We can play a 4,500-year-old board game — because the rules were decoded from a clay tablet
The Royal Game of Ur, a two-player race game, was buried in the royal graves of Ur around 2600 BCE and then forgotten for millennia. The rules were recovered only because a British Museum scholar recognized that a cuneiform tablet — written by a Babylonian scribe over two thousand years after those game boards went into the ground — was in fact the game's instruction manual.
How we know
Game boards excavated by Leonard Woolley from the Royal Cemetery at Ur, c.2600–2400 BCE. The rules were reconstructed in the 1980s by British Museum Assyriologist Irving Finkel from a cuneiform tablet written by the scribe Itti-Marduk-balatu in c.177 BCE — over 2,400 years after the boards were buried.
One of many fact-checked wonders across eight traditions at The Spring of Wisdom.