‪The Jiroft Game Boards (World’s Oldest Backgammons)

‪The Jiroft Game Boards (World’s Oldest Backgammons) قدیمی ترین تخته نرد های جهان در جیرفت

 As archeologist Jean Perrot noted in the Persian Journal article, the lay-out of the "holes" on the "eagle" game boards is highly suggestive of the twenty squares game boards excavated by Woolley in Sumer, the so-called "Royal Game of Ur." The lay-out of the "holes" on the "eagle" boards is also identical to the lay-out of some twenty squares boards used in ancient Egypt, where the game, known as "Aseb," was sometimes put on the other side of case-style Senet boards. Nine Ancient Game Board Identified Among Jiroft Relics Nine ancient game boards have been identified among the items taken back from illegal excavators of the historical site of Jiroft, Halil Rud area of Kerman, indicating that people of the area enjoyed playing games some five thousand years ago. Five of these game boards look like eagles, one looks like a scorpion with human head, one looks like a Scorpion, one looks like a long board with an extra square part attached to the handle and the other is a flat board, and all have 12 or 18 holes with similar sizes. According to head of the archeology team of Jiroft, Yusef Majidzadeh, the holes in the boards, which mostly count to 16 or 20 and their similarity in size indicating that they were most probably used as games by the ancient residents of the area. It is not yet sure how the boards were exactly used, Majidzadeh told CHN, however, the equal numbers of the holes and the holes all being in one size show that they were games most probably played with some sort of beads. Jean Perrot, a world-known archaeologist and a retired expert of Louvre Museum who has also studied the boards told CHN that boards similar to these, plus some beads, have previously been discovered in the historical sites of Mesopotamia, and their form and structure shows that ancient people used them as games to entertain themselves. The boards are right now kept in the archeology museum of Jiroft and Iranian and foreign experts are studying them further to find out how they were played.‬