Shahr-i Sokhta: How to Play the Oldest Board Game in the World, Iranian Edition

In 1922 the British archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley discovered something unexpected during his excavation of the Royal Cemetery of Ur, in Mesopotamia. Amidst the grave goods and treasures he uncovered a rectangular piece of wood, heavily ornamented and with indentations along the sides.

Woolley had found an ancient game, complete with pyramidal dice and pieces. Dubbed the “Royal Game of Ur” as it had, after all, come from a royal cemetery, it dated as far back as 2,600-2,400 BC, making it probably the oldest board game in the world.

Woolley would go on to find four more examples of the game over the next twelve years. These were fascinating curios, but the real breakthrough came in the 1980s when the magnificent Irving Finkel of the British Museum translated a cuneiform tablet which was found to contain partial rules for the game. Suddenly we could play a dead game again, one from the dawn of civilization.

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Following Woolley’s discovery, evidence has been found for the game being popular across social strata and in many cultures of the Middle East. The game was played for 2,000 years and at its most popular it apparently held divine significance, and a player’s fortunes was thought to indicate favor with the gods themselves.

Variants of the game are also known to exist, for example relating to the game boards found at Shahr-i Sokhta in Iran. This set, found in grave no.731 of this Bronze Age site, differed from Woolley’s finds: it lacked a “rosette” feature which Finkel’s translation indicated was key to how the original was played, and it had several different types of playing pieces.

The significance of these differing pieces has remained unknown until now, when a new study by Sam Jelveh and Hossein Moradi hopes to shed some light on this advanced variant of the game. And in the different pieces the study’s authors have gained new insight into how ancient board games were seen.

The design of the Shahr-i Sokhta find consisted of intertwined serpent biting its own tail, with the coils of the snake creating spaces for the pieces. This closely resembles another board game found in the Iranian city of Jiroft, but the find at Shahr-i Sokhta is clearly derivative of the older Royal Game of Ur.

The study proposes a new ruleset based on the unique features of the Shahr-i Sokhta version: the snake, and the new pieces. The snakes head and tail are in the smaller section of the board, and it is suggested that the game is a race between two players looking to escape the snake’s coils.

The game pieces are all wooden with the exception of two stone cones, and are not divided into two “teams” with differing markings as with game sets found elsewhere. There are ten triangles and ten jagged triangles which resemble stepped and smooth sided pyramids, as well as seven other pieces. An odd number, puzzlingly, due to there being three step-sided cross pieces.

Four “dice” were also found, numbered from one to four. This again differs from the Royal Game of Ur, which had dice with only two possible numbers. Taken together with the other differences above, our understanding of such games in ancient times, and game theory.

This does make the new rules hypothetical, but they have been created based on a clear understanding of both the significance of such games in ancient Middle East cultures, and our understanding of how other similar games were played. They follow the original design of the Royal Game of Ur where each player must race to remove all ten of their pieces from the board, but with extra rules for the new pieces. 

Some pieces are considered lucky, others act as blockers preventing movement of the standard pieces. The stepped crosses are considered to be a mobile version of the rosettes from the Royal Game of Ur, safe spaces which move about the board.

This makes for a complex game, one with multiple variations as to how the pieces are distributed, moved, and “captured” by the opposing player. We recommend, should you wish to try the game for yourself, you refer to the original study and print yourself out a board. Then you can see for yourself how board games used to be played, millennia ago.

Original Study: https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/kctnj.

Header Image: The key differences between the Royal Game of Ur and the Shahr-i Sokhta version are the many different pieces, and the lack of “rosettes” denoting certain board spaces as special. Source: https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/kctnj / CC-By Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International