A rare find: archaeologists unearth 4,000-year-old board game in Oman

The stone board game was unearthed by archaeologists in the Qumayrah Valley. There are holes for cups on the board. There is a site near the village of Ayn Bani Saidah.

The Iron and Bronze Age settlements in the Qumayrah Valley are being studied. Sultan al Bakri is the director general of antiquities at the Ministry of Heritage and Tourism in Sultanates and he collaborated with the Polish Center of Mediterranean Archaeology at the University of Warsaw. The Qumayrah Valley is one of the least studied regions of the country, but the archaeological finds so far indicate that it was part of a major trade route between several Arab cities.

There is archaeological evidence for various kinds of board games from all over the world, such as senet and Mehen in ancient Egypt, or a strategy game called ludus latrunculorum favored by Roman legions. The game known as the Royal Game or the Game of Twenty Squares, a two-player game that may have been one of the progenitors of backgammon, was discovered at the site.

Sir Leonard Woolley is credited with the rediscovery of the Royal Game of Ur after his team excavated five game boards at the Royal Cemetery at Ur between 1922 and 1934. There were two sets of boxes on the game boards, one with rows of four boxes each, and the other with rows of two boxes each, with a bridge of two boxes joining them.

The rules of the game were described in a Babylonian clay tablet translated by Irving Finkel, a curator at the British Museum, in the early 1980s. Like backgammon, it is a race game in which players compete to see who can move their pieces the fastest. The layout of squares on the board is likely to have evolved over time according to a paper published in the Near East. In the 1950s, Aasha was still being played in the Indian city of Kochi.

The remains of several large circular stone towers dating back to the Bronze Age were unearthed by the Qumayrah Valley team along with a board game. The settlement was involved in the lucrative copper trade at that time, according to the evidence found by the excavators. The function of these prominent structures at many Umm an-Nar sites still needs to be explained according to a University of Warsaw team member.