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The complete game was found in a catacomb grave, but without a copy of the rules. The Royal Game of Ur, helpfully, had its rules written out on a cuneiform tablet. Image credit: Mary Harrsch/Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) After thousands of years, we may finally know how to play an ancient board game, or at least a decent approximation of it. In 1977, Italian and Iranian archaeologists were excavating a cemetery in Shahr-i Sokhta in the south-eastern region of Iran when they discovered an unusual item in grave number 731. Inside the pseudo-catacomb grave was an ancient board game, coming...

The board discovered at Çapmalı, Azerbaijan. (Crist & Abdullayev, Eur. J. Archaeol., 2024) ============================================================================ The discovery of artifacts associated with an ancient board game is offering clues about how humans interacted thousands of years ago. At various sites on the Abşeron Peninsula and Gobustan Reserve in Azerbaijan, archaeologists have found six designs carved into the surfaces of rocks. Dating to around 2000 BCE, they each resemble the hallmark pattern on which the ancient board game Hounds and Jackals is based. This is contemporaneous with the previous oldest example of the game ever found, hailing from the tomb of a government...

In northwest Europe, meanwhile, the Viking game Hnefatafl popped up in such far-flung locales as Scotland, Norway and Iceland. Farther south, the ancient Egyptian games of Senet and Mehen dominated. To the east in India, Chaturanga emerged as a precursor to modern chess. And 5,000 years ago, in what is now southeast Turkey, a group of Bronze Age humans created an elaborate set of sculpted stones hailed as the world’s oldest gaming pieces upon their discovery in 2013. Senet is one of the earliest known board games. Archaeological and artistic evidence suggest it was played as early as 3100 B.C.,...