Backgammon History: Myths and Many Names
Popular accounts of backgammon's past are full of confident claims: that it is the oldest game in the world, that the Sumerians invented it, or that the Egyptians played it under another name. The truth is more interesting and more modest. This article looks at the most common myths and then at the many names under which the game is still played today. For a step-by-step timeline, see our main page on the history of backgammon.
Myth: backgammon is the oldest game
Backgammon belongs to a very old family of dice-driven race games, but it is not the oldest game known. Boards for several ancient race games survive from the Middle East, and they used different tracks, different numbers of pieces and, as far as we can tell, different rules. The modern game, with its fixed starting position and fifteen checkers per side, is much younger.
Myth: the Sumerians played backgammon
Excavations in ancient Mesopotamia uncovered beautifully made boards for what is now called the Royal Game of Ur. It was a race game with dice and pieces, which is why it is sometimes linked to backgammon. Its board, however, has twenty squares rather than twenty-four points, and the reconstructed rules are quite different. It is a relative in spirit, not an early version of the same game.
Myth: Senet and tabula are the same game
Egyptian Senet and Roman tabula are sometimes named together as "backgammon under other names". Senet was played on a board of thirty squares in three rows, while tabula used a board much like ours, with fifteen pieces per player and the aim of bearing them all off. Of the two, tabula is the true relative of backgammon.
Bans and restrictions
Because tables games were played with dice, rulers and religious authorities often viewed them with suspicion. In Japan a board game called ban-sugoroku, closely related to backgammon, was banned several times from the late seventh century onward. In medieval Europe a number of decrees, including one by the French king Louis IX in the 13th century, tried to suppress dice games. None of these bans lasted, and the game kept its popularity.
Tables in English literature
Before the word "backgammon" appeared in the 17th century, the English simply called the game "tables". The name appears in many medieval and Renaissance texts. Shakespeare uses it in Love's Labour's Lost, where one character mocks a courtier who "chides the dice" when he plays at tables.
A game of many names
Today the same family of games is played under different names across a wide area:
- Tavla in Turkey, where it is a fixture of cafes and family gatherings.
- Tavli in Greece, a set of three games played in turn: Portes (very close to backgammon), Plakoto and Fevga.
- Nardy in Russia and the Caucasus, where the long version, with all checkers starting on one point and no hitting, is the most common.
- Takhte nard or simply nard in Iran, a name that goes back to the Persian game of the early Middle Ages.
- Shesh besh, a popular name in Israel and parts of the Arab world, taken from the Persian and Turkish words for six and five.
Many of these games have no doubling cube and are played as single games or to a small number of wins. Our page on backgammon variants explains how several of them differ from the standard rules.
From cafes to computers
The 20th century gave backgammon two big changes: the doubling cube in the 1920s and, from the 1990s, strong computer programs that can evaluate positions better than any human. Players who once learned only from older relatives in a cafe can now study the game in depth on their own. Our article on backgammon's fascinating history takes the story in another direction.