has been found from the Indus to the Aegean, five hundred years before alphabetic writing. Third, that play and religion were not separate spheres: senet is unintelligible without the afterlife, and even the game of Ur carries an omen-text tradition on the same tablets that copy its rules — a game consulted like an oracle, exactly as astragali were.

After Ur: the long road to backgammon

The twenty-square track thinned and lengthened over the centuries. By the Roman Empire its heirs were the duodecim scripta boards incised in pub courtyards at Pompeii and legionary forts; in Persia the game became nard, praised in the Shahnameh as an invention of the sage Wuzurgmihr; the Islamic world played it and carried it along the Silk Road; medieval Europe called it “tables” and Charles IX’s Paris nearly banned it. That unbroken lineage — the subject of the backgammon drawer — makes Ur not merely the oldest game in the cabinet but the direct ancestor of a game still played in cafés tonight.

Seeing them today

The Woolley boards, the rules tablet and Tutankhamun’s senet sets are among the star objects of the collections listed in the museums drawer — the British Museum and the Penn Museum for Ur, Cairo and the Metropolitan for senet. Their place in the long story of chance is set out in the short history that opens this cabinet, and their world-wide contemporaries — patolli, pachisi, mancala, mahjong — wait in the world tour drawer. For the terms of art scattered through this page, the glossary keeps the definitions.