Ancient Backgammon To Modern Life

Today thousands of people play backgammon online at all hours of the day and quite often these two questions arise:

And,

The short answers are:

And,

The long answers make for an interesting read below.

Let’s start at the very beginning and then we’ll skip past five millenniums of the game’s deep history to reach modern day times to trace the factors that brought about Backgammon’s transition to the Internet.

Backgammon and its precursors have a fascinating story that can be traced to the time when the wheel was first invented!

Although their exact origin is still under debate today, there was a mysterious race of people that came to occupy the Sumer area of Southern Mesopotamia, about 7,300 years ago. They supposedly came from a distant land and spoke a language not of the region; it was non-Semitic and most probably Indo-European.

The Sumerians were exceptionally intelligent and manually skilled people. They invented the wheel, the first written language and first math system, and built the world’s first urban civilizations - a system of city-states that were run by a government with a priest-king as monarch. The Sumerian translation of Sumer is "Land of the Lords of Brightness".

Of course there was no electricity, television or Internet way back then but Sumerians did have fire and thus a source of light and heat to pass away their leisure time at night. And it was in the Sumerian city of Ur, about 5,000 years ago, where some bright Lord invented an ancient variant of Backgammon called “The Royal Game of Ur”. Our game is born!

There are oodles of literature on the next five millenniums of the game’s history as many different ways to play Backgammon are devised by people in countries to where the game has spread. The game becomes a traditional pastime in numerous countries, appears in art, music and plays, and has been the pursuit of many Kings and Queens throughout the ages.

So we have our game - where did the players, computers and the Internet come from? In our next article we'll go over the pre-internet period of modern backgammon.