In 1950s Kochi, India, members of the local Jewish community were still playing a 20-square race game they called Aasha, unaware that its board matched a pastime of Mesopotamian kings that the rest of the world had forgotten. This episode follows the Royal Game of Ur from Sir Leonard Woolley’s excavations of the Royal Cemetery at Ur between 1922 and 1934, where he found boards of shell, red limestone and imported lapis lazuli dating to around 2600 to 2400 BC, older than the Great Pyramid.

We trace the game’s spread across Iraq, Iran, Egypt, Cyprus, Crete and Sri Lanka, the four boards in Tutankhamun’s tomb, and the version scratched into a winged bull statue at Sargon II’s palace by what looks like a bored guard. Then we cover how British Museum curator Irving Finkel decoded the rules in the 1980s from a cuneiform tablet written in 177 BC, the brutal race mechanics with four-sided pyramid dice and a shared combat zone, the gambling pot tied to rosette squares, and the game’s later life as a fortune-telling device before it faded into backgammon.

• Why the tetrahedral dice can roll zero and produce a bell curve of outcomes
• Finkel’s rosette rules versus the alternate path proposed by Murray and Masters
• The 21 white balls believed to be betting tokens
• Prophecies like you will draw fine beer and the Mesopotamian view of chance as divine
• How Jewish merchants carried the game to India and preserved it for centuries