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History of Backgammon - the game as we know it
Posted By: Strato In Response To: History of Backgammon - the game as we know it (Chris Bray)
Date: Wednesday, 6 June 2012, at 12:53 p.m.
Until 2004, we thought Backgammon might have originated in Sumeria:
From Wikipedia: The Royal Game of Ur, also known as the Game of Twenty Squares, refers to two game boards found in the Royal Tombs of Ur in Iraq by Sir Leonard Woolley in the 1920s. The two boards date from the First Dynasty of Ur, before 2600 BC, thus making the Royal Game of Ur one of the older examples of board gaming equipment found, although Senet boards found in Egyptian graves predate it as much as 900 years. The game is still played. One of the two boards is exhibited in the collections of the British Museum in London.
Then in 2004...
From: http://www.payvand.com/news/04/dec/1029.html
Excerpts - The oldest backgammon in the world along with 60 pieces has been unearthed beneath the rubbles of the legendary Burnt City in Sistan-Baluchistan province, southeastern Iran, Iranian Cultural Heritage News Agency reported.
Iranian archeologists working on the relics of the 5,000-year-old civilization argue this backgammon is much older than the one already discovered in Mesopotamia and their evidence is strong enough to claim the board game was first played in the Burnt City and then transferred to other civilizations.
...the board features an engraved serpent coiling around itself for 20 times, thus producing 20 slots for the game, more affectionately known in Persian as Nard. The engraving, artistically done, indicates artisans in the Burnt City were masters of the craft. "The 60 pieces were also unearthed inside a terracotta vessel beside the board. They were made of common stones quarried in the city, including agate and turquoise..."
-------------------- If you do buy a copy of "The Backgammon Book" by Jacoby and Crawford, try to get the larger paperback version, not the small one, because the larger one has a lot of large images in the History section of the book, some I have not seen elsewhere. I think the History section is also longer in the bigger book. There is also a photo of one of the Sumerian boards at the British Musuem mentioned above.
Of interest to DaveT:
What the authors say in the first paragraph of the History section of "The Backgammon Book" is:
The history of backgammon is long, complicated, very incomplete - and facscinating. The exact origins of the game remain unknown, though there is much conjecture, a good deal of it both ingenious and farfetched.
-------------------- Somewhere, I have a scanned copy of Edmond Hoyle's "A Short Treatise On the Game of Back-Gammon" published in 1745. It was sent to me about 12 years ago by Mark Driver. Mark found an original in a library in Australia. Unless I am confused with some other literature, what I seem to remember about it was that it was about the version of backgammon we play today (without doubling, and of course no Jacoby and Crawford Rules) and there was a bits about strategy, such as odds and probabilities and how to play some of the opening rolls - but I am not sure, I'll have to dig it up.
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