In Iraq, an Ancient Board Game Is Making a Comeback

To revive the game's ancient popularity, British archaeologist Ashley Barlow (R) sought to recreate a board based on the dimensions and design of the original (AFP Photo/SHWAN MOHAMMED)
To revive the game's ancient popularity, British archaeologist Ashley Barlow (R) sought to recreate a board based on the dimensions and design of the original (AFP Photo/SHWAN MOHAMMED)
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In Iraq, an Ancient Board Game Is Making a Comeback

To revive the game's ancient popularity, British archaeologist Ashley Barlow (R) sought to recreate a board based on the dimensions and design of the original (AFP Photo/SHWAN MOHAMMED)
To revive the game's ancient popularity, British archaeologist Ashley Barlow (R) sought to recreate a board based on the dimensions and design of the original (AFP Photo/SHWAN MOHAMMED)

After rolling pyramid-shaped dice, Iraqi Kurdish artisan Hoshmand Muwafaq shifted his pebble around an ornate board, his handmade recreation of one of the Middle East's oldest and most popular games.

Originating nearly 5,000 years ago in what would become Iraq, the Royal Game of Ur mysteriously died out -- until Muwafaq resurrected it by making his own decorated wooden board.

"It is a nice feeling when you rebuild and recreate a game which is not played by people anymore, and you try to show your generation and your people what we used to have before," he told AFP.

"So you introduce the board again to the people. It's just really something, somehow amazing."

It was only in 1922 that the board game came to light.

A board -- a kind of draughtboard in an elongated 'H' shape -- together with its pieces and dice, were found during archaeological excavations at the royal cemetery in the ancient Sumerian city of Ur, known now as Tal al-Muqayyar, in southern Iraq.

Taken to the British Museum for closer study, it took more than five decades until experts managed to match up and translate a set of rules carved into a piece of clay with the board game.

It became known as the Royal Game of Ur.

Two players have seven circular pieces each, which they must move in a loop across the beautifully carved wooden board.

If a player lands his piece on a square already occupied by his rival, he can knock off the original piece and his rival must start again.

Some of the 20 variously inlaid square places on the board offer players a refuge from being knocked off, or allow for a second roll of the unusual, pyramid-shaped dice.

- 'First Ur board' -

Despite its simple rules, it makes for ferocious competition.

"It's not just a game of luck, there's strategy," said Irving Finkel, the British Museum curator who worked to decipher the game's rules.

Not only had they discovered the game's playing instructions, he said in a video published last year by the museum, but also that it could be played for more than just fun, with some people betting for drink and women.

Superstitious players in ancient Mesopotamia thought the outcome of each Royal Game was directed by the gods or had an impact on their future.

Finkel said the board predated backgammon, a similar and extremely popular game now played across the Middle East.

"Before chess and before backgammon came into the world, everybody played this game," Finkel said.

But it has largely been forgotten by modern-day Iraqis.

- 'Testament to globalized world' -

To revive the game's prehistoric popularity, British archaeologist Ashley Barlow asked Muwafaq to recreate a board based on the dimensions and design of the original.

The aim is to create the first Ur game board "produced in Iraq for millennia", said Barlow, who lectures at the University of Raparin in the town of Raniye, 400 kilometers north of Baghdad.

Although it was invented locally, the game seems to have reached communities hundreds of kilometers away, even as far as India.

"The board itself, with its Afghan Lapis lazuli and Pakistani carnelian (gemstones), is testament to a globalized world connected by traders, merchants and craftsmen," Barlow told AFP.

By reviving the game back in its birthplace, he hopes Iraqis can move past recent decades of violence to build an identity based on a shared ancient past.

"We want to reintroduce and re-educate people in their Mesopotamian history, something they can be really proud of -- something that unites people rather than divides people," he said.

- The old becomes new -

Barlow and his team of volunteers are on a mission to bring back the spirit of Mesopotamia by spreading the game -- first in the north, and then hopefully to Baghdad and Mosul.

Their first stop is the local park.

There, mainly older men play more mainstream games like checkers and backgammon -- but can the Royal Game of Ur make a comeback?

"Yes!" says Mam Rasool, one of the elderly men there.

"I would play if there is someone to play the game with, like they (the Mesopotamians) did."

He picked up a piece to move it across the intricate board.

"It's 5,000 years old, but to us it's new," said Rasool.



Nigerian Farms Battle Traffic, Developers in Downtown Abuja

Developers fill in farmland despite regulations protecting these areas as rare green spaces in Abuja. OLYMPIA DE MAISMONT / AFP
Developers fill in farmland despite regulations protecting these areas as rare green spaces in Abuja. OLYMPIA DE MAISMONT / AFP
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Nigerian Farms Battle Traffic, Developers in Downtown Abuja

Developers fill in farmland despite regulations protecting these areas as rare green spaces in Abuja. OLYMPIA DE MAISMONT / AFP
Developers fill in farmland despite regulations protecting these areas as rare green spaces in Abuja. OLYMPIA DE MAISMONT / AFP

Under the din of traffic from the highway bridge that cuts over his fields, Bala Haruna inspects corn, cassava and okra on his family farm.

A pump pulls up water from a nearby stream and is diverted through trenches dug through cropland wedged between four-lane roads -- fields which were here long before the nearby hotel, the imposing national mosque or any of the high-rises that make up downtown Abuja were even dreamed up.

"There were no buildings here," Haruna, 42, told AFP, reminiscing over his childhood as birds chirped and frogs croaked.

The urban farms dotting Nigeria's capital show the limits of the top-down management the planned city is known for -- oases scattered around pockmarked downtown that has long expanded outward faster than it has filled in.

They owe much of their existence to the fact that they lie in hard-to-develop gulches along creek beds. Even roads built through them over the years tended to be elevated highway overpasses.

That fragile balancing act, however, is increasingly under threat, as developers fill in farmland despite regulations protecting these areas as rare green spaces in a city known for concrete sprawl.

On the other side of the overpass, the future has arrived: the vegetation abruptly stops and temperatures suddenly rise over flattened fields razed by construction crews.

Local farmers said the people who took the land three years ago provided no documentation and only gave the eight of them 300,000 naira to split -- a sum worth only $190 today after years of rampant inflation.

Much of the farmland in and around downtown is supposed to be a municipal green space, with neither farms nor buildings on it.

But enforcement of the decades-old Abuja master plan is ripe with abuse and lack of enforcement, said Ismail Nuhu, urban governance researcher who did his PhD on the capital's urban planning.

Adding to the sense of precarity is that the land, on paper, belongs to the government.

"Politicians still use it to grab lands, just to say, 'Oh, according to the master plan, this is not to be here'," no matter what the document actually says, he told AFP, adding that, technically, even the presidential villa is not located where it is supposed to be.

Nyesom Wike, the minister of the Federal Capital Territory, which includes Abuja, recently told reporters he would "enforce" the 70s-era master plan by building roads and compensating and evicting settlements that stand in the way.

FCT officials including Wike's spokesman did not respond to requests for comment.

Urbanizing country, not enough jobs

The farms have provided steady employment -- a lifeline for some as the rapidly urbanizing country fails to produce enough jobs. A recent opening for 10,000 government jobs saw 450,000 applicants, according to local media.

"Having a green space... in a very thick, populated city like Abuja does a lot of good," said retiree Malik Kuje Guni, who started farming three years ago to supplement his pension.

While tens of thousands of residents pass by the farms each day without second thought, Guni, when he was working as a civil servant, would often come down to visit, enjoying the shade and fresh air.

Now tilling a potato plot of his own, "I can come down, work, sweat," the 63-year-old said. "I have hope something will come out of it."

A few blocks over, squat, informal houses made of wood and sheet metal give way to a field of sugarcane, corn and banana trees. Glass-paneled highrises, half-finished construction and the imposing Bank of Industry tower above.

The crops give way to land cleared by developers a few months ago, some of whom pushed into Godwin Iwok's field and destroyed his banana trees.

Iwok, who quit his security job 22 years ago to make more money as a farmer, has had parts of his fields destroyed twice in the past two years, neither time with compensation.

To Guni, the farms represent the city's rural heritage. Despite decades of government promises to relocate Nigeria's capital from the crowded, congested mega-city of Lagos, the move only occurred in 1991.

But neither Iwok, 65, nor Haruna want their children to continue their increasingly precarious line of work.

"I wouldn't want my children to stand under the sun as I did," Iwok told AFP.

"I only use what I'm getting here... to make sure my children go to school."