The Royal Game of Ur Article by Catherine Soubeyrand. This time we leave Egypt to move East and reach the region of Mesopotamia. The Royal Game of Ur gets its name from two boardgames which were found in tombs by Sir Leonard Wooley, who was carrying out excavations in the ancient city of Ur in the 1920s. The two boards date from before 2600 BCE. Each of the game boards is composed of a set of ...

Woolley's excavation of RT 800 (Queen Pu-Abi's Grave) The care with which Sir Leonard Woolley excavated the Royal Cemetery of Ur is justly famous, and the difficult conditions under which he worked would prove challenging to even the most skilled archaeologist today. The relationship between graves RT 789 and RT 800 illustrates this point. RT 789 preceded RT 800, as attested by the location of ...