Backgammon · History
A race game five thousand years old
Racing pieces around a board by the throw of dice is one of humanity’s oldest pastimes. A board and dice from Shahr-e Sukhteh in eastern Iran date to around 3000 BC, and Mesopotamia’s Royal Game of Ur is a close relative. These ancestors are why backgammon is often called a 5,000-year-old game.
Roman tabula and Persian nard
The Romans played tabula with fifteen pieces on a 24-point board; a famous position from a game played by the Byzantine emperor Zeno in the fifth century is still recorded. In Persia and the Arab world the game lived on as nard, and medieval Europe knew it simply as “tables”.
Ssangryuk in East Asia
Along the Silk Road the same family of games travelled east to become shuānglù in China, ban-sugoroku in Japan and ssangryuk in Korea. Joseon-era genre paintings show people absorbed in ssangryuk, while in Japan the game was banned repeatedly from the late seventh century because of gambling.
Modern backgammon and computers
The English name “backgammon” appears in the seventeenth century. In the 1920s New York clubs added the doubling cube, creating the modern match game. In the early 1990s an IBM researcher’s neural network taught itself by self-play to reach world-class strength, and its ideas changed how top humans play the opening.