The people of ancient Mesopotamia played a wide variety of games and sports, many of which are still avidly played by people around the world today. The use of dice and board games by the Sumerians, Babylonians, Persians, and other Mesopotamians is a clear-cut example. As is true today, dice were employed in various forms of gambling. There were some differences between these and modern versions. For example, Mesopotamian dice throwers did not necessarily reckon the numbers of their throws in combinations that added up to seven, and some Mesopotamian dice had four triangular-shaped surfaces rather than six square-shaped surfaces.
Board Games Board games, some that used dice and others that did not, were particularly popular in ancient Mesopotamia. In the early twentieth century the great English archaeologist charles Leonard Woolley found the remains of a Sumerian board game while excavating the royal cemetery at ur. The game was similar in some ways to the ancient Egyptian game called senet, only nearly a thousand years older, dating to the early third millennium B. C. The board Woolley found is made of wood covered by layers of chips of dark blue lapis lazuli, white shell, and red limestone. It measures about 5 by 11 inches (13 by 28cm) and has twenty-one squares, a large rectangular zone, a small rectangular zone, and a narrow bridge connecting the two zones. Each player had seven playing pieces, or tokens. The rules of the game remain unclear. Apparently the object was for a player somehow to move tokens from one end of the board to the other while keeping his or her opponent from moving tokens across the bridge. Experts think that some of the squares encountered along the way were special ones, as in many modern board games, that allowed the player to take an extra turn or advance an extra number of squares.
Other board games more familiar to modern observers were played by the ancient Persians and likely by other Mesopotamian peoples as well. The Persians played an early form of chess, for instance, which they called shatrang. The board was similar to a modern chess board, and the playing pieces represented military men and war devices. In the same vein, the moves were meant to mimic military strategy and tactics, as indeed some of the moves of modern chess still do (“capturing” the opponent’s knight or king, for example). The Persians also played a form of backgammon, called nard, which featured two dice.
Polo and Falconry More physically demanding games, which people today generally refer to as sports, were also widely popular across ancient Mesopotamia. A good example is polo, the oldest-known team sport. The Persians were playing it at least as early as 600 b. c.; and it is possible that they copied it from a similar game played by earlier peoples in the area, perhaps the Medes or the Elamites. King Darius I (reigned ca. 522-486 b. c.) refined the rules and used the sport to help train his cavalrymen. In his day there were up to one hundred players on each team, and the style was what might be termed no holds barred, meaning that it was very rough and often resulted in serious injuries, occasionally even death. Later modifications in the game resulted in smaller teams and stricter rules, which made it much less dangerous, so kings and their nobles adopted the sport. Even Persian queens and their ladies-in-waiting played, sometimes against one another and other times against the king and his all-male team. Persian kings also engaged in the sport of falconry, in which they raised and exploited large birds of prey. Persian men of all classes—but especially soldiers— engaged in contests of weight lifting, swimming, chariot racing, horse racing, and archery, the latter performed while seated on a galloping horse. Evidence attests that the Assyrians and the Babylonians also practiced racing and archery as sports.
The Assyrian kings also fired arrows for sport from chariots during large-scale hunting parties. Surviving carved stone reliefs from the Assyrian city of Nineveh, for instance, show King Ashurbanipal (reigned ca. 668-627 b. c.) hunting in his royal chariot. According to scholar Arthur Cotterell:
He [Ashurbanipal] can be seen firing his bow from a heavy chariot during a lion hunt. One sculpture shows the king shooting ahead, while two guards ward off with spears a wounded lion attacking the chariot from the rear.
The heroic encounter is somewhat undercut by another relief, which reveals a gamekeeper about to release from a cage a captured lion. As the monarch reserved to himself the right to kill lions, they were collected in the wild and taken to the palace for royal sport. (Chariot, p. 240)
Wrestling In addition, all of the peoples of Mesopotamia—from the Sumerians and the Babylonians to the Persians, Greeks, and Sassanians—took part in the most popular of all ancient sports: wrestling. It is likely, in fact, that wrestling is the world’s oldest sport. Many modern scholars think it originated in Stone Age times because it was already well developed by the time that the earliest civilizations—in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and China—first began keeping records. For example, archaeologists digging in Iraq in the 1930s found artifacts depicting Sumerian wrestling matches dating from about 3000 B. C. These finds include a small bronze sculpture showing two wrestlers gripping either each other’s hips or the wrestling belts they wore around their hips. Wrestling belts were common among most ancient peoples and are still used by wrestlers in a number of countries today. By grasping and then pulling or twisting on an opponent’s belt, a wrestler tries to throw the other person off balance and gain the advantage.
Another clear indication of the popularity of wrestling among the ancient Sumerians and Babylonians is literary in nature. The title character of the famous Epic of Gilgamesh is a champion wrestler and is frequently called “Gilgamesh the wrestler” in ancient Mesopotamian writings. In the story contained in the epic poem, Gilgamesh faces off with his nemesis and later friend, Enkidu, in a huge, sprawling match in the city streets. The fact that the text describes the two men using their fists and tossing each other into walls suggests that a catch-as-catch-can style, similar to modern professional wrestling, was common and popular. However, various sculptures and other forms of evidence show that other styles of wrestling, with more structured rules, existed as well. It appears that the Babylonians and the Assyrians used wrestling moves similar, and indeed often identical, to those of their ancient Egyptian counterparts. A series of about four hundred paintings of sparring wrestlers, dating from roughly 1900 b. c., were found at Beni Hasan, located on the Nile River in central Egypt. The wrestlers depicted use many of the same moves and holds employed today in both amateur and professional wrestling, including head-locks, armlocks, trips, and shoulder throws. Also shown are wrestlers choking each other. It remains unclear whether choking was considered legal in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia.
See Also: chariots; Epic of Gilgamesh; Woolley, Charles Leonard
World History
