Aasha – and the Royal Game of Ur

 When Ruby met Finkel

This had been in my drafts folder ever since I came across its mention in Ruby’s book on the Cochin Jews. Recently Arun at Intach Palghat organized a Pallankuzhi session in Palghat, to bring about an understanding and some resurgence to the ancient Malabar game, and that sort of galvanized me into restarting this story. Let me first warn you, that many of you may feel you know the end, but there is a twist, so please read this in full, I assure you it will be well worth the effort.

Though it was a game well-known and prevalent among the Cochin Jews (you may wonder if it was the Black or the White Jews of Cochin, we will get back to the question a little later), it was not of any interest to anybody really, till a very famous Assyriologist delved deep and connected it to the ancient game which used to be played at Ur in lower Mesopotamia around 2,600-2,400 B.C or the Early Dynastic Period III. Like many other religions and cultures, migration can usually be traced from cultural objects and practices, and this makes it very clear that the Jews of Cochin had Middle Eastern origins.

Let’s first start with the discovery of the Ur Game, a thrilling game that requires you to race your pieces to the end of the board, by tossing dice. It was doubly interesting because it also foretold a bit of your fortune! Sir Leonard Wooley found some 20 square playing boards in a cemetery at Ur (a city in ancient Sumeria) in 1928, and this is known as the ‘Royal Game of Ur’, one of the oldest. The game as such was well known all over the Middle East and played by all classes of people, noble or not and though it was the national game in Mesopotamia for many years, it slowly vanished over time, after morphing into differing versions.

By chance, an antique dealer (originally dug up at Babylon, in the 1880s) brought a disintegrating tablet filled with cuneiform (wedge-shaped characters used in the ancient writing systems of Mesopotamia, Persia, and Ugarit) script to the British Museum, and in the 1980s, a hundred years later, Dr Irving L. Finkel decoded and translated the text, to find that it was the rules for the Royal Ur game, written on clay circa 177-176 B.C by a scribe named Itti-Marduk-Balatu. Other translations and transliterations had been attempted, though not published, while another tablet had been found at Uruk, which was sadly destroyed in the WW I bombing, though its photo survived.

Putting it simply, each player threw a type of ancient (pyramid-shaped) dice and based on the number shown moved his piece that many numbers of squares. If he landed on a square already occupied, the opponent’s piece is sent back to the start, and so on. In addition to the game, which of course is based on luck and some strategy, certain squares had zodiac assignments, so provided predictions on various matters.

Additional details of the game came to light, such as the fact that the dice were made from sheep and ox knucklebones and that you had to hit a number before a player launched pieces on the board and began racing around it. According to the tablet, each player had five pieces (though in Ur, they each had seven) and the winner was the person who moved all of them off the board first. According to the tablet of Itti-Marduk-balaṭu, whenever a player skips one of the boxes marked with a rosette, they must place a token in the pot. Over many centuries, this game gave way to more sophisticated games that were developed and the Royal Game of Ur died out nearly 2,000 years ago.

This was what Finkel believed, till he came across a photograph in a museum journal from Israel in the 80’s, which showed a scratched-up wooden board game that had belonged to the Koders who had migrated to Israel, from Cochin. He had never seen this game thus far being played in India, and the board had 20 squares, similar to the Royal Game of Ur. Knowing that Cochin boasted of an ancient Jewish community, which had migrated from Babylon to Cochin, over 1,000 years ago, he quickly made the connections and wondered how it had been preserved and played all these years.

As the story goes, Finkel contacted his pregnant sister Deborah Lionarons, who lived in Jerusalem, and asked her to go to the northern Kibbutz which has the settlements of the Cochin Jews. Finkel says - “I typed out a questionnaire and asked her to go door to door with a picture of the game and ask anybody and everybody if they could identify the picture and if they knew the rules of the game?”  As luck would have it a 70+ year-old woman, Ruby Daniel recognized the game, identified it as Aasha, which she used to play back home with her aunts, and sent back some rudimentary playing rules, through Deborah to Finkel.

Finkel was quickly on a plane to Israel and with the pregnant Deborah in tow, rushed to the Kibbutz, where Ruby lived. Now, readers, this is the same Ruby Daniels, whose marvelous account was brought to us by Barbara Johnson, a book I have used often in my studies and quoted from. When Finkel met the sprightly 70+ years old Ruby, Finkel then produced his version of the archaic rules to Ruby, who scoffed at it and said she would teach Finkel how they played it at Cochin, after which they played the game, sketched on a piece of paper. Now recall that Finkel was by then quite an expert at the game, had written a paper on the rules, and gifted a board to Gary Kasparov, though he was not familiar with the small changes for the Cochin Asha board. The game was played with cowrie shells for dice. By then, each player had 12 pieces, also shells, and the placement of the 20 squares had shifted slightly. But it was clearly the descendant of the game played in their ancestral homeland of Babylon 4,600 years ago. She told him it was a popular pastime for women and girls when she was growing up and that she had played it with her aunts. As it transpired, he beat her the first time and Finkel says - I did a terrible thing tactlessly and won, Ruby was hurt, her face fell…so they played again, and Ruby won.

Now we take it from Ruby who had taken her Aliyah and moved to Israel in 1946.

The ninth day of the month of Ab is a day of twenty-five hours of fasting and lamenting in memory of the destruction of both the First and the Second Temples of worship in Jerusalem and the dispersion of the Jews. For some unknown reason, the Cochin Jews called that day “Seerya.” In Cochin, the first nine days of the month of Ab are days of mourning. We did not eat meat on those days. The shohet puts away his knife till the end of the ninth day. People did not dress well, and no weddings or any other celebration took place. Those nine days were considered to be a bad time for the Jews. It was said that you should not go to dangerous places or leave the children alone, or an old man called “Seeriya Mutha” would come after you.

The Jews had special games for that season, at the beginning of Ab. The men used to gamble with a special kind of coconut…..The ladies and girls usually played a game called Aasha during that season. We made circles on a piece of plank, something like the game called damka. Aasha is played with twelve small shells for each of the two players. You throw five larger cowrie shells with one of them broken on the back, and you move the shells according to the number you get from the throw.

We did not take this game very seriously then. It was just a board game like many other board games. But recently Mr. Koder of Cochin gave an old Aasha board to someone from the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. They put it in their catalog, which came to the attention of Dr. Irving Finkel, an Assyriologist from the British Museum in London. The British Museum has collected a number of game boards from archaeological sites all over the world. One of these game boards which was found in Ur Kasdin (the country where Father Abraham was born) had some similarity to this Cochin game of Aasha. Though the boards were found, no rules were found.

It must have been in 1987- Dr. Finkel thought that this royal game from Ur must have gone with the Jews who escaped to South India from Babylon. By looking for someone who knows how to play this game of Aasha, they found me in Israel. I left Cochin forty-one years ago, and nobody has played this game since! There are only two or three of us left now from the old generation. So, I gave all the rules of the above game to Dr. Finkel for the book he is writing of all the games they found.

In those days we used to say that the twelve shells for Aasha represent the twelve tribes of Israel, who fought each other, and the five shells represent the fifth month of the Hebrew calendar, which is the month of Ab. But recently I was reading the story of King Shaul and King David. When Shaul died in the war with the Philistines, the kingdom should go to his son, but there were others who wanted it to be given to David. So Shaul’s commander in chief— Abner—and Yoab—the commander-in-chief of David—stood up for their masters. Both these men were helped by twelve great men each, and there was a great fight between these two sides when many people died. Perhaps this game of twelve killing each other is in memory of that. I am not sure.

One could assume that the name Aasha has probably been derived from Aseb, the Egyptian name of the game. Outside Egypt, versions of Aseb have also been found in Sudan, Crete, and other nations. Aseb is also a race game, in the same category as Senet and the ‘Royal Game of Ur’, but with a much shorter playing duration, and somewhat quicker and simpler, a game of chance with little strategy involved.

It is understood that this game was played by the Pardesi or white Jews of Cochin, but Ruby confirms that she and her friends played the game. But Ruby and others mentioned in her book are considered desi or black Jews (Ruby’s dissatisfaction with the white Jews and their demeaning attitude towards her community is clear in her accounts), so it seems to have been popular with all the Cochin Jews. Was it brought in by the most ancient Jews who came to Cochin following the upheaval at Jerusalem or was it a later import from the region through the Pardesi Jews? It remains unclear, but the fact of the matter is that the game as played in Cochin bears more resemblance to the ancient version at Ur, and had not mutated much over 4,600 years, compared to the evolutions of the game in the Middle East. Interestingly, the 1968 Cochin Synagogue (400th anniversary) souvenir states that the Asha board was on display when many luminaries including Indira Gandhi visited.

Though Finkel is now sure that the game moved South East to Cochin, he felt that the shape of the dice was at odds with the stick-type dice found in all other Middle Eastern versions. Having studied the migration of the Chess game from India, he decided to investigate further and check if the game had anything to do with the Indus Valley civilization, and still marvels at how the game lasted for 4,000 plus years, compared to new games which hardly last two Christmases!

Anyway, as it turned out, Finkel went back to India after reading an obscure Indian paper on the existence of similar board games in Vijayanagar and Orissa. The first sighting of the telltale squares on the ground was at a burning ghat in Nagarjuna Konda (dated 3^rd – 4^th century) in Andhra per Krishnamurthy who wrote it.  He asks - What on earth would a burning ground have to do with this? Did they play the game while waiting for the dead body to burn? It had nothing to do with the Jews of Cochin. Next, he went to Orissa and saw the same game on the 11th-century Kedareshwar temple grounds at Bhuvaneshwar, first thing in the morning – the game of Ur, again in India! Finkel says – It was like I saw the game wherever I went!  And he later saw the same game at Hampi and Sri Lanka. But barring Cochin, where it managed to survive in a virtual time capsule down into modern times, it became obsolete everywhere and there are no other documents or game rules from the other Indian locales. Finkel concludes therefore that the game probably originated in Dholavira in Gujarat circa 3,000 BC. Dholavira is located on the Tropic of Cancer, and is one of the five largest Harappan sites, also the most prominent of archaeological sites in India belonging to the Indus Valley Civilization. It then moved westwards to the Babylonian kingdoms, and Ceylon, following the trade routes, and came back to Cochin. Are there other places where the game was played? Perhaps, only time will tell…

Finkel adds - At any rate, whatever the details may turn out to be, there can be no doubt that the Game of Twenty Squares, stretching in one form or another from the early third millennium BC to the end of the second millennium AD is the longest running board game in the history of the world.

Somebody who reads this carefully is bound to ask – what about the Zodiac sings in the Ur game? Finkel speculates on the astronomical significance and explains how certain squares portended good fortune: one square would bring "fine beer"; another would make a player "powerful like a lion."

According to Finkel’s paper, this is a summary

Pegasus -One who sits in a tavern

Aries -A beer vat(?) will turn away

Pleiades/Taurus -I will pour out the dregs for you

Gemini -You will find a friend

Cancer -You will stand in exalted places

Leo -You will be powerful like a lion

Virgo -You will go up the path

Libra -Like one who weighs up silver

Scorpius -You will draw fine beer

Sagittarius -You will cross the ditch

Capricornus -Like one who owns a herd

Aquarius -You will cut meat

While the Ur tablet scribe suggests that the 12 squares of the board associated with the zodiac represent the twelve portions of the heavens, Ruby connects them to the later Biblical story. Rather sophisticated, Finkel says that at least four out of five bird names were also used to denote astronomical constellations, showing that they had definite astral associations.

Reminding you of Dumbledore from Harry Potter, Irving Finkel is a very enthusiastic speaker, and his speeches are such great fun. You can follow his speeches on many topics and I will write about his trip to Alleppey to recreate the Ark of Noah, soon. Also, I will give you details of other clues about the way Vedic cultures and civilizations moved westward, and some related archeological finds.

Thanks again to Arun at Palghat who ran the Pallankuzhi challenge recently, which spurred me to action- There are multiple names for it in South India, Pallankuzhi in Tamil, Chenne Mane in Tulu, Aliguli Mane in Kannada, Vamana Guntalu in Telugu, Kuzhipara in Malayalam and Ekke in Konkani. While both Pallankuzhi and the Game of Ur are ancient board games, the key difference is that Pallankuzhi is a "mancala" style game where players move stones between pits on a board, capturing the opponent's pieces, when possible, while the Game of Ur is a race-based game where players move pieces around a set path using dice to determine movement.

While many people believe it originated in India, again a topic which needs investigation like this, it is thought that it came out of the Arabic ‘mancala’, a game which perhaps originated in Africa. It was played in groups or between two and in theory can go on for days! The game used to be popular among children and older people and encouraged children to master counting and improve their hand-eye coordination. While we know this deceptively simple game of 'pits and pebbles' was played in ancient Ghana and Sudan as long ago as 1600 BC, a stone board discovered in Jordan may date back to 5,870 BCE. That would place Mancala in the Neolithic era, or the Stone Age! The version known as Owari is still popular in West Africa and the Caribbean with local and international tournaments, while the version popular in southern India is called Pallankuzhi.

I am sure all this would have delighted some readers, bored others to death, or wasted a perfectly valuable 30 minutes for an unfortunate few. But spend a while in thought, on how things happen, and what you can learn from something you find in your backyard if you relentlessly went after it!

References

Ruby of Cochin - An Indian Jewish Woman Remembers– Ruby Daniels, Barbara Johnson

The Royal Game of Ur – Persian Wonders Dr Irving Finkel

The Royal Game of Ur - Play the Oldest Board Game on Record – Deb Amlen (NY Times – 17-11-22)

Traditional board games: From Kochi to Iraq – S Priyadarshini (The Hindu, Oct 1,2015)

It isn’t a game for idiots - GUERNSEY PRESS – 24-06-24

Playing with the past: a framework for studying south Asian board games - Ramesh Gowri Raghavan (Instucen Trust 2019)

 

Pics – courtesy Wikimedia, thanks to the authors. 

Aasha board - Asha game board, Cochin, India, Early 20th century, Wood and cowrie shells, H: 12; L: 50; W: 22 cm, Gift of Satoo and Gladys Koder, Cochin, B84.0315, Photo © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, by Oleg Kalashnikov