A board for a two-player race game, one of the oldest known, excavated by Leonard Woolley in the Royal Cemetery at Ur in southern Iraq. Twenty shell squares are set among red limestone and lapis lazuli. The game was played across the Middle East for more than two thousand years, and its rules were partly reconstructed from a Babylonian tablet of the 2nd century BCE.
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Five of the squares carry rosettes. In Irving Finkel's reconstruction of the rules, landing on one gives the player an extra throw.
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