The Early Beginnings of Backgammon
People began playing with dice with the use of bones. Apparently, in every part of the world there is a dice game and backgammon is one of these games. The tribes before rolled the bones of some animals to predict their fate and foretell future and then after that people began betting the outcome of the rolls of the dice. It is from the bones that our dice originated from. Instead of numbers though, the primitive ancestors had carvings on their dice.
Later they carved numbers of fours and twelve and twenty. They called it the bones of gambling. There are two reasons why the six-faced die-with pictures or bers came about everywhere. First because it is easy to build a cube. Second the cube is suitable for rolling. The next invention was having the layout for the game. This would enable the players to move the pieces of the game.
One of the oldest possible ancestor are Sumers who lived some five thousand years ago in the south of Mesopotamia and which we now know as Iraq. Sir Ard Woolley, a British archaeologist found Urhee Chaldess, the Biblical home of Abraham in 1920. He found layouts which looked to resemble the boards of Backgammon. The boards were made out of wood with decorations of bones and shells and other colors. It is now considered as the oldest board for Backgammon ever discovered. The Sumerians were indeed one of the most intelligent civilizations during that time. They invented the wheel. They had a mathematical system and they have the record for the first written language in the world.
Another ancient backgammon board is the version known in Persia. This is 1,600 years old. They called it that "Takhteh Nard" which means "Battle on Wood". This board was introduced by the Arabs. It had 24 points, a pair of dice and 30 playing pieces.
Backgammon was a game played only by the royalty hundreds of years ago. However , today in many nations it is being played by almost anyone.
During the Middle Ages, Backgammon was known as "Tables", in Spain "Tablas Reales", in Italy "Tavola Reale" all means "Royal Tables" This game is called T'shu-p'u in China. The Germans call it "Puff", the Japanese called it "Sugoroko", and the French "Le Trictrac".
Backgammon's name came about in the mid-seventeenth century when the Anglo Saxons called it the "bac" for back and "gamen" which means game because the checkers go back when hit and re-enters the game.
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