The Royal Game of Ur, also known as the Game of Twenty Squares or simply the Game of Ur, is a two-player strategy race board game that was first played in ancient Mesopotamia during the early third millennium BC. The game was popular across the Middle East among people of all social strata and boards for playing it have been found at locations as far away from Mesopotamia as Crete and Sri Lanka. At the height of its popularity, the game acquired spiritual significance, and events in the game were believed to reflect a player's future and convey messages from deities or other supernatural beings. The Game of Ur remained popular until late antiquity, when it stopped being played, possibly evolving into, or being displaced by, an early form of backgammon. It was eventually forgotten everywhere except among the Jewish population of the Indian city of Kochi, who continued playing a version of it until the 1950s when they began emigrating to Israel.
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At some point before the game fell out of popularity in the Middle East, it was apparently introduced to the Indian city of Kochi by a group of Jewish merchants. Members of the Jewish population of Kochi were still playing a recognizable form of the Game of Ur, which they called Aasha, by the time they started emigrating to Israel in the 1950s after World War II. The Kochi version of the game had twenty squares, just like the original Mesopotamian version, but each player had twelve pieces rather than seven, and the placement of the twenty squares was slightly different.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Game_of_UrIn much the same way Irving decoded the instructions of the Royal Game of Ur found in a grave in the 1920 excavations in Iraq. An inscription that found its way to the museum had the rules of the game. “It was a very popular game for two and was played all over West Asia,” This important relic and its decoded knowledge lay with Irving, until something “truly amazing happened.”
In the 90s two anthropologists from the museum made their way to Kochi to collect and codify social and cultural items of the fast dwindling community of Pardesi Jews. They returned with extremely invaluable shared material that included objects of daily use. In that was a wooden board game, which Irving says “is to all intent and purposes the same as the Royal Game of Ur.” It has 20 squares, two wings and a centre aisle. It was played using a dice.”
Irving believes that whatever be the origin of the population of Jews in Kerala they ultimately came to India from Babylonia and that all displaced populations most importantly carry cultural items with them.
This game, he says, has survived into modern times. When he first saw it, Irving remembers being surcharged with an immediacy to find a person to recognise the game. He called up his sister Deborah Lionarons, who lives in Jerusalem, requesting her to go to the northern Kibbutz which has the settlements of the Cochini Jews. “I typed out a questionnaire and asked her to go door to door with a picture of the game and ask anybody and everybody if they could identify the picture and if they knew the rules of the game?”
As luck would have it a 70-year-old woman, Ruby Daniel recognised the game, identified it as Aasha, which she used to play back home with her aunts. Ruby was a school teacher in her early 20s when she left Cochin in 1951. She wrote out the instructions of the game and said it was played on the floor or by drawing it on a piece of paper.
The one sent by Sattoo Koder to the museum, “a lovely object”, is a wooden one with tiny legs, says Irving.
When the matter came to him, he found the rules to be similar to the ones on the 2nd century tablet. Amazed at this rather romantic turnaround of cultural shifting and its curious fallout Irving says, “When the game was found in the excavations in Iraq, I was certain that this was not native but had come from Mohenjo-Daro in the Indus valley. I believe it began there, moved to Iraq and went all over the West Asiatic world.” The game then morphed into other board games that exist today, like Backgammon.
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https://www.thehindu.com/features/metroplus/society/tradtional-board-games-from-kochi-to-iraq/article7711918.ece
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