Ask most people about leisure activity in the Ancient World and they will probably mention the sport of hunting, Greek athletics, or the cruel contests staged between Roman gladiators and wild animals. It will therefore come as a surprise to many that one of today’s most popular games – backgammon – actually has a history going back some five thousand years. Nobody knows for such who was the first person to invent the backgammon game but scholars believe it was devised or developed in the area today occupied by Iran and Iraq.
Since written descriptions of how to play backgammon had not yet been discovered, it is hard to know for sure that the backgammon rules of ancient Persia were similar to the ones we are familiar with today. The fact that the design of the backgammon board with the twenty four narrow divisions known as points, and the fifteen round counters, and the dice whose throws determine the counter movements, were all part of the anc
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31 May
