Royal Game of Ur

The Royal Game of Ur, also known as the Game of Twenty Squares, refers to an ancient game represented by two gameboards found in the Royal Tombs of Ur in Iraq by Sir Leonard Woolley in the 1920s. The two boards date from the First Dynasty of Ur, before 2600 BC, thus making the Royal Game of Ur one of the oldest examples of board gaming equipment found, although Senet boards found in Egyptian graves predate it as much as 900 years. The Ur-style Twenty Squares gameboard was also known in Egypt as Asseb, and has been found in Pharaoh Tutankhamen's tomb, among other places. Discovery of a tablet partially describing the gameplay has allowed the game to be played again after over 2000 years, although reconstructions of the detailed rules have differed widely.

One of the two boards from Ur is exhibited in the collections of the British Museum in London.

Gameplay

The Royal Game of Ur was played with two sets, one black and one white, of seven markers and three tetrahedral dice. After around 1000 BC, the layout of the twenty squares was altered to make the end course for the markers a straight line. The rules of the game as it was played in Mesopotamia are not completely known but there have been a number of reconstructions of gameplay, based on a cuneiform tablet of Babylonian origin dating from 177–176 BC by the scribe Itti-Marduk-Balāṭu. It is universally agreed that the Royal Game of Ur, like Senet, is a race game.

The Royal

The Royal is a British medical drama series produced by ITV that ran from 2003 to 2011. The show comprised one-hour episodes which were normally first aired on ITV in the Sunday early evening slot.

The title of the series refers to the fictional "St Aidan's Royal Free Hospital", located in Elsinby, a fictional rural seaside town, portrayed as being close to Aidensfield, the fictional setting of the UK TV series Heartbeat. The series was shot in Whitby and Scarborough, in the North Riding of Yorkshire. The Royal is an NHS hospital serving the local town, countryside and visitors. The show was set in the 1960s. It began as a spin-off from another popular ITV show set in North Yorkshire, Heartbeat.

Stars of the show included Ian Carmichael, Wendy Craig, Robert Daws, and Amy Robbins. The last episode of the show aired at 7.00 pm on Sunday, 31 July 2011 on ITV.

Overview

The Royal was introduced in the 14th episode of the 12th series of Heartbeat entitled 'Out Of The Blue' and The Royal benefited from this connection to the extremely popular parent series; several Heartbeat characters appeared in the first couple of series of The Royal, most notably Bill Maynard as a bed-ridden Claude Greengrass, but as the series progressed it generally dropped its character crossovers with Heartbeat to become its own entity.

The Royal Game

The Royal Game (or Chess Story; Schachnovelle in the original German) is a novella by Austrian author Stefan Zweig first published in 1941, just before the author's death by suicide. In some editions, the title is used for a collection that also includes "Amok", "Burning Secret", "Fear", and "Letter From an Unknown Woman".

Plot summary

Driven to mental anguish as the result of total isolation by the National Socialists, Dr B, a monarchist hiding valuable assets of the nobility from the new regime, maintains his sanity only through the theft of a book of past masters' chess games which he plays endlessly, voraciously learning each one until they overwhelm his imagination to such an extent that he becomes consumed by chess.

After absorbing every single move of any variation in the book, and having nothing more to explore, Dr B begins to play the game against himself, developing the ability to separate his psyche into two personas: I (White) and I (Black). This psychological conflict causes him to ultimately suffer a breakdown, after which he eventually awakens in a sanatorium. Being saved by a sympathetic physician, who attests his insanity to keep him from being imprisoned again by the Nazis, he is finally set free.

Game

A game is structured form of play, usually undertaken for enjoyment and sometimes used as an educational tool. Games are distinct from work, which is usually carried out for remuneration, and from art, which is more often an expression of aesthetic or ideological elements. However, the distinction is not clear-cut, and many games are also considered to be work (such as professional players of spectator sports or games) or art (such as jigsaw puzzles or games involving an artistic layout such as Mahjong, solitaire, or some video games).

Key components of games are goals, rules, challenge, and interaction. Games generally involve mental or physical stimulation, and often both. Many games help develop practical skills, serve as a form of exercise, or otherwise perform an educational, simulational, or psychological role.

Attested as early as 2600 BC, games are a universal part of human experience and present in all cultures. The Royal Game of Ur, Senet, and Mancala are some of the oldest known games.

Irving Finkel

Irving Leonard Finkel (born September 1951) is a British philologist and Assyriologist. He is currently the Assistant Keeper of Ancient Mesopotamian script, languages and cultures in the Department of the Middle East in the British Museum, where he specialises in cuneiform inscriptions on tablets of clay from ancient Mesopotamia.

Education

Finkel earned a PhD in Assyriology from the University of Birmingham under the supervision of Wilfred G. Lambert with a dissertation on Babylonian exorcistic spells against demons.

Career

Philology

Finkel spent three years as a Research Fellow at the University of Chicago Oriental Institute. In 1976 he returned to the UK, and he was appointed as Assistant Keeper in the Department of Western Asiatic Antiquities at the British Museum, where he was (and remains) responsible for curating, reading and translating the museum's collection of around 130,000 cuneiform tablets.

In 2014, Finkel's discovery of a cuneiform tablet that contained a Flood narrative similar to that of the story of Noah's Ark, described in his book The Ark Before Noah, was widely reported in the news media. The ark described in the tablet was circular, essentially a very large coracle or kuphar and made of rope on a wooden frame. The tablet included sufficient details of its dimensions and construction to enable a copy of the ark to be made at about 1/3 scale and successfully floated, as documented in a 2014 TV documentary.