Irving Finkel
India and the Beauty of Boardgames

Irving Finkel - India and the Beauty of Boardgames

- Hello everybody. My name is Irving Finkel, and I’m a curator in the British Museum in London. And I’m glad to say I have the opportunity to talk to you today under the topic of India and her board games, which is an interesting subject. I hope you’ll think so. At the end of this we have to jump around the world quite a bit. So get comfortable in your seats and if you look at the first pictures on this opening page, you will see that the origins of these things go back in time because this is a 19th century photograph of some Indian aristocratic gentleman playing a board game and then in the street, a more modern one from Kolkata showing how the continuation has gone on and on. And when you start to look into these things, the most interesting discoveries come to light. Good. So my first slide is what you might call archaeological because these are boards at the top, both made of clay, which come from Northwest India in the Indus Valley civilization, which is partly northwest India, partly in modern day Pakistan, where in the middle of the third millennium about 2,600 BC archaeological excavations have shown that people were playing board games then. And these two clay or brick examples give you an idea of what they look like. The one on the left has got three rows of squares and it went further on. On the right, it’s broken off. And the one on the right is a kind of square of squares. I don’t know how you would play that. But the one on the left is part of a family of games which we can trace much later in time.

And it actually opens up a whole history of unexpected things. And down at the bottom you will see a a dice made of stone from this culture, the middle of the third millennium. And one of the interesting things about it is, it’s made of stone here. One of the things is that the opposite faces of the six faces add up to seven as they do with a modern dye. So you have six opposite one, two opposite five, and three opposite four. Maybe you can find an example at home where that’s not true, but they’re very unusual. So India has a very important role to play in the history of board games in the world. And this is not a small matter because if you think about it, board games have given excitement and pleasure and competition and sometimes very bad temper to human populations all over the globe. And board games are of two kinds, jolly good ones that last forever and invented ones which are just for the moment and tend to disappear. And some of the board games that have come out of India are of the first category that they are very ancient and they’ve given people pleasure ever since. So if you look at this Indian miniature, you will see two game boards, which perhaps you’ll recognise. The one at the bottom is chess and the one at the top is backgammon. And there’s a fable or a myth that there was a competition between the rulers of India and of Persia about how to play board games. And somebody tried to work out how to play chess and they couldn’t do it and somebody had to work out how to crack backgammon and they did do it.

And it’s a whole interesting piece of mythology which actually touches upon the serious matter that games of this kind where you have fixed rules and you have discerning pieces and you have diced to control the pieces, sometimes, often came out of courts where there were nobles and people who wanted entertainment. And from those gust sought of beginnings spread out throughout society ever after. Sometimes we see in India, in particular, sculptures like this one from a temple which shows a god and a goddess playing a board game. You can see it’s on his left leg and it’s a long plank which goes back into the sculpture. We can’t see it, but you can see that it’s got pieces on it and he’s making a move and that she, his consort, is holding in her hand some dice. And this is very probably an early example of the game of backgammon, which we believe started in India. And look what happened to that because the Romans got hold of it and they played it and then it turned into modern backgammon and it’s gone all over the world. And backgammon is one of those games that we call a world conqueror because it is such an interesting thing. It’s such a good competition that wherever it sets down roots, it stays and you get people who become very good at it and people who don’t get very good at it, but they play it for entertainment ever after. And backgammon is certainly one of them. And we believe it started in India in the early centuries AD.

Now a case which is easier to demonstrate about origin in India is of course the game of chess ‘cause everybody in the world knows how to play chess, although I must say perhaps fewer than used to be the case 'cause lots of people today think chess is complicated and difficult and they’re frightened by it, which is absurd because you can learn the rules very quickly if you ask your uncle or grandfather one day, he will show you the moves and then after that it’s part of your own source of entertainment in the world. Well, chess began as we think in India. And it’s clear when you see 19th or 18th century chess pieces, these are made of ivory. You can see that the elephant in the middle is the ruler, which we call a king. And next to him was a vizier where we have a queen and there are major pieces and then foot soldiers in the front equivalent of pawns. And this dramatic photograph, which is especially out of focus, does give you an idea how chess was originally grown out of, deliberately grown out of the art of warfare, the teaching of how knights should battle on a battlefield, how to move your pieces, literally in a battle in real conflict. Somebody had the bright idea of reducing this to safe things which you could use for teaching purposes. And eventually it became a board game. And the most complicated, or the most entertaining, of all games ever really invented, a game of chess. So that started in India. And this is an example of an engraving from the 16th century from a professor in Oxford who wrote a book in Latin about the games of the East where he did some drawings of an Indian chess set that had come to him. And you can see more clearly how they are mounted on elephants, horses, and camel for the rook and the foot soldiers.

So this drawing is of probably the oldest Indian chess set to come to Europe, although no one has ever seen what happened to it. It’s disappeared from sight. Then eventually what happened was that once chess had gone from India to Persia and then it spread into what it turned out to be Europe and the rest of the world, we have some early chess men which reveal the impact of the arrival of chess in Europe. So for example, these chess men were found in the Isle of Lewis, the north of Scotland and they’re made of walrus ivory. And you can see at a glance you have a king and a queen. The queen looks rather anxious, a bishop with his mitre and his a special hat. And then you have the knights on horseback and then the warders with their shields and the tombstones are the pawns. So this is an interesting thing because it shows that when chess was travelling and it got to Europe and the people who were well off, the aristocrats who had big country houses and very affluent and leisure, they were interested in this new game and they got their craftsmen to make pieces that they could use to play the game they’d learnt from coming in in from outside and they transposed the elephants, which you don’t get in England very often. And and they had bishops because of the importance of the church in the states. So you have a king and queen in the bishop and the knights who were the aristocrats and the rooks who were the warders, who were the kind of soldiers.

So in a way, this chest from the 12th century AD made of ivory exemplifies the impact of an exotic, so to speak, oriental game, which was dressed in its own natural format, in that context, being transposed into something where everybody who met it would know how it worked. And then the major pieces and the minor pieces and the game went on from there. Meanwhile, in India there was an interesting development which is worth documenting, which is this, that they had knights and elephants and horses and carvings of the kind I’ve shown you, which were very expensive and affluent people only had them. But at the same time there was a second tradition in India of chess men, which were quite different. They were not realistically carved, they were reduced to stereotyped simple forms of geometrical type. And this is believed is due to a kind of view among Islam that you don’t have things which are representative of human life or animal life, very often they preferred these things which were more abstract. And so side by side with the marvellous figural and pieces, we have these sometimes red against white, sometimes red against green, sometimes green against white, very simple shapes, which if you had to play chess with this for the first time, you might find it a bit confusing until you learned the relative heights and the relative sizes and you say, oh, this is their version of a rook, their version of a knight. So that is an interesting matter because you have these two styles coming out of the same part of the world. And above, there’s a bit of a chess board made of cloth. And the thing about it is this, everybody knows that chess is played on a board with eight by eight squares, which is 64.

And one side has the back two rows and the other side has the other two rows at the top and then they play together. And this is an Indian chess board of embroidered cloth. And the funny thing about it is lots of the squares have crosses on. Well you I’m sure are familiar with the fact that when you have a race game, that when you have a track of pieces, some of them have crosses like that, that they’re special squares, they may be safe squares or may be dangerous squares or you get another throw, something like that. And this board or chess set out for chess has on its squares which have nothing to do with the game of chess. And the reason is that there was a game in India more ancient than chess, where the squares had to be distinguished like this, some of them, for a different kind of game. And what happened was that when that game was replaced by chess and eight by eight boards were used for the new, as it was, chess game, these for traditional reasons, the craftsmen still put these X’s on the board even though they were of no function for the game and even though probably hardly a chess player in India today could tell you what they were for, it’s just a kind of fossilisation of an old tradition. Now another game which had its origin in India, which is familiar to people all over the world is the one which we call snakes and ladders.

So this is an example of an Indian snakes and ladders board. You can see it’s laid out a bit like a chess board and it has on it ladders and snakes. I have to say that when people showed snakes in India, they’re much more frightening than you find snakes when they’re in the English version or the European versions which came out of the Indian game because these were people who knew what snakes looked like and how dangerous they could be and how frightening they could be. And some of these boards have snakes, which if you were a small child and you were playing with it, you might feel a bit nervous in case it bit your finger. Anyway, the interesting thing about this board with its snakes and ladders where you go up the ladders and down the snakes, of course, as you always do in this game, you will notice that all the squares have inscriptions written within them. Now this is an unusual thing in a gaming board because normally the houses are the sequence all that you have to run. But in this board and many other examples from India, some in fact from different religions, it occurs Buddhist and Jain and the Islamic boards from India all have this characteristic, that the squares have things written in them and they are to do with human behaviour. That is to say if you are a good person and you are pious and helpful and kind and considerate, then you go up the ladders all the way to the top unimpededly and you end up in Nirvana where you really would like to be. And if you are a wicked person and you are sinful and cruel, then you land on squares where the snakes, they’re waiting to get you and you have to go all the way down the snake sometimes all the way down almost to the beginning of the board.

So you have a device which is a game where you have a piece each and you have your dice to throw to get the scores. But at the same time it is a religious instruction system where good and bad and behaviour is explained to young impressionable children. This is another one with a lot of tangle of snakes down the bottom, a very hazardous part. And you can see that the building at the top to represent heaven, this is a completely different one drawn on paper. And there’s only about a hundred of these in existence in the world because in India they either painted on cloth or printed on paper like this. And very often there are special insects in India which like game boards and whenever they find them they go munching through them and they eat their way through. So we are very fortunate when some of these old boards from the 18th century sometimes, or the 19th century, survive so that people can study how the game evolved and the differences between them. Well the thing about it is that the game of snakes and ladders in India was imported into Great Britain in the 19th century. And this this is a pattern which we will see occurs elsewhere. The movement of games from culture to culture is a very important matter to do with Ludology, the history of games, and also to do with the history of commerce because very often it was a commercial matter. So there were manufacturers of board games in Britain who knew nowadays, that’s to say in their day at the turn of the century, the beginning of the 20th century, late 19th century, they knew that there were families with lots of children and they liked having parlour games and they’re always looking for something new. And so what they did is they produced the familiar snakes and ladders board with 100 squares here with snakes and ladders on them in the same kind of way.

So you can see there’s one very long snake there indeed. And you can see there’s a fight between a man and a woman and they go all the way down the bottom, then they get beaten up by somebody stronger. Now the thing is, most snakes and ladders boards, if you’ve ever played with one as a child or you see them lying around in the place they don’t have these pictures on, it’s only occasionally you find one that does have these pictures on. And what is very interesting is that the early boards from Britain knew that in India there was the tradition that good behaviour was rewarded and bad behaviour was punished and they got their artist to draw pictures on some of the squares to match up with this function. So on some of them, for example, there’s a boy pinching biscuits out of a tin and boy is he sorry 'cause he goes all the way down the snake a long way down and an old lady who helped cross the road by a young boy, he goes soaring up the ladder. So this is an extraordinary thing that when the game first arrived here, the element which made it so important in India, which was a serious grave matter to discuss the difference between good and bad behaviour, somehow came with it. And for a while manufacturers preserved it in the English market and elsewhere as well where it wasn’t telling children off all the time, it was more lighthearted, less serious. But somehow the original story came with it. And then, thought you might like to see one of these, which is a modern printed Indian snakes in ladders game because it has never disappeared from Indian culture even though it was exported in the 19th century to Britain and elsewhere.

Nevertheless, it survived strongly in India, and this is the sort of thing you can buy from any news agent. It’s printed in polychrome on paper and there are many varieties of them with different positions for snakes and ladders and so forth. But this shows that it is a vibrant and important game where the same tradition and the decorated squares apply today. Then I’m going to tell you about this game. I’m afraid to say this is me because it’s the only good picture I could find of this wonderful place which is called Fatehpur Sikri which is where Akbar, the great ruler of mogul ruler of India had his palace without hundreds of people in the courtyard taking photographs. It just happened to be a freak moment when I was there with my wife. And what you can see perhaps coming towards you is a gaming board with three lines of squares. It goes all the way down towards the towers and out to the right and out to the left. It’s a four-armed gaming board. And this is a giant board for the game of Parcheesi, which is played in many forms as you’ll see briefly in a minute, both in Europe and in America, which is a race game for four players. When you have pieces and you go round the different arms together, the first to get in the middle and the story goes, the great Akbar liked to play himself sitting on that strong table 'cause I imagine he was a rather bulky person throwing the dice and moving his pieces around. And in his day the pieces were not wooden things or even bedecked jewelled objects or precious goods. They were young ladies in different colour saris.

Four different colours, and these poor young ladies had to stand on the board and when the dice were thrown they would have to move in accordance and if someone landed on their square, they had to come off and start again. So I think on a hot day it was probably rather tiring to be one of the king’s gaming pieces, but I suppose that was his privilege. So I told you just now that the professor in Oxford wrote a book in Latin about board games from India and other places. Well this is the engraving he made of one of these four armed boards. You’ve undoubtedly seen a modern version of this, but there’s a lot of information on this plate from the book. You can see that it’s three by eight squares on each of the four arms and there are cross cuts on these arms because here they are important for the game, whereas on the chess board they’ve become redundant, here they are still crucial. So you have four pieces each and you have little dice you can see on the engraving and on the right you can see a box with some dice of this kind. They’re not square dice or long thin ones, they’re sort of half in between. And those are the sorts of dice that Thomas Hyde, this man, discovered when he bought this board from a sailor in London. Now he was, you can see his picture, he was a court interpreter for several successive kings of Britain. And he was an interesting man because he found everything fascinating and he could read all the languages in the world and talk all the languages in the world. And when foreign ambassadors came to London, he did all the important thing about translating from Arabic and Persian and so forth for political reasons.

But when he was quiet, he always had a word with people about the games that they played and he recorded contemporary games for us, which otherwise would disappear from sight, with a very scholarly and informative thing. And this game he bought, he said it from an Indian sailor who told him the names of the pieces and the name of the game, but he didn’t know how to play it. So fortunately we do anyway. So this is the sort of thing that historians have, these wonderful coloured paintings. And the reason I wanted to show you this is an interesting corner about the history of games in art because it’s not just this kind of narrative I’m talking about today, but also when you go to an art gallery, you see people playing chess or backgammon as part of their daily lives in oil paintings. And there are two kinds of paintings. One is where the artist is very careful to get the right number of squares and to have the pieces on the board in a plausible position or the dice with a plausible throw so that it looks like someone’s taken a photograph of an actual game in progress. And when you have a a sculpture or a painting or a drawing of that kind, then it’s very informative, if you are a historian of games and you want to see the development of local rules or geographical differences, because a snapshot can record for you in the positions something very important. Whereas the other kind of artist does something like a chess board or like a Parcheesi board, a sort of generic thing because it’s not really any importance at all for the picture whether it’s actually accurate. Everybody can see they’re playing a game that’s not what they’re painting. They’re painting the people, their faces, and their haughty selves and their importance and you have a generic picture of a board game, which is maybe fun to look at, but no use to the historian.

This board for example, is a good example of a game in progress. And this is I said about the beauty for board games or I have to say this is one picture just to give you an idea because boards for this game are made all over India in different parts of the country of different materials, different kinds of embroidery. And this gives you an idea of what they look like if you spread them all out on a carpet, you have to walk on them in bare feet of course so you don’t damage them. Sometimes you can see, for example on the lower left hand corner there’s one with silver wire and mauve squares and some insect of the kind I mentioned before there’s been munching on the left arm, obviously likes velvet for lunch. So sometimes these boards come to light with horrible holes in. But the interesting thing also from an ethnographical point of view is that there are different arrangements, different styles all over India and sometimes the X cross squares are in different places. So if you like this kind of thing, which I have to say I do, there’s a lot to be discovered. Now, in India when you play these games, you have to have dice because they are race games of the kind familiar to us. Chess does not need dice, but backgammon and Parcheesi and even snake and ladders have to have dice. What scholars call random generators. And in India there are three basic kinds.

You can see the ones at the top, they are made up in a stick shape. They have four sides usually with numbers on, one, two, three, four, or five, two, four, and three. And sometimes they are hollow with bells inside. And the reason is this, that when you are playing a game you have to roll the dice in your hand and throw them on on the table to get the right scores. You have three dice to throw and sometimes when you want to annoy your opponent you can mutter things and make noises and sometimes they have bells inside which are irritating as anything of the person who doesn’t want them to get the right throw. And there are accounts for how these special bells are there to annoy the opponent. And annoying the opponent is an important part of all this. The second thing is down at the right you can see examples of square or cube, rather cubic dice of the kind that are more familiar to people including one for crown and anchor and a brass one that also has bells inside. And then on the left we have the cheap, so to speak, kind of dice which on the whole, much more widely used than the expensive ones of bone or ivory, and these are cowry shells which are found on seashores all over the place in as Asia. And you you can see that the one in the middle is a real one and they are basically two sided. You have the curvy back and the side with teeth and when you have five or seven of them and you throw them on the table, you count the upturn teeth face to give you your score. And as well as having real ones, people made them out of gold, out of brass, out of bronze, out of glass, out of any other kind of material. And so you can find natural simple dice which are really seashells you can find for nothing made in expensive materials in imitation of as well.

So this is a smart board made of red velvet and gold wire. So I think if you were were from an aristocratic family, that’s the sort of board that you would play on. It’s been very well worn and very well used. But you see the arrangement where you have the four arms from corner to corner of a square, not just cut out like most of the boards. That is the sort of thing that lies behind this, which is a very early example of an English version of this game, Parcheesi, when it first appeared in Britain in the same way as the snakes and ladders board, people thought this game was rather interesting. It was exotic looking and it had nice dice and pieces and so they decided to take this Indian game and transpose it into a game which is much more familiar to most people today, which is called Ludo. So if you look here, you see there are eight squares in each arm, like in the original boards in India, and it’s still called Parcheesi, which is the Indian or one of the names used in India for this traditional game. And when it came to Britain they shortened the arms so it’s only five squares, they made it gaudy and cheap and they took out of the game all of the interesting complexities which made it such a fantastically stimulating thing for people who play Parcheesi, 'cause for example, when you have your dice, you can throw the dice repeatedly until there are some throws which score and some which don’t. But you can throw your dice repeatedly and add up the scores until you throw a one which stops it. And then you have a big total.

So you might have 57 points having thrown and thrown and thrown. You add them up, you’ve got 57, and then you can use the 57, moving your pieces round the board, the four of them, at your disposal as you like. So you have to be jolly quick at calculating, very quick indeed, in order to spread out the number. There’s four here, seven there. And also some people do it so fast that their opponents are not quite sure that they did it properly. And in this game it is a respectable matter to cheat sometimes if you can get away with it, which I think is a very enlightened principle. So I want you to see this man here, he’s called wadiyar is a maharaja in a place called Mizo in south in India. This man is calmly seated in his chair and he looks like a reasonable person. He was a reasonable person, but he was completely obsessed with board games. He had a kind of mental obsession with it. He collected them, he invented them, he combined them, he had the walls of his palace painted with pictures of them and with the rules printed and he had books published and he had rewarded people in his court who played games with him. And altogether he had a rather playful time, but he was serious about it. And this is one picture of one of the things that came from his court. So this is a Parcheesi board such as you’ve seen before, but it’s made of silk and the pieces are made of ivory, different colour pieces and so are the dice.

And what he’s done here is he took the four armed Parcheesi board and he imported from snakes and ladders the idea of writing on the squares. And he made a kind of united game, snakes and ladders plus ludo. Now that’s a very remarkable thing 'cause nobody else ever did that and they certainly never did that in England, but this guy did and he liked playing it. And he incorporated the thing that when you are going round the board, if you land on one square and it says something, you have to go back and sometimes if you land on the other one you go forward. So he pinched from snakes and ladders, the up and down process. And he worked into this four arm race process in a rather original way. And he had these things made of metal and paper and all over the courts and everybody had to play them and said, “This is a really good game. "I really enjoying myself.” And he got his scribes in the court to write out books of rules which still exist today. They’re very beautiful and very, very fascinating. So at the same time in India and this game, the four arm game you can see here, this is a scene in Kolkata. There are four men bent with a great deal of concentration on a board on the floor. And the people are standing around and watching. And this is a very common, it used to be a very common site in India with people who had a bit of time on their hands, they would have a cloth board that they might carry around in their turban or they would draw it on the floor with chalk and they’d have simple dice and bits and pieces, nuts or something.

And they all sit down and I was always hunting in India for example, and the thing is that it I have to say, is if you come across a group of people like this and you have a camera or everybody else looks at you and thinks, that’s an interesting camera. But the people who play the game are completely oblivious to anything like that 'cause they’re so intent on winning and trying to get the right throw and share out the score as I explained, and this is a wonderful picture of real life version of the traditional game of India, which we know about. But at the same time, because of commerce and the evil of commerce, then the original game of Parcheesi, which came into England was re-imported back into India on paper boards and plastic washable boards. And lots of people in India today play Ludo, as we called it in Britain, oblivious to the fact that it used to be a million times better game to be played traditionally in India for centuries and centuries before. So this intrusive, horrible plastic thing with its silly childish rules has supplanted the distinguished and elegant game, which is a traditional Indian contribution to the world. When Parcheesi ended up in Britain, people thought the name was strange and they didn’t like it though they decided to call the game Ludo.

And Ludo is Latin because obviously at that time many more people knew Latin than do today, and Ludo means “I play”. So somebody had a really clever idea, we’ll call it Ludo, means I play, so that it’s to do with playing so that in case anybody didn’t know and they got rid of the lovely Indian name and then they send it back to India and you see people, as I see in this photograph, which I took ages ago, people playing Ludo today in this ignorant way. Now this kind of topic could be talked about for about two days nonstop. But is there something I have to just show you, which is somewhat mind stretching and surprising. Because we’ve seen get board games travelling in the 19th century into Britain. And of course snakes and ladders and Ludo have gone from Britain all over Europe and they’ve gone into America and they, in their way, have been a very successful tradition. Now this game here is in the British Museum. It comes from Mesopotamia from the site of Ur in southern Iraq, it’s called the Royal game of Ur or the Game of 20 Squares. You can see it’s the same kind of thing they’re talking about. It’s a track. There are five squares with rosettes. Those are to do with playing in the game. People have seven pieces in these funny dice in the middle. So when the Sumerians were in charge in southern Iraq, about 2,600, about the same time as the board I showed you at the beginning from Pakistan, they were playing this game. In fact, the one from Pakistan, the broken, is almost certainly the same game as I show you here.

So this game is known to us from archaeology and people all over the ancient world, the Middle Eastern world, played this game. So Cyprus, Crete, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, Egypt, Syria, Palestine, Turkey, Iran, in all those countries for two and a half thousand years we’d find archaeological examples of this game. This is the most famous one, but it’s everywhere. It’s like backgammon. It’s like the backgammon in ancient times that everybody played it, wherever you went, in cafes, you saw it and soldiers played it. It was all over the place. It was a really successful board game. Some years ago, a team of anthropologists went to Cochin in southwest India to do some anthropological work among the Jewish populations who lived in Cochin because they were aware of the fact that the population was reducing in number and many of the Indian Jews who lived in Cochin had emigrated from there to go and live in Israel. So the original community, the ancient community, was beginning to diminish. And so they sent a team of people to go and talk to everybody and to discuss about their food and their implements and objects. And they brought back some things for the museum in Jerusalem, including this game board. And if you can see here, you’ve got a board with three rows of five squares, which is 15 and 15 at one end is the neck. So it’s 20 squares of play, with an X you can see at the end.

And this is the same basic game as the one from Ur, which I showed you before, which is also 20 squares. And this game surfaced among these Jewish Indians from Cochin on this trip and it was never been seen before. So that’s quite an interesting thing. So as I found out how to play the game of Ur, did a lot of work on it, and I discovered it was being played in India, I was jointly keen to find out how people in India might have played it. And to cut a very, very long story short, I went once to a kibbutz in Northern Israel with my sister who was seven and a half months pregnant on the coach to meet this lady, Ruby Daniel, who lived on a kibbutz who we discovered knew how to play this game, the one which was on the board, which had been taken by the anthropologist to Jerusalem for their museum. So this is what Ruby Daniel looked like when she was a young lady. She was a school teacher. She played this game with her aunts and that’s me playing with her on her table in her house. This photograph is taken by my sister. It gives you the impression perhaps of being underwater. It’s one of the worst photographs ever taken. To me, it’s one of the most important photographs ever taken because this was the moment when I, who worked on this ancient game, discovered its modern survival, was able to play it with somebody who knew how to play it.

So it’s quite an important photograph to be in focus, but that’s all we have. It just definitely looks like it’s in a fish tank. So the thing is this, my theory was this, perfectly simple, that the Jews who live in southwest India, the Cochin Jews came from Babylon because that’s where they all were. You remember from the bible that the Jews went from Jerusalem to Mesopotamia into Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar time. And then eventually when the Persians came, they went all over the place and some of them went back to Jerusalem and some of them went east and many of them travelled along the sea coast and ended up in Cochin where they started a new community and they were given land and rights and they’d been there ever since. So from the early centuries AD there’s a community of Jews who came ultimately from Babylon who lived and had their families and died over many, many centuries in Cochin. So I assumed when I saw this board and found out about the rules from Ruby, which is similar to the rules that we found from Mesopotamia itself, that obviously the ancestors who came from Babylon must have brought with them the national board game, it arrived in India and they adopted it and they’ve kept it alive ever since. So this was a very dramatic thing which got in the newspapers. 'Cause if you have a game already played in 2,600 BC and here it is being played in about 1984 AD, that’s quite a long continuum and quite a dramatic thing. And so it was in all the newspapers and I felt very pleased because hello, what a discovery.

Then I found out about this because somebody wrote an article, a man called Krishna Murthy, about a site in India called Nagarjunakonda, where in the third to fourth centuries they had burning ghats. When people died, they were of of course cremated in this way and on these burning ghats. And people went and they were there the whole day while it was going on. And there was a whole area with wide steps going down to the river where people sat and I suppose spent the day and talked and sometimes they played board games and sometimes they scratched board games on the stone while they were there. And here we had on this third and fourth century AD sketch of a game board, which was exactly the same plan as the one from Cochin and the one from Mesopotamia. So what is this? I mean, this is a very serious problem because it is easy to believe that people took from Babylon to Cochin, a Babylonian board game and kept it alive. But what’s it doing the other side of India in the third or fourth century AD? I don’t think anybody from Cochin went there for a holiday. So it looked like, a-ha, this is a more complicated matter than it first appeared and that this is to be explained in a different way. And then two other things happened to me, and then I’ll give you the conclusion. I went to India with my wife and we went to this place, Bhubaneswar and we ended up going early in the morning to this temple called the Kedaresvara temple in India, which was the first temple I actually went in, really. And when we went in the courtyard, which you can see on the left, I was absolutely flabbergasted to see on the floor in this courtyard another game board scratched. And this is a drawing I did at the time. It’s the same kind of thing.

So there it was in the middle of this temple, nothing to do with the Jews of Cochin, nothing to do with the people at the burning ghat, something else altogether. And this was the first Indian temple I set foot in. So this is a bit of a thing to swallow when we are dealing with evidence, which is so rarefied and so difficult to discover. You put your foot down, you look down, there’s another one. Then what happened was we went to Sri Lanka and when we went to Sri Lanka, you can see this great monument on the left. Well, they had a kind of grassy thing in front of it and the archaeologists had decided to take up this grass and see what’s underneath the original pavement. And when they did that, they found a whole load of gaming boards scratched on the pavement of the same design. And this is in Sri Lanka, or as we used to call it Ceylon. So what is going on here? What is going on here? And eventually after a calm glass of water and a shady room, it occurred to me that this was the explanation. So that you can see in the middle the royal game of Ur board, which I showed you a big version of. Well ultimately this comes from India because of that block at the top, which is a broken board of the same kind. This is about 3,000 BC or later in India. So this game played on 20 squares with pieces and dice almost certainly begins in India. It then travels, it goes to Iran. By 2,500 BC there’s a board from Iran and made in the form of a snake’s body, all twirly twirly together. And then from there it went to Iraq. And from Iraq, as I said, it went all over the ancient world. So you’ve got this lovely movement, India, Iran, Iraq, elsewhere. And the thing about that is as what happens with chess, you have chess goes from India to Iran, Iran to the Middle East, and all over the world. It’s exactly the same principle, marvellous thing.

Meanwhile, however we can see on the right that the game which started in India at that time continued in India at that time and crops up in different places to do with the burning ghat and also down in Sri Lanka. So it survived there. And on top of that, the Jews from Cochin, not knowing any of this stuff at all when they left Iraq, took with them the Iraqi game and re-imported it back into India in the early centuries AD. So you have this marvellous swirling circle where everything goes round and round and round. And that is the truth of the matter, that that’s what happens with board games, which people think are rather childish or rather boring or just silly. They are very, very significant flags of what happens in the world. And in summary, how does this happen? I brought you two more images to give you some ideas. Firstly, we are talking in antiquity of a time when you don’t get rule books, you don’t buy a box from a shop with a printed rules and this is what you do and these are the pieces you have and this is how you win. How do you learn? You learn by watching people. You watch your parents, you watch your uncles, you just imitate, you see people doing it, you pick it up and you go from there. So that is how games are promoted and passed on in a normal environment in one place and so forth. But the devices which moved them out of a homestead, or out of a village, or out of a city, or even out of a country into another country are quite different. So one of them is mercenaries. These are people dressed up as Roman soldiers, including me, I’m afraid, I don’t mean to have all these pictures of me, it just happens to be there.

So they are playing a Roman game dressed up for some kind of documentary film. But the point is, mercenaries travel from country to country. They go all over the place. They follow Alexander around the world and what are they? There are people who fight and lust and destroy and burn all day. And in the evening they like to relax, they like to get drunk, they like to play board games, and they learn from other soldiers and they go in the pub and they learn from other soldiers and then they pick things up and they carry them with them. When they go home they say, “Oh, what was that game again? "Let’s see if we can remember it.” So mercenaries are one of these uncharted things. And then you have sailors, same kind of thing. On board, sometimes nothing to do, they play a kind of game of Ludo. You can see the board here, which has a special fence around the edge because if they’re on a ship or a submarine and there’s a kind of wobble, they don’t want all the pieces coming off the board and going on the floor under the table. So they have a special naval board for playing a version of Ludo. And actually it’s much more complicated and more competitive than the kind of ludo you play from toy shops today, I’m glad to say. Then you have what you might call traders. This is a modern picture of a car of caravanserai, which was a mediaeval structure on a trade route where traders and messengers and people passing through could stay overnight. They could have their animals watered and there’d be food and they would meet people from all over the place, probably with no shared language, just looking at one another, how strange they are, their costume, their speech.

And one of the things which levels this sort of situation is people playing a board game. So if two guys are playing, then three, or four people would hang around. Not a word in common between them, but they would soon grasp how it worked because all games have all these things in common and you get the kind of idea very quickly and then someone takes somebody on and somebody might become a really good player in two days and everybody keeps away from them. And somebody might get ferocious when they get drunk and they wouldn’t play with them. But in a caravanserai like that with intercourse between all sorts of people in the kind of confluence of travel, ideal moment for a game going from one to another without much language and without any rules. They just spread in that remarkable way. And then there are other things not quite so happy. I mean the slave trade, for example, from Africa has been responsible for the the spread of the game mancala, which is played on a wooden board like this little one at the bottom with two rows of holes and you sow seeds in it. Marvellous, marvellous, complex game, gone all over the world because of this trade in human beings and what it led to and the movement of what remained of their shattered culture.

This is one of the things which came out of it and which has gone all over the place as a result from that original stimulus. And then you have a kind of artificial stimulus, which is missionaries because you can see those earnest ladies in their virginal white clothes who went out to do their missionary work. Well often when they had to deal with children who couldn’t read and write, they had devices to explain things to them and they taught them English folk games or parlour games to teach them how to spell and to teach them how to sing. And they are the sort of persons who might take something from a village in England where they grew up in a very different environment and they find themselves singing a little song and all the kids learning it and then they teach their children and all this kind of funny transmission of things. And we can see anthropologically that sometimes it’s included board games. And then there’s the old refugee matter and it’s a really extraordinary thing that all these issues, are still alive in the world. You think they ought to be really the subject of dead anthropology when we think what does refugee mean. Nobody has to be told what refugee means, I’m afraid to say.

But in the field board games, they have a serious thing. For example, America was so-to-speak, invented when the boats went out from Britain to found the country and start what happened there to the native population and so forth and so forth. But when they went on the ship like that, the two or three ships that first went, and they didn’t take chess and draughts with them because they ought to take things which are really essential and they had to get there in one piece. But what happened was that when they finally got there and they started their settlements and they started and they built houses and they had some kind of leisure and some kind of community structure, somebody thought, “Oh, I fancy a game of what it might be chess "or draughts as they used to play at home.” And so what? Some carpenter makes a board, they carve a few pieces, because you don’t have to take a chess board and pieces across the world in a sailing boat in order to import the knowledge of it because it travels in the head. And in no time at all you have chess embedded in American culture and you end up with Bobby Fisher directly as a result of this boat. So this is a marvellous matter that something which people think is just an amusement or it’s trivial or it’s not very significant. It’s actually one of the major forces of contact between the nations and the spread of things which are only beneficial to mankind at large. So thank you very much.

Q&A and Comments:

Well, someone has written pointing out that the first die, which I showed did not have six opposite one. And that’s true. I have to apologise. Almost every one in the world does, but that’s one of the ones that doesn’t. Good point. Very important point. Let me see what else. I don’t know.

Q: Someone, Julius Stone asks whether the mark of David with the six point star on that board from India, whether it has a significance.

A: I don’t think it has a Jewish significance there. I think it’s just a symbol. It’s rather extraordinary that it’s there, but I don’t think it is necessarily a sign of that. Somebody has asked about the dice game, which she inherited from her father with five dice each showing nine 10, jack, queen, king, ace, made of ivory. These are what we call polka dice, which is kind of gambling game because dice, as well as being the mechanics for moving pieces along a racetrack, also lend themselves to gambling. And there are people who might say that the spread in existence of gambling in the world is not a beneficial thing. And polka dice, although not themselves the tools of the devil, are to do with gambling. And there was a time, for example, in 19th century England where board game manufacturers stopped making dice and they made cardboard spinners instead.

Two people have asked about mahjong, which is, as you say, not strictly a board game. The thing about mahjong is that it’s really, you might say a card game transposed into stone or ivory or wooden blocks to make a structure. But the way it works is like a card game with suits and so forth. As far as we know it began in China. And the movement of mahjong around the world is certainly a consequence of the movement of Chinese merchants, especially in when you have a city what we used to call Chinatown, for example, in London or in America, there are places which I think are still called Chinatown, where the merchants still play mahjong. You can hear it being played. So it followed that process all over the place. And then in America in the 1920s, it was adopted outside of the Chinese community and there were mahjong drives and lots of books about it. It was a very successful game. It’s not quite a board game, it’s a kind of hybrid board come card game.

Somebody has asked me when unequal strength games, like one called Officers and Sea Boys start. And that is an important question because in antiquity, most games were to do with dice. They were race games from one end to the other with internal rules. But there were some games which were played on a board with a linear design, sometimes triangles around a central part or something of the kind where you have one powerful piece and half a dozen or more weak pieces. They are very often traditionally a tiger against sheep. Officers and Sea Boys is a sophisticated version of what’s really tigers and sheep. And it’s believed that these games were tended to be invented by boys who had to watch the flocks and had nothing to do under the sun all day and fiddled about with pebbles on the ground and came up with these sorts of games to wile away the time. But the principle of it is that the powerful piece, like a tiger, can jump over one of the sheep and so to speak, eat it. So if they’re, say they’re nine sheep, the nine sheep try to trap the tiger so it can’t move and then they win. But if the tiger quickly eats enough of them so he can’t be trapped, he’s the winner. So that’s the origin of unequal strength games and they are quite a large number of variations of the same kind of principle.

Some, a lady called Jean has said that, “Mancala has been a wonderful game "to play with my grandchildren. "It’s quick, looks simple, "but requires strategy that my "grandkids eagerly work to master. "Thanks for a great talk.” Well, it’s something interesting about that you can learn the rules, as you say, of mancala in no time at all, but it is remarkably complex and even the simplest versions are, and it’s historically true that most people who observed it in the field had no idea at all how it worked. And it’s a very remarkable thing, but I think if your grandkids are on it, you’ll have to be very wide awake before they wipe the floor with you.

Right, I think those are most of the questions I can answer off the top, but there’s some very nice comments. Much appreciated. It’s very kind. Okay.