(no subject)

[xiphias]

On Saturday, Lis and I went to a lecture at the Boston Athanaeum presented by Dr. Irving Finkel, on the History of Board Games.

Irving Finkel is one of the British Museum's cuneform experts, and the curator of their board game collection (along with many other areas of interest and expertise.) And he's just an amazingly entertaining lecturer. I think I want to be him when I grow up.

He talked a little about Monopoly, and its origin by a Quaker woman as an attempt to show the evils of capitalism. Then he started on Pachisi, and went through its history, including a photo of himself standing in the courtyard of the palace of Akbar, on the giant patchisi board, where the emperor Akbar would use sixteen of his harem girls, four each in four different colored saris, to play patchisi. Then he showed a slide of a bunch of folks sitting in the street in Calcutta, playing patchisi on a board drawn in chalk on the ground, playing with bottle caps and pebbles.

We were shown the historical origins of Snakes and Ladders, and went through some of the Egyptian games. We had a digression to possibly the oldest board game in the world, which we know nothing about, because it's five thousand years older than writing, but it *looks* like a board game, maybe related to Mancala. And then we got to, clearly, Dr. Finkel's favorite game, the Royal Game of Ur.

I've played the Royal Game of Ur, occasionally, against my computer (yeah, I've got a computer version of the Royal Game of Ur. So I'm a geek.) It's tough. You've got a fun shaped board, and three tetrahedral dice. Each tetrahedron has two of its points colored different; you throw all three dice on your turn, and you get a score from zero to 3 -- one point for each colored point upmost. And you move your seven pieces around the board, and bump other pieces off, and so forth.

He had bunches of interesting stuff about the Royal Game of Ur: a cuneform tablet which, when used with a Ur game board, allowed you to do fortune telling; a betting game where each of your pieces had a different role, and if you got to special spaces on the board with different pieces, you got different numbers of points -- stuff like that.

He also, after the lecture, was talking about how kids learned to read and write in ancient Sumer. He showed one young girl a clay tablet about the size of a hockey puck. There were lines engraved on both sides; the teacher would write something on one side, and then the student would copy it on the other side. He said that the British museum has one of the tablets in which, on the student's side, besides the half-completed lesson (done badly), there's a drawing of a guy with his mouth open and his teeth pointing in all directions. The kid was doodiling a caricature of his teacher, proving that bored kids are about the same throughout history.

Comments

Did he say anything about Go?

[jhitchin.livejournal.com]

Okay, it's become my pet favorite board game and I like to see it get coverage in the U.S. :-)

Re: Did he say anything about Go?

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

A sentence or two. His comment was, "There's an occasional outbreak of Go in the United States, like measles, at MIT or some such place, but it's never really caught on the way it has in Asia. This is because one of the primary qualities needed for success is patience." He also pointed out that you can learn to play in about five minutes, at which point you spend the rest of your life getting any good at it. (He considered this to be a rather positive quality in a board game.)

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

The kid was doodiling a caricature of his teacher, proving that bored kids are about the same throughout history

This makes me very happy :)

I should learn to play the Royal Game of Ur. I bet I could make myself a set with spare Shrink plastic and glue...

A.

[jehanna.livejournal.com]

Ooh. This sounds like it was cool. I have to ask--did he mention fidchell? :)

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

No, he's basically interested in India and the Near and Middle East, so, except for Monopoly, we basically stuck in the Fertile Crescent/North Africa/India sorta chunks of the world. Didn't mention Fidchell, Halafatl, or, for that matter, New World games like Patolli (although, sticking around afterwards, it turned out that someone who was in the audience wrote the authoritative work on Patolli).

But, I'm sure that if you mailed him a fidchell set, it'd be put into the collection of the British Museum. :)