Archaeologists operating in Oman’s Qumayrah Valley recently unearthed a rare artifact: a stone board game dating back some four,000 years. The board capabilities grid-like markings (possibly indicating fields) and holes for cups. It was discovered at a web-site close to the village of Ayn Bani Saidah.
The excavation is component of an ongoing project to study the Iron and Bronze Age settlements in the Qumayrah Valley. The dig is a collaboration amongst Sultan al Bakri, director basic of antiquities at the Ministry of Heritage and Tourism in Oman, and Piotr Bielinski of the Polish Center of Mediterranean Archaeology at the University of Warsaw. The region is 1 of the least-studied regions of the nation, but the archaeological finds hence far indicate that the Qumayrah Valley was most likely component of a significant trade route amongst various Arab cities.
There is archaeological proof for several types of board games from all over the world dating back millennia: senet and Mehen in ancient Egypt, for instance, or a technique game known as ludus latrunculorum (“game of mercenaries”) favored by Roman legions. The board just found at the Omani web-site may be a precursor to an ancient Middle Eastern game identified as the Royal Game or Ur (or the Game of Twenty Squares), a two-player game that could have been 1 of the precursors to backgammon (or was merely replaced in reputation by backgammon).
/ Archaeologists excavating a Bronze Age and Iron Age settlement close to the village of Ayn Bani Saidah in Oman. J.Sliwa/University of Warsaw
An English archaeologist named Sir Leonard Woolley is credited with the rediscovery of the Royal Game of Ur following his group excavated 5 game boards at the Royal Cemetery at Ur amongst 1922 and 1934, all dating back to 3000 BCE. All the game boards featured two rectangular sets of boxes: 1 has 3 rows of 4 boxes each and every, even though the other has 3 rows of two boxes each and every, with a bridge of two boxes joining them.
Nobody had any thought how to play the game, of course, till a curator at the British Museum named Irving Finkel translated a Babylonian clay tablet in the early 1980s that turned out to be a description of the guidelines. Like backgammon, it is primarily a race game in which players compete to see who can move all their pieces along the course of the board ahead of their opponent. However, a 2013 paper examining almost one hundred Near East board games concluded that the layout of squares on the board (and the guidelines) most likely evolved more than time. A version identified as Aasha was nevertheless getting played in the Indian city of Kochi as lately as the 1950s.
Along with the board game, the Qumayrah Valley group also unearthed the remains of various big circular stone towers dating back to the Bronze Age, as properly as 1 angular tower. The excavators also discovered proof at 1 of the towers of copper smelting, which suggests the settlement was involved in the profitable copper trade at that time, according to Bielinski. University of Warsaw group member Agnieszka Pienkowska told the Oman Daily Observer that “the function of these prominent structures at quite a few Umm an-Nar websites nevertheless wants to be explained.”
Keyword: A rare come across: archaeologists unearth 4,000-year-old board game in Oman