History of Backgammon

The ancient Egyptian game known as ‘senet’ was in some ways similar to backgammon, as each move is controlled via the roll of a dice. However, the Royal Game of ‘Ur’, which was played in ancient Mesopotamia, is a more apt ancestor of modern day table games. Excavations at the "Burnt City" in Iran have shown that another comparable game existed there around the time of 3000 BC. The artefacts found there include two dice and 60 checkers, and the set is believed to be roughly 200 years older than the set of playing materials found in Ur.

The Romans played a number of games that are remarkably comparable to backgammon. ‘Ludus duodecim scriptorum’ ("Game of twelve lines") consisted of a board with three rows of 12 points each; additionally the checkers were moved across all three rows according to the roll of dice. Barely any specific text regarding the gameplay has survived which is why facts about the games found, remain shrouded in mystery.

Tabula, meaning "table" or "board", was a game mentioned in an epigram of Byzantine Emperor Zeno (AD 476–481). It was akin to the modern game of backgammon in that, the object of the game was to beat your opponent by strategically losing all of all of one's checkers. The way in which to do so, is as follows; the player threw three dice and moved their checkers in opposing directions on a board of 24 points.

During the 11th century ‘Shahnameh’, the Persian poet Ferdowsi credits Burzoe with the invention of the table game ‘nard’ during the 6th century. In his manuscripts Ferdowski describes an encounter between Burzoe and a Raja visiting from India. The Raja introduces and explains the game of chess; Burzoe then demonstrated ‘nard’, which was played with dice made from ivory and teak. (Nard is the name for the Persian version of backgammon, which has different initial positions and objectives than today’s common variant backgammon.)

The ‘jeux de tables’, the predecessor of modern backgammon, first appeared in France during the 11th century and became a favourite pastime of the gamblers of that era. Table games were played in Germany during the 12th century, and had reached Iceland by the 13th century.

In the 16th century, Elizabethan laws and church regulations prohibited the playing of tables throughout Britain, but by the 18th century backgammon was a popular past time among the English clergymen.

In English, the word "backgammon" is though to have derived from  the word "back" and Middle English "gamen", meaning "game" or "play". The earliest use of this term documented by the Oxford English Dictionary was in 1650.

The most recent major development in the world of backgammon was the addition of the doubling cube. The doubling cube was introduced in the 1920s in New York, to members of gaming clubs in the Lower East Side of the city. The cube required players not only to select the best move in a given position, but also to calculate the probability of winning from that position, which transformed backgammon into the expected value-driven game, which we play today in the 20th and 21st centuries.