<P> The Game of Ur was popular across the Middle East and boards for it have been found in Iran, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, Sri Lanka, Cyprus, and Crete . Four gameboards bearing a very close resemblance to the Royal Game of Ur were found in the funeral chamber of the Tomb of Tutankhamun . These boards came with small boxes to store dice and game pieces and many had senet boards on the reverse sides so that the same board could be used to play either game and merely had to be flipped over . The game was popular among all social classes . A graffito version of the game carved with a sharp object, possibly a dagger, was discovered on one of the human - headed winged bull gate sentinels from the palace of Sargon II (721--705 BC) in the city of Khorsabad . </P> <P> The Game of Ur eventually acquired superstitious significance and the tablet of Itti - Marduk - balālu provides vague predictions for the players' futures if they land on certain spaces, such as "You will find a friend", "You will become powerful like a lion", or "You will draw fine beer". People saw relationships between a player's success in the game and his or her success in real life . Seemingly random events such as landing on a certain square were interpreted as messages from deities, ghosts of deceased ancestors, or from a person's own soul . </P> <P> It is unclear what led to the Game of Ur's eventual decline during late antiquity . One theory holds that it evolved into backgammon; whereas another holds that early forms of backgammon eclipsed the Game of Ur in popularity, causing players to eventually forget about the older game . At some point before the game fell out of popularity in the Middle East, it was apparently introduced to the Indian city of Kochi by a group of Jewish merchants . Members of the Jewish population of Kochi were still playing a recognizable form of the Game of Ur by the time they started emigrating to Israel in the 1950s after World War II . The Kochi version of the game had twenty squares, just like the original Mesopotamian version, but each player had twelve pieces rather than seven and the placement of the twenty squares was slightly different . </P> <P> The British archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley discovered five gameboards of the Game of Ur during his excavation of the Royal Cemetery at Ur between 1922 and 1934 . Because the game was first discovered in the Royal Cemetery at Ur, it became known as the "Royal Game of Ur", but later archaeologists uncovered other copies of the game from various other locations across the Middle East . Each of the boards discovered by Wooley date to around 3000 BC . All five boards were of an identical type, but they were made of different materials and had different decorations . Woolley reproduced images of two of these boards in his 1949 book, The First Phases . One of these is a relatively simple set with a background composed of discs of shell with blue or red centers set in wood - covered bitumen . The other is a more elaborate one completely covered with shell plaques, inlaid with red limestone and lapis lazuli . Other gameboards are often engraved with images of animals . </P>

Where was the royal game of ur found