Pieces from a mysterious board game that hasn't been played for 1,500 years were discovered in a heavily looted 2,300-year-old tomb near Qingzhou City in China.
There, archaeologists found a 14-face die made of animal tooth, 21 rectangular game pieces with numbers painted on them and a broken tile which was once part of a game board. The tile when reconstructed was "decorated with two eyes, which are surrounded by cloud-and-thunder patterns," wrote the archaeologists in a report published recently in the journal Chinese Cultural Relics.
The skeleton of possibly one of the grave robbers was also discovered in a shaft made within the tomb by looters. [See Photos of the Ancient Tomb and Board Game Pieces]
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Dead game?
Twelve faces of the die are numbered 1 through 6 in a form of ancient Chinese writing known as "seal script." Each number appears twice on the die while two faces were left blank, the researchers noted.
The artifacts seem to be part of a game called "bo," sometimes referred to as "liubo" the archaeologists said. Researchers who have studied the game of bo are uncertain exactly how it was played. People stopped playing it around 1,500 years ago and the rules may have changed during the time that it was played.
However, a poem written about 2,200 years ago by a man named Song Yu gives an idea as to what the game was like:
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"Then, with bamboo dice and ivory pieces, the game of Liu Bo is begun; sides are taken; they advance together; keenly they threaten each other. Pieces are kinged, and the scoring doubled. Shouts of ‘five white!' arise" (translation by David Hawkes).
Massive tomb The tomb itself has two large ramps that lead to a staircase descending into the burial chamber. Five pits holding grave goods for the deceased are located beside the tomb. In ancient times, the tomb - which is about 330 feet (100 meters) long - was covered with a burial mound (now destroyed).
At the time the tomb was built, China was divided into several states that often fought against each other. Archaeologists believe that this tomb was built to bury aristocrats from the state of Qi.
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"Despite the huge scale of the tomb, it has been thoroughly robbed," the archaeologists wrote. "The coffin chamber was almost completely dug out and robbed, suffering severe damage in the process."
Archaeologists found 26 shafts dug into the tomb by looters. One of the shafts "yielded a curled-up human skeleton, which might be the remains of one of the tomb robbers," wrote the archaeologists, who said they don't know when this person died, why he or she was buried in the looting shaft, or the person's age or sex.
Winner takes all During the third century B.C., a state called Qin, ruled by a man named Qin Shi Huangdi, gradually conquered the other states, including the state of Qi.
Qi itself survived until 221 B.C., when Qin Shi Huangdi conquered it, unifying all of China and becoming the country's first emperor. Qin Shi Huangdi then began construction of his own tomb, which was guarded by a terracotta army.
The tomb near Qingzhou city was excavated in 2004 by archaeologists from the Qingzhou Municipal Museum and Shandong Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology. The finds were first reported in Chinese in 2014 in the journal Wenwu. Recently, the Wenwu article was translated into English and published in the journal Chinese Cultural Relics.
Original article on Live Science.
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Archaeologists think this 14-face die was used to play a game called "bo" that hasn't been played in 1,500 years.
These small sculpted stones unearthed from an early Bronze Age burial in Turkey could be the earliest gaming tokens ever found, confirming that board games likely originated and spread from the Fertile Crescent regions and Egypt more than 5,000 years ago.
The elaborate pieces consist of 49 small stones sculpted in different shapes and painted in green, red, blue, black and white.
"Some depict pigs, dogs and pyramids, others feature round and bullet shapes. We also found dice as well as three circular tokens made of white shell and topped with a black round stone," Haluk Sağlamtimur of Ege University in İzmir, Turkey, told Discovery News.
The playing pieces were recovered from one of nine graves found at Başur Höyük, a 820- by 492-foot mound near Siirt in southeast Turkey. Inhabited as early as from 7,000 BC, the site was on a trade route between Mesopotamia and East Anatolia.
Archaeological records indicate that board games were widely played in Mesopotamia. Several beautifully crafted boards were found by British archaeologist Leonard Wooley in the Royal cemetery of Ur, the ancient Sumerian city near the modern Iraqi city of Nasiriya which many consider the cradle of civilization.
Dating to 2550-2400 B.C., the boards were associated with the "Game of Twenty Squares," a board game played around 3000 B.C.
Beautiful tokens used in the game were found arranged in a row, with the colors alternating, in another Ur tomb. The set consisted of seven shell pieces inlaid with of five lapis lazuli dots and seven pieces of black shale inlaid with five dots of white shell.
Much more elaborate, the newly discovered gaming stones were found in one of nine graves found at Başur Höyük. The burials revealed metal artifacts, ceramic finds and seals with different attributes and influences. This indicates the local people had close connections with their surrounding cultural regions, said Sağlamtimur.
Radio carbon dating traced the grave goods back to 3100-2900 B.C., confirming the Early Bronze Age stylistic features of the items and the advanced technological level of the local population.
About 300 well-preserved amorphous bronze artefacts were present in the nine burials. The nearly 5,000 year old artifacts were produced following advanced technologies.
The burial featured an abundance of painted and unpainted pottery, with several examples from the Ninivite 5 culture, which spread throughout the eastern settlements of the Al Jazira, the river plain of Mesopotamia which encompasses northwestern Iraq and northeastern Syria.
"The findings at Başur Höyük add to our knowledge as they reveal a coexistence of traditions and a continuity of relationships between the settlements in the northern mountains and the Mesopotamia sites," Marcella Frangipane, a professor of prehistoric and protohistoric archaeology at Rome's La Sapienza, told Discovery News.
Tens of thousands of beads made of mountain crystal and other types of stones were recovered.
The abundance of bronze spearhead and other weapons, not appearing in the Mesopotamia Ninivite burials, reveal the presence of "an important warrior component," Marcella Frangipane said.
"The study of these findings, along with other discoveries in east-Anatolian sites, will allow us to reconstruct a new history of this crucial region which is indeed the meeting point of the most ancient Near East civilizations," she added.