tavli history

THE ANCESTORS THAT GAVE BIRTH TO TAVLI

Palamides, the tragic hero of Homer, is referred often as the inventor of lots of board games. The most important though, in the case of tavli, is not if Palamides is the first one who thought tavli. The important is that Palamides is the inventor of dices/craps. And whatever we can do, tavli without dices cannot be played.

I think that now is easier to follow the path. In the archeological excavations, in the east Mediterranean, lots of founding of board games has been found. One of the most important is the king game of Our, which is chronologically put in 2600 b.C. A game, which reminds me more chess or draughts and I cannot understand where the various experts can see the ancestor of tavli in a game with squares….I don’t think that they will ever explain this to us. I let the picture to speak by it self.

Some other games are of the same logic and construction. These games, which are called also games of 20 squares, were played in the wide area from India to Egypt. Senet or senat, which comes from Egypt and has the same age (more or less) of the one in Our, has 30 squares.

Even if these games were played with dices, these dices have the shape of pyramid or are triangle and not cubic. Dices in the shape of cube are met for the first time in ancient Greece.