BOARD GAMES BEFORE UR?

Thierry Depaulis

It has for long been accepted that one of the earliest known board games
was the celebrated ‘Royal Game of Ur’ (Fig. 1), that is exhibited in the
British Museum and is dated to around 2500 BCE (Becker 2007; Finkel
2007: 17). The game of ‘twenty squares’ – the type of game that is
exemplified by the ‘Royal Game of Ur’ – is indeed one of the oldest known
board games.
As Sumer is sometimes dubbed the ‘cradle of civilization’, it was
assumed that there could be some sort of correlation between the rise of
earliest states and the birth of board games. Although very simplistic, the
hypothesis receives some kind of support from ancient Egypt. There too we
have board games – senet (or znt) and mehen (mhn) – which appear as early
as the first dynasties, and seem to accompany the rise of the Egyptian
civilization. If we leave apart a miniature board from el-Mahasna, which is
exhibited in the Musées royaux d’Art et d’Histoire, in Brussels, and which
is assigned to the Naqada I period (ca 4000-3500 BCE), because there are
doubts about its actual function (Crist, Dunn-Vaturi, de Voogt 2016: 41-
43), boards for playing senet (Fig. 2) – at least fragmentary – appear in the
First Dynasty (ca 3100-2900 BCE). Mehen, another board game from
ancient Egypt, offers examples that date back to the end of the fourth
millennium BCE, in other words around 3000 BCE (Crist, Dunn-Vaturi,
de Voogt 2016: 17).
Keeping with these very early times we can see that the Indus civilization
also had board games. Although they are hard to characterize, because the
few gameboards that have been unearthed are just fragments, and the field
is ‘invaded’ with small objects often interpreted as ‘gamesmen’ (or
‘pendants’…), and even sometimes as… chessmen, it is clear that the game
of ‘twenty squares’ was also known there. Not only were terracotta
fragments of gameboards excavated at Mohenjo-daro, but four fragmentary
boards, made of stone, were unearthed at Dholavira, Gujarat, two of which
being easily recognizable as parts of ‘twenty squares’ games (Bisht 2015:
[Link]., p. 594-6) (Fig. 3 – forget the ‘gamesmen’). The city of Dholavira
flourished between ca 2500 and ca 2000 BCE.

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Remaining on this part of the world, that is, between the Indus Valley
and Western Europe, the inventory of ancient board games, known to have
been in existence before the turn of the Common Era, appear, strikingly, to
exclusively belong to the class of ‘race games’. Based on a more detailed and
rational classification of a large corpus of documented board games, the
illustrated diagram (Fig. 4) shows clearly when the various classes appear in
the course of history. The left column, devoted to race games, is the highest
one; it spans from ca 3250 BCE to the present.
Without entering in too many details, we can define race games as board
games played with a random generator – dice of all kinds.1 The design of
their boards is typically ‘unilinear’, that is, it shows a linear path, that, for
convenience sake, is often bent, folded or spiralled, but that can be
geometrically represented as a single line segment. On this track gamesmen
have to ‘race’ from one endpoint to the opposite. They cannot go sideways
(Fig. 5). The backgammon family of games well exemplifies the class of ‘race
games’, but most ancient board games whose mechanics can be understood
belong to this class. Exceptions are the Greek game of polis (πόλις), which
appears in the literature around 450 BCE, and the more or less
contemporary Chinese game of weiqi (‘go’), which, under the name of yi (弈),
is mentioned in Confucius’s Analects (Lunyu) compiled between ca 470/50
and 280 BCE. All other board games around the world that avoid using a
random generator, and are therefore games of pure reasoning (or ‘strategy’),
have to wait until the beginning of the Common Era to be supported by
archaeological, iconographic or literary evidence.2

Rollefson’s ‘Neolithic’ Mancala

Gary O. Rollefson is a well-respected archaeologist specializing on

Near-Eastern prehistory. He made his name famous with the excavations at

1 It is unclear, though, whether the Egyptian game of mehen used a random generator.

None has ever been found in association with that game (Crist, Dunn-Vaturi, de Voogt
2016: 24), and its rules are unknown. But, whatever it is, the shape of the board, a coiled
serpent, implies a ‘unilinear’ track, as in all race games.
2 A fact that I have underlined in my presentation ‘A Timeline of Mind Games, with

some correlations’ to the 22nd BGS Colloquium, at Bologna, in May 2019. To be

published soon.

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‘Ain Ghazal, Jordan, a site now included in the 2004 World Monuments
Watch. It is the discovery, there, of spectacular lime plaster figurines, dating
back to ca 7000 BCE, which called the scientific world’s attention to the
importance of ‘Ain Ghazal. In a less spectacular way Rollefson published a
short article called “A neolithic game board from ‘Ain Ghazal, Jordan” in
1992 (Rollefson 1992)3, where he presented a stone slab marked with rows
of holes which he intepreted as a board game (Fig. 6 A). The find was a
stone plaque where two vaguely parallel lines of six small depressions each
could be observed. Radiocarbon dating pointed to 6876 BCE cal ±275.
Parallel lines of holes are indeed a feature of some board games, particularly
mancala, which have two or four, sometimes even three, rows of cavities
where seeds are put in numbers.
So it came to Rollefson’s mind that his perforated plaque was a kind of
similar game. It must have been a ‘mancala-type game board’, albeit in a
prehistoric form, the more so as there are claims to a great antiquity for this
family of games. No other alternative hypothesis is offered. It is stated in the
title of the article, and the word ‘board game’ is used throughout, as an
obvious fact. One may, however, wonder about the references
Rollefson used for comparison: an anonymous article about ‘Playing Board
Games in the Stone Age’ (sic), found in the National Geographic Magazine of
1990, F. Grunfeld’s popular Games of the World (Unicef, 1975), and Claudia
Zaslavsky’s much (too much…) read and often reprinted book Africa counts
(1st edition 1973); the absence of Murray (1952) or even Bell (1960/69) is
remarkable. The only academic publication Rollefson quotes is Swiny
(Swiny 1980).
The comparison with mancala is here irrelevant. (Did Rollefson ever see
a mancala game?)
The cavities, whose diameter does not exceed 3 cm, and whose depth is
only 2 cm, would be unable to receive more than two prehensible seeds, and
not of the kind that is currently used in mancala games. Actually the
‘gameboard’ looks very unpractical for a game. But even if it were a very
early, very crude prehistoric ancestor of mancala, we would have to fill a
time gap of more than 6,000 years, since the earliest documented mancala

3 A re-assessment of the same was published in French, as ‘La préhistoire des jeux’, in
Histoire Antique & Médiévale, special issue no. 33, Decembre 2012: 18-21. It adds nothing to
Rollefson’s theory.

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boards, found in Matara (now Eritrea), an ancient Aksumite site, during

excavations led by Francis Anfray, are dated to the 6th-7th centuries CE
(Anfray 1990; Pankhurst 1971, 1982; Townshend 1979). Although only one
fragment was published by Anfray (Anfray 1963: pl. CXII), there were more
which the excavator seems to have communicated to Pankhurst who
mentions and illustrates them with photographs from the Institut éthiopien
d’archéologie in his 1971 article (Pankhurst 1971: 154-8).
In his paper Gary Rollefson correctly reminds us that “the absence of
evidence should not be taken to be evidence of absence”. But, if this is a wise
caution for ‘narrow’ gaps – say, a few decades or even centuries –, it
becomes embarrassing for such an enormous time span. And little has been
found, since 1992, to fill in the gap.
To support his conclusion Rollefson informs us that “more recent
excavations … have turned up a considerable number of game boards from
areas between these ‘cusps of the fertile crescent’.” (Rollefson 1992: 2).
Actually the ‘considerable number of game boards’ include those from
Cyprus that were published by Swiny, and belong to the Bronze Age.
Reference is made too to Amiran 1978 and Lee 1982, who, like Swiny,
describe Bronze Age artifacts. They clearly have nothing to do with mancala
games either, and seem to be games borrowed from Egypt (Crist, Dunn-
Vaturi, de Voogt 2016: 70-71). MacDonald 1988 is just a reference to
undated rows of cupholes that can be assigned to modern Bedouins.
Thus the remaining finds are those of Beidha, Jordan (Kirkbride 1966)
(Fig. 6 B), and Chagha Sefid, Iran (Hole 1977). Not exactly a “considerable
number”…

Simpson’s Contribution

In a more recent contribution St. John Simpson has made a further

attempt to consolidate the theory. Again without expressing any doubt,
Simpson argues that “the consensus of opinion is that these objects are
gaming boards” (Simpson 2007: 7), an extraordinary statement. To
Rollefson’s short list, Simpson adds some more ‘gaming boards’: two
fragmentary ones from Wadi Tbeik, in Southern Sinai (Bar-Yosef 1982;
Simpson 2007: 6, no. 2), four other fragments from El-Kowm 2, Syria

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(Maréchal 1982; Simpson 2007: 6-7, no. 3), so that St. John Simpson counts
twelve possible ‘gaming boards’.
Simpson is particularly concerned with dating. He never questions the
function. For him, as for Rollefson, they are just ‘gaming boards’, nothing
else.4 Let us first get rid of the single Chagha Sefid fragment, which presents
a series of eight irregularly scattered holes, and can be anything (Simpson
2007: 7, no. 5 and his Fig. 1.4). There is no serious reason to assign it a
function in a game. The Beidha slabs are more impressive: they offer two
parallel rows of regularly spaced holes, with a kind of wavy groove that links
them (Simpson 2007: 5-6, no. 1). One is said to be complete, with only four
cavities per line (Ibid., Fig. 1.2 left), while another shows three holes and is
obviously incomplete (Ibid., Fig. 1.2 right). The exact function of these
grooves is unclear, but we will see further an alternative explanation.
Unfortunately the Wadi Tbeik and El-Kowm objects are not illustrated.
The Wadi Tbeik slab is ‘semi-complete’, with “three parallel rows of circular
hollows” (three or four), and here too a single straight groove connects the
holes in each row. At El-Kowm the ‘gaming boards’ are made of plaster;
they are all small fragments, the larger one measuring 11.4×6.6 cm; only
one is described, “and this consists of two or more rows of hollows with three
or more per row”, so a very indistinct pattern, which sheds no light on the
actual function of these plaster specimens. Needless to say that no gaming
pieces or ‘dice’ whatsoever have ever been found in the proximity of these
slabs.
Trying to sort out this curious collection of ‘games’ Simpson seems to be
lost… He recognizes “two or more types, namely one with two rows of
hollows (‘Ain Ghazal, Beidha) and one with three or more rows of less
regularly spaced and slightly deeper hollows (Wadi Tbeik, Chagha Sefid);
the el-Kowm 2 ‘gaming boards’ are of uncertain type. He definitely assigns
the first type to… mancala (Simpson 2007: 7), which, as we have seen, is
easy to disprove. Simpson concedes of course that the size of the boards
needed “tiny pebbles, seeds or small animal droppings”, very tiny indeed…

4 For the problems and necessary caution of identifying and dating patterns of holes
pecked in stone, see de Voogt 2012.

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An Explanation Comes to Light

Light, or rather fire, is probably what most of these slabs were intended
for. In a brilliant article, a team of archaeologists have shown that stone
plaques marked with small holes, sometimes connected with grooves, were
the result of drilling with clay cylinders to produce fire (Goren-Inbar et al.
2012). They show limestone slabs found at Kfar HaHoresh, Israel, a PPNB
(Pre-Pottery Neolithic B) site which they interpret as fireboards. “These
fragmentary stone artifacts (…) have one or more pits/sockets with grooves
connecting them” (my emphasis) (Fig. 7). “Examination of the sockets and their
morphology, as well as the straight and curved incisions on the stone block,
leads us to consider these artifacts as fireboards, similar to objects recorded
through ethnographic observations.” At the end of their article, they have
this interesting remark:

“The increasingly frequent occurrence of partially perforated

stone blocks described as “game boards” at other Near Eastern
PPNB sites, such as Beidha [Kirkbride 1966], Wadi Tbeik [Bar-
Yosef 1982], ‘Ain Ghazal [Rollefson 1992], Wadi Abu Tulayaha
[Fujii 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009] and Wadi Ghwair [Simmons,
Najjar 2006], clearly merits further investigation. Of these, some
of these could have functioned as fireboards.”

With the addition of six specimens found by Sumio Fujii at Wadi Abu
Tulayaha and three from Wadi Ghwair I the current total amounts to
twenty-one slabs with cupmarks.
It is interesting to quote Fujii (Fujii 2006b) here:

“It was our great surprise that a total of six game boards
occurred at an outpost isolated in the middle of Hamada. These
unique artifacts, all made of relatively fine-textured limestone
slabs, fall into two types: boards with six depressions in two rows
and those with eight depressions in two rows. (…) Some of our
samples are accompanied with engraved lines connecting any two
neighboring depressions, another similarity to the Beidha
samples. (…) Unfortunately, no clear evidence for game pieces
was attested, but small, semi-translucent colorful pebbles ca.1-2
cm in diameter, found in considerable quantity from various

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contexts including floor deposits, might have substituted for

them.”

At Ghwair I, the excavators have found “three artifacts [which]

resemble possible gaming boards similar to those from Beidha and ‘Ain
Ghazal” (Simmons and Najjar 2006: 88 and Fig. 7).5 Although they do not
give more details, and show only one of these objects, I was happy to access
Claudia C. Woodman’s MA thesis presented in the University of Nevada,
Las Vegas in 2005, dealing with Ghwair I stone artifacts. In her thesis the
author mentions three such objects, that she describes thus (Woodman
2005: 84-6):

“Several items, including three ‘gaming boards’ (…). Two of

the artifacts are sandstone. The remaining gaming board is
limestone. The cupmarks on each gaming board are roughly the
same size, though the cupmarks on one of the sandstone gaming
boards are larger than those on the limestone gaming board. The
gaming boards are similar to artifacts identified at Beidha (…),
‘Ain Ghazal (…), and the PPNB mortuary installation of Kfar
HaHoresh in Israel.”

One of the stone plaques is illustrated (Figure 6 in her thesis, here Fig.
8);6 it shows eight hollows arranged in two rows; six hollows are connected
with a straight groove. The dimensions, as can be inferred from the scale,
seem to be around 29x15 cm; the largest depression has a diameter of
approx. 3 cm.
She previously commented (Woodman 2005: 72):

“Gaming boards are called such for want of a better term.

They are not common but have been identified elsewhere during
the PPNB. They are tabular stones with two series of regularly-
spaced cupules. Narrow grooves run between the cupules. Moore

5 My thanks to Eddie Duggan for providing a copy of this publication.

6 I would have kindly asked permission to reproduce her figure, but I have been unable
to find where Ms Woodman is presently.

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hypothesizes that these could have functioned as bases for bow

drills (1978:250)7.”

The re-examination of the grooved slabs found in Beidha, Wadi Tbeik,

Wadi Abu Tulayaha and Ghwair I leaves little doubts: they were most likely
used to make fire. The other artifacts (Chagha Sefid, el-Kowm 28) are too
much undefined. The ‘Ain Ghazal specimen is less clear, but Goren-Inbar
et al. suggest it might also be a fireboard.

A Timeline of Board Games

In his ‘concluding remarks’ Rollefson (Rollefson 1992: 4) compares the

“single two-by-six array of depressions in the ‘Ain Ghazal game board” with
the “complex arrangements of the Early Bronze Age games from
Mesopotamia, Cyprus, Palestine, and Jordan.” He says that a simple game
does not “indicate that Neotlithic people had not attained a level of
cleverness in game-playing”. Really? Board games, even in their simplest
form, are the result of various mental processes, which are cumulative. They
associate a set of precise rules and an assemblage of artifacts. Their design
supposes a good command of abstract ‘mapping’ – which seems to be
lacking in Neolithic times, judging from the chaotic organization of
settlements like Jericho, Çatalhöyük, or ‘Ain Gazhal – and some arithmetic.
Ancient board games, as we have already remarked, are all race games. And
we may hypothesize some kind of evolution, with simple race games coming
first and then new innovations later.
The game of twenty squares, senet, and mehen show a very elaborate
design. Clearly they must have had precursors, probably less sophisticated,
but we know nothing about them. After all the earliest states, with their
urbanized centres, political hierarchies, specialized crafts, official religions
and highly stratified society, and the use of writing, seem to have sprung up
within a few centuries. Not from scratch, but the evolution from pre-state,
pre-writing societies was rapid.

7 Quoting A.M.T. Moore, The Neolithic of the Levant. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of
Oxford, 1978.
8 If the El-Kowm slabs are really made of plaster they can hardly have been used as

fireboards. Whatever their actual function, they are the only such artifacts made of plaster.

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The only serious candidate for a gameboard that would predate the
‘game of Ur’ is a fragmentary terracotta board, measuring approx. 11 x 11
cm, divided in nine well delineated squares – like a chessboard! – though six
of the holes have small holes in their centres, while the other three are plain
(Fig. 9). It was found in Tell Majnuna, near Tell Brak (Syria), and is dated
to the Late Chalcolithic, that is, “no later than sometime around 3600 BC”
(Oates 2012: 117)9. Joan Oates, the director of the excavations of Tell Brak,
thinks it is a gaming board, but she does not eliminate the possibility it could
be a ‘proto-calculator’. Interestingly she adds that “one small spherical
‘gaming piece’ has remained in situ within the equally small hemispherical
depression that is found in the centre of each square.”10 It is therefore very
tempting to interpret this clay board as a gameboard.
On the other hand, the perforated slabs, which are too fastly interpreted
as ‘gaming board’ by Rollefson, Simpson and their colleagues, may not
correspond to the evolution of the human mind as described by scholars like
Merlin Donald (Donald 1991), Colin Renfrew (Renfrew & Zubrow 1994,
Renfrew & Scarre 1998, Renfrew, Morley and Boyd 2018), Peter Damerow
(Damerow 1995), and others. They all base their theories on the
accumulation of knowledge and on the development of human memory.
Merlin Donald, a Canadian psychologist who is very influential among
prehistorians, hypothesizes three ‘stages’ or ‘cultures’ in the evolution of the
human mind. Donald calls these three stages ‘Mimetic’, ‘Mythic’ and
‘Theoretic’. Only the two latest ones belong to Homo sapiens. Mythic cultures
arose as a result of the acquisition of speech and the invention of symbols.
The ‘Theoretic’ stage shows an increasing reliance on ‘external memory’
(graffiti, body painting, rock art, and finally writing). Donald argues that
there was a revolution in human cognitive capabilities, with the addition of
external symbol systems, external memory and external computational
devices (‘tokens’, abacus, etc.).
If we examine what happens in the Neolithic, we still are in Donald’s
pre-writing, ‘Mythic’ stage. To this we may add Peter Damerow’s ‘cultural
evolution of thinking’. Specializing on the history of Babylonian
mathematics, Damerow has sketched a possible (pre)history of
mathematical concepts, from “no arithmetical activities”, until the end of

9 I am grateful to Walter Crist for this reference, and for his comments.
10 Not each: there are three squares that have no holes…

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the Mesolithic, when “all judgments about quantities are based on direct
comparisons of amounts and sizes”, to a “Proto-arithmetic” stage, which he
assigns to the Neolithic period and Early Bronze Age, then to a more
complex “Symbol-based arithmetic” stage, where “quantities are structured
by metrological systems”, that are typical of the early state societies.
Therefore, it would be surprising to imagine that our Neotlithic
ancestors had reached enough mathematical knowledge that would allow
them to invent board games as early as 7000 BCE. Even if we have to
account for forerunners of twenty squares or senet, they can hardly be
earlier than a millennium (as perhaps the Tell Majnuna ‘gaming board’).
And these forerunners must have been race games. When did race games
begin? My own hypothesis is that they cannot be much older than ca 3500
BCE. Until then dice games must have been the only kind of formalized
games. An evolution from dice games to board games seems possible, but
we lack the evidence. Although ‘Ain Ghazal is a very impressive complex
settlement, with its hundreds of houses and famous lime plaster statues, it
lacks ceramic technology. In spite of a careful digging, the site has not
yielded any kind of possible random generator. Perhaps these were made of
perishable material, as it often happens, but it is striking that nothing like
dice has been unearthed.
This would finally agree with the present author’s ‘Attempt at a
Combined Chronology of Dice and Board Games in the Lands Between the
Indus Valley and Europe’ (Depaulis 2019), that hypothesizes an evolution
from ‘primitive’ dice games in the Neolithic to more complex board games,
with race games being earlier than games of pure reasoning. Fig. 4 shows
how a modern classification of board games can be used along a timeline of
known games. It clearly appears that race games have for long been the only
type used around the world.

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[Swiny, 1980] Swiny, S. 1980. Bronze Age gaming stones from Cyprus, Report of
the Department of Antiquities Cyprus: 54-78 and pl. X-XII.

[Townshend, 1979] Townshend, P. 1979. Mankala in Eastern and

Southern Africa, Azania, XIV: 109-138.

Board Game Studies Journal 14, pp. 127–144

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140 BOARD GAMES BEFORE UR?

[Woodman, 2005] Woodman, C. 2005. An analysis of ground stone

artifacts from Ghwair I, a Pre-Pottery Neolithic B site in southern
Jordan, UNLV Retrospective Theses & Dissertations, 1812 (a downloadable
pdf found at
[Link]
&context=rtds, accessed 31/12/2019).

Figure 1: The ‘Royal Game of Ur’, a luxury game of ‘twenty squares’, ca 2500 BCE. (British
Museum, Wikimedia Commons)

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 Thierry Depaulis 141

Figure 2: A ‘faience’ senet board from Egypt, with drawer and gamesmen. (Wikimedia
Commons)

Figure 3: Fragment of a game of ‘twenty

squares’ found at Dholavira, ca 2300 BCE.
(From Bisht 2015)

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142 BOARD GAMES BEFORE UR?

Figure 4: A timeline of board game types. Hatched cells are hypothesized periods. (©T.
Depaulis)

a b

Figure 1: Graphic representation of the track in three

race games: backgammon (a); taayam (b), a traditional game
from Southern India; duodecim scripta (c), the Roman
ancestor of backgammon. (©T. Depaulis)

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 Thierry Depaulis 143

Figure 3: Some so-called Neolithic ‘gaming boards’: ‘Ain

Ghazal, Jordan (A); Beidha, Jordan (B).

Figure 2: Limestone artifacts from Kfar

HaHoresh interpreted as fireboards. (From Goren-
Inbar et al. 2012)

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144 BOARD GAMES BEFORE UR?

Broken zone

Figure 5: A schematic
representation of one of the ‘gaming
boards’ from Wadi Ghwair I, personal
drawing after Woodman 2005. (©T.
Depaulis)

Figure 4: A terracotta ‘gaming board’ from Tell Majnuna, ca 3600 BCE. Left, the actual
board (from Oates 2012: Fig. 1); right, a possible reconstruction of the board.

Board Game Studies Journal 14, pp. 127–144

DOI: 10.2478/bgs-2020-0007