Irving Finkel

So it's a sort of euphemism, so to speak, because after the flood, at the end of the tablet, not my tablet, but the other ones, where it's still broken, it says there's a tantalizing thing where they create...

barren women who can't have children and men who can't have children and people who, princesses who don't have children, they institute in society some figures who will not reproduce the species.

So it's actually a rather sophisticated Malthusian kind of philosophical position.

It's remarkable.

So that the noise means there's so many of them.

They're actually so noisy that we can't hear ourselves think.

Well, the Royal Game of Ur is a board of 20 squares in a rather idiosyncratic form.

And it was pretty much unknown until the 1920s when Sir Leonard Woolley was digging at the site of ore.

And in the graves of the royal family, the Sumerian rulers, they found four or five boards of this pattern together with dice and pieces, which showed that it was popular among them at this time.

And also that wherever they were going in the world to come, they would want to be playing it.

And so that was one thing.

And we had the number of pieces and some dice.

So lots of people had ideas about how it might have been played.

And that went on like that for a very long time.

And thereafter, boards for this game...

turned up in most of the countries of the Middle East, sometimes quite a lot of them.

The one from Ur dates to about 2600 BC.

From then down to the end of the first millennium, there's examples of boards from Mesopotamia itself and from Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Greece, Crete,

all over the place.

And when you put all the boards together, you realize that you're dealing with a board game which was extremely widespread and extremely popular.