While excavating a 5,000 year-old burial mound at Başur Höyük near Siirt in southeast Turkey, archaeologists have unearthed a set of carved stones that may represent the earliest recorded gaming tokens. The stones depict dogs, pyramids, pigs, and other shapes with each set of tokens painted a different color. There were even dice.
Archaeologists have matched these 49 apparent game pieces with similar objects found in several sites in Syria and Iraq. At these locations, the stones were found alone, so they were assumed to be counting stones, not part of a game. This mysterious game might have been a common way to pass the time in ages past. The Başur Höyük site dates to 3100-2900 BCE, suggesting board games like this one may have originated in the Fertile Crescent and Egypt before spreading outward.
Some bits of decomposed wood were also found in close proximity to the stone game pieces. Researchers are hoping that they will provide some hints on the rules of the game, which seems to have something to do with the number 4 — most of the tokens are in sets of four or eight.
The site where the game pieces were discovered also contained a large cache of beads and pottery, which indicates it was connected to an individual in the ruling class. This reinforces evidence from other Mesopotamian sites and Egyptian writings that board games were common among the elite in the ancient world. Some tombs from Mesopotamian societies dating around 3,000 BCE have contained intricate game boards and pieces from the “Game of Twenty Squares.”
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