Backgammon 18 Games

Backgammon: The game that dates back thousands of years

Backgammon is one of the oldest games in existence, alongside Go and Chess. It is probably about 5,000 years old and may well have originated in what today is Iraq—previously Mesopotamia.

Recent evidence supporting this was found when these very early dice (made of human bones) were discovered in the area.

There is evidence that several thousand years later the Egyptian Pharaohs were enjoying another board game that may be an ancestor of backgammon.

Boards dating from 1500 BC. were found in King Tutankhamen’s tomb in the valley of the Nile, and even at Enkomi on Cyprus, then an Egyptian colony

Backgammon in the Mediterranean

The game must have reached Western Europe from the Mediterranean. A thousand years after the Egyptians were playing their version, the Greeks, or at least the patrician Greeks, were playing a form of the game.

Plato mentions a Greek form of the game and comments on its popularity. Sophocles attributes its invention to Palamedes, who was said to have beguiled away the time during the long siege of Troy by playing it.

Homer mentions the Greek game in the Odyssey. Herodotus claims that the Lydians invented it. In this and other dice games the Greeks evidently had feelings about lady luck just as strong as ours.

They called sixes, which were good high rolls then as now, “Aphrodite”, and they called ones a word akin to “dog”.

The Romans were the first to make it truly popular with their version called “Duodecum Scripta et Tabulae” or “Tables” for short.

The Emperor Claudius was a keen player—he had a special board built on the back of his chariot to relieve the tedium of long journeys. Emperor Nero was a prodigious gambler.