Archaeologists announced the discovery of a 4,000-year-old 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:board game at the site of Ayn Bani Saidah in Oman earlier this ♈month. The settlement wasꦛ primarily focused on trade within the Qumayrah Valley during the Bronze and Iron Ages. The site consisted of several buildings and circular towers that may have been used for storage.
The excavations were carried out by the Polish Center for Mediterranean Archeo🥀logy at the University of Warsaw under Director Piotr Bieliński and supervised by the Ministry꧒ of Heritage and Tourism under Director General of Antiquities Sultan al Bakri. The aim of this ongoing project is to study settlement patterns within the Qumayrah Valley.
“We finally found proof of copper working at the site as well as some copper objects. This shows that our settlement participated in the꧅ lucrative copper trade for which Oman was famous at that time with mentions of Omani copper present in the cuneiform texts from Mesopotamia,” Bieliński said.
While the settlement provides insight into ancient networks of trade in the region, the most remarkable find was a board game featuring a series of holes carved into a stone slab that were used for pieces. The artifact resem⛄bles many other board games which have been discovered throughout the Middle East over the years.
“Such finds are rare, but examples are known from an area stretching from India through Mesopotamia and even to the Eastern Mediterran💫ean. The most famous examp💃le of a game board based on a similar principle is the one from the graves from Ur,” Bieliński noted.
The ancient city of Ur was excavated under the direction of Leonar🐟d Woolley between 1922 and 1934. The archaeologist became famous after discovering a series of royal graves dating to the Bronze Age that contained a vast array of goods in addition to five game boards. These were basically wooden boxes with parallel rows of square spaces where pieces could be placed. This came to be known as the Royal Game of Ur.
The rules for the Royal Game of Ur were discovered on a cuneiform tablet by Irving Finkel about ♛50 years after Woolley brought his excavation to a close. These described how pieces were advanced along the game board by each player according๊ to a schedule that was determined by rolling a set of three four-sided dice in much the same way as Backgammon. The rules which Finkel discovered date to long after the Royal Game of Ur was first played, meaning that variations almost certainly existed. Archaeologists have found game boards with different numbers and arrangements of square spaces.
Boarℱd games have been played for thousands of years in the Middle East. Senet and Mehen for example were popular in Egypt. While they represented an important aspect of life in the region, board games in the ancient world have not been thoroughly studied. Archaeologists like myself will no doubt be discovering more about how people played in the past over the course of the coming years.