People are often surprised, firstly, at just how long board games have been played and secondly, how sophisticated they can be although, of course, their simplicity or complexity depended upon the circumstances in which they were played. What may astonish readers is that many of those games of the past were so popular that, though centuries old, they are still played and enjoyed today.
This series of three articles covers roughly six thousand years of board game history. But is not comprehensive. The subject is too vast and the games too many. What these articles do provide is a light-hearted insight into the pursuits of our ancestors, and the similarities that connect the ancients playing their popular board games with the players of today.
For anyone interested in attempting to play the games mentioned here, where the rules or part of the rules are known, they are provided (or players can emulate those of the past and devise their own rules – and possibly create a new game). The games all have easily drawn boards and can be played using, like our forbearers, stones, shells, beads or game-pieces from other games. Complex games, such as chess or backgammon, are covered merely for their historical context; their rules (and problems and solutions) are covered in many books or can be easily be found on the internet.
Variations on a Theme
Games were played by all social classes. Boards might be wooden (plain, jewelled or painted), burnt into leather, embroidered on cloth, etched into clay tablets, stone seats or pavements or just formed on the ground.
Some games have been found as decorations on tables, chests, boxes or lids. Just like today, some came with little drawers to contain the playing pieces, which were made in various abstract shapes or carved into men or animals. Or they just had flat counters, painted, carved, jewelled, and made from precious metals, jewels or glass. Poorer people used clay, wood, shells or stones.
Moves could be made via throwing sticks, knucklebones (also called astralagi) or a die (or two or three dice). These latter were made from a variety of materials including gold, brass, copper, glass, ivory, marble or painted or carved stones with dots. The latter have been found shaped as cubes, rectangles and pyramids. Cubic dice, thought to be at least 3,000 years old, were found in South East Iran. It is conjectured that Neolithic people played board games which could possibly take the history of games-playing back another two or three thousand years.
As today, games were fluid: they were adapted, tweaked or evolved while on the move with settlers, merchants, soldiers or other travellers. Players made changes to game layouts, making them larger or smaller to fit the time available, or added a few extra spaces, holes or lines, or designed it in such a way that more than one type of game could be played, or just changed the rules to suit themselves.
An example of this process is perfectly illustrated at the archaeological dig at Vijayanagara (a rich city in India which existed between 1350 and 1565), where a number of different board games and layouts were found. The games, while unique of their time, were also fundamentally recognisable, for example, mancala, alquerque and merels.
Reaching Back Far Into Antiquity
The earliest games we are currently aware of were found in tombs. Most likely these are the ‘ deluxe’ versions of the well-off, although both archaeologists and historians are sure they were played by all social classes, perhaps painted onto wood, or scratched into stone or sand. The game thought to be the oldest currently can be dated to before 3,500 BCE – which put into context is a thousand years before the building of Stonehenge.
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During the 1920s Sir Leonard Woolley was excavating the royal cemetery tomb of Queen Shub-ad in Mesopotamia which dated from between 3500-3200 BCE. On first entering the tomb, Sir Leonard came across a group of 10 women’s bodies carefully arranged in two rows, wearing gold headdresses as they had joined their mistress in death. At the end of one row was the remains of a beautiful harp, the finger-bones of the harpist still laid across the strings where death had taken her while she played.
Queen Shub-ad’s body lay on the remains of a wooden bier, a gold cup near her hand, her upper body entirely hidden by a mass of beads of gold, silver, lapis lazuli, carnelian, agate and chalcedony, long strings covering her like a cloak to the waist. She wore an elaborate headdress and fixed into the back of it was a gold five-flowered ‘Spanish comb.’ Sir Leonard also found a squashed object which turned out to be a sophisticated game board which he dubbed the Royal Game of Ur.
Royal Game of Ur (BabelStone/Public Domain)
Five other gaming boards were found, all inlaid, ‘though decoration of the squares differed.’ One board had little disks of shell with red or blue centres. Another was more elaborate, with shell plaques engraved with decorative animal scenes but they all agreed in one detail: the coloured rosette decoration appeared in the same place and it was assumed they would be lucky or unlucky spaces.
The finest of them can be seen displayed in the British Museum. The games were engraved on tops of hollow boxes, with drawers to house the counters and dice and appeared to have been played with seven black and seven white counters and three white and three lapis dice.
During the 1980s, Dr. Irving Finkel of the British Museum found a tablet. Translating it, he discovered it was by an author musing about a two-player game: whether the block of twelve squares had any astronomical significance; that one square brought ‘fine beer’ and another made a player ‘powerful like a lion;’ how pieces could not enter the board until a certain number was thrown and how the first person to reach the exit and remove their pieces from the board was the winner.
Around 1900 BCE a city was built on Crete. Homer described it as a ‘great city… called Knossos on …a land called Crete, in the midst of the wine-dark sea, a fair, rich land begirt with water’. For years scholars believed it to be a myth because of the legend he related of the minotaur and the labyrinth: King Minos, a great sea-king and tyrant and overlord of the Aegean, built a navy to crush piracy in his seas while hiding a monster in a dark labyrinth under his palace. Hidden for shame, it being the progeny of his wife, Pasiphae, born half-man-half-bull because of her ardent passion for a bull.
Every seven years, seven youths and seven maidens from Athens were sacrificed to it in tribute or retribution for the killing of Minos’ son at the Olympic Games. On the third tribute, Prince Theseus, son of King Aegeus volunteered to be one of the youths intending to kill the minotaur. At Minos’ court, the king’s daughter, fair-haired Ariadne fell in love with Theseus as he stood in the group of doomed men and women.
That night, before they were led to the entrance of the labyrinth, she gave him a spool of thread with which he could retrace his stops and a short sword to hide in his tunic. Taking the lead, he killed the man-beast and escaped the maze. Ariadne and he, with the others, raced to board the Athenian ship. On his return, he forgot to change the black sails for white. King Aegus seeing the ‘black-winged ship’ for sorrow believing his son dead threw himself into the sea now called after him.
The ship was preserved, timbers being replaced as they rotted, although philosophers debated whether it could be classed as the same vessel or not. In 399 BCE Socrates’ execution was delayed to await the return of the vessel which sailed every year from Athens to Delos to make solemn sacrifices. When Schliemann in 1844 found a wall painting with an athlete vaulting over the back of a mighty charging bull while excavating at the Mycenaean site at Tiryns, he believed he had found the origin of the Minotaur legend.
The Royal Game of Knossos
Then the city and its palace were discovered to exist. Amazed archaeologists found multi-storied buildings and sophisticated sanitation with water closets. Excavating the palace complex revealed interior walls decorated with flowering plants, fountains, joyful women wearing low-necked tops with puffed sleeves and flounced skirts conversing in gardens. In one painting a youth wore a silver earring and agate bracelet; another had picked white crocuses to place in a vase.
Evans was amazed at colours ‘ almost as brilliant as when laid down over three thousand years before’. There were fragments of blue and green porcelain and painted crystal plaques. One plaque showed a galloping bull against an azure background, its head with a grey-blue horn depicted in plaster-relief. Its prominent yellow eye with fiery red iris was ‘ full of life and spirit’. The palace had ‘flushing’ toilets and a sewage system with covered manholes to give easy access for inspection. Ordinary houses were made of wood and plaster, with ground-floor double doors and rows of windows in first and second storeys; some even had attics with windows.
