The Royal Game of Ur
From the Royal Cemetery at Ur, excavated by Leonard Woolley starting in 1922, came a board of twenty squares inlaid with lapis lazuli and shell, dated to around 2600–2400 BCE. The wood had rotted away, but the inlay had stayed in place, still lined up, so the shape of the board could be read. How it was played remained unknown for a long time, until Irving Finkel of the British Museum deciphered a cuneiform clay tablet (BM 33333) and brought the game back. I should note that this map itself started out getting this wrong — the gap is not simply 2,400 years from the board's discovery to the rules being worked out. The blank runs in two stages. First, from when the board began to be played to when its rules were set down in writing took about 2,400 years — the tablet was finished on November 3, 177 BCE, by the scribe Itti-Marduk-balatu, whose name and the date both survive. Then it took another two thousand-odd years before that tablet was read by anyone in the modern world. A game from four thousand years ago was set aside and forgotten twice, and found again twice. And the twenty-square board does not end there. It traveled to Egypt, to the Levant, as far as India — and in Jewish households in Cochin, a descendant of the game was still being played as late as the 1950s. Across cultures, languages, and enemy lines, it had been handed down for four and a half thousand years, almost unchanged.