Archaeologists Excavate 4,000-Year-Old Board Game Crafted From Stone

Monopoly, who? About 4,000 years ago, residents at a Bronze and Iron Age settlement located in the Qumayrah Valley in Northern Oman entertained themselves with a board game featuring a grid and cup holes.

The stone slab, discovered in one of the least-researched sites in Oman, has grid-like carvings seemingly to represent fields of play, as well as cup holes for playing pieces. Its rules, unfortunately, remain unclear.

“Such finds [of such gameplays] are rare, but examples are known from an area stretching from India, through Mesopotamia even to the Eastern Mediterranean,” noted Piotr Bielinski, a University of Warsaw archaeologist and a leader of the project, in a news release.

Bielinski said one of the most prominent board games sporting a similar format is a 4,500-year-old, two-player game board uncovered in 1922 in a grave in Ur, a royal cemetery in modern-day Iraq. The object, believed to resemble a backgammon board, now resides in the British Museum in London, as per Artnet News.

The stone board game in Oman was retrieved among copper objects, validating theories that the settlement specialized in “the lucrative copper trade for which Oman was famous at that time,” said Bielinski. He also told the Daily Mail that findings in this site “[prove] that this valley was an important spot in Oman’s prehistory.”

[via Artnet News and Smithsonian Magazine, images via J Sliwa / Polish Center of Mediterranean Archaeology, University of Warsaw]