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,  ...