tavli history

INTRODUCTION

Tavli is a very old game, which comes from East Mediterranean and the civilizations of Mesopotamia. Although there are many mentions in history and in archeological findings, the origin of tavli has not been searched in depth and the conclusions that every author is making are a little bit arbitraries.
I am not historian, but I know about history. Can they talk for Egypt in the era of the Roman conquest and do not know that it was a Hellenistic kingdom? And finally tavli was brought in England by the Romans or by the knights of the king Richard the Lionheart when they came back by the crusades?

In these web pages, we will try to come close to the past and connect it with the present, by reading carefully the sources and the relevant bibliography. By this way, we will try to find the clearest answers about the origin of tavli. And wherever we will not manage to do this, we will let the sources to talk to you and make your conclusions.

Nevertheless, I believe that, concerning the games that are played only in Greece, this is the place where they were born. This explains the variations of the game here in Greece, which are played only here. Even the mentions in the Homer’s cycle from the moment that is recorded, it is the mouthpiece of at least one thousand oral tradition of the civilizations of the widely area. In the light of this, it is hard for me to understand why Greece and Turkey are not mentioned as two of the areas that tavli was born.