lost

[WSTWUN]

i am referring to the first episode shown last week, there is a scene with the young boy goes over to the old bloke who is playing backgamon on the beach, the old man tells the boy that backgamon is the oldest game in the world.  is this true if not what is

[juliely]

I always thought it would be something like Mah-Jong.

[Octavius]

It may be one of the eldest board game variants but it certainly wasn't called Backgammon then:

Backgammon-type games have been played for thousands of years in all parts of the world and certainly during the Egyptian, Greek and Roman eras.  The Romans left a great deal of evidence of a game they called Ludus Duodecim Scriptorum, the game of the twelve lines. The game is possibly derived from the Egyptian Senat having a topological set of 3 x 12 points and being played with 3 x 6 sided dice but, again, the rules have never been fully ascertained. In the first century AD, Ludus Duodecim Scriptorum seems to have been replaced by a variant with only 2 rows of 12 points, a game which by the 6th century was called 'Alea'.  Both these games and others were also referred to as 'Tabula', which was a generic game for 'boardgame' and in early mediaeval times was usually used to mean the most popular boardgame, Ducodecim Scriptorum/Alea/Backgammon, in the same way that the generic term 'football' normally means 'soccer' in England today.

Boards found in Ancient Sumeria, in the royal tombs at Ur (~2500BC), Mesopotamia made during this period seem to be some sort of race game.  The ancient Sumerian name of the game is not known although it is often referred to as the Royal Game of Ur (The Game of 20 Squares).

[WSTWUN]

thanks that was most informative

[Skellen]

i would have thought hide and seek from the dinosaurs would be older?

[WSTWUN]

yeah if humans & dinosaurs existed at the same time