Irving Finkel

chess or backgammon, which you can say are world conquerors.

Because the way I see the issue is that human beings for a very long time have been, shall we say, hungry for things to do.

Because all through the Bronze Age and the Iron Age, there was no television.

You know, they weren't no nothing.

And kids played with pull-along things, and adults had board games, and they're kind of embedded in culture from a very early time.

And this game was so widespread.

You know, Tutankhamun, for example, in his tomb, there were two or three boards for it with the pieces.

So it arrived in the middle of the second millennium in Egypt.

And even the pharaoh played it.

So you have a game which, the interesting point about it, is that it spread across the gnome world without written rules and without people necessarily knowing the same language.

So a merchant would go

end up in a bar, you know, come from India or I don't know where, start seeing these guys playing, have a go himself.

It looks rather interesting.

You go home and try and remember what it looked like and try and work out how to, you know, be transported this way or the other.

And so you can see that the board has 20 squares.

So you have a block of four by three and then a bridge of two and then a second three by two thing at the end.

So it's difficult to describe the actual shape.

But what happened was after about 2000 BC, the squares at the far end, which there were two on one flank and two on the other, were all put at the end of the central avenue.

So you end up with 12 squares down the middle.

So all the boards after the period of Ur have 12 squares down the middle and then four on each side at one end.