Game on: Ludo's ancestor traced to Kochi

KOCHI: 'Pack of Hounds', once the most popular board game played in ancient Babylon and believed to be extinct for more than 3,000 years, was played at the homes of Cochin Jews here till recently. "I believe 'Asha' is the Malayalam name for the game. I will be returning to Kochi soon to learn more about the game and its rules before they are lost forever," Irving Finkel, world-renowned archaeologist and curator of cuneiform inscriptions from ancient Mesopotamia at the British Museum in London, who is currently in the city, told TOI.
Finkel said that he will be conducting exhaustive research on how 'Asha' evolved from the original Babylonian version and what it has in common with backgammon, its much-recognised worldwide version. 'Asha', like Pack of Hounds and the modern game of Ludo, was a board game wherein two players race to the finish by knocking each other's pieces off the board.
"Some years ago, a member of the Jewish community who used to reside in Mattancherry here in Kochi but had migrated to Israel got in touch with me stating that she had been playing this game since she was a child. She remembered some of the rules of the game and I was shocked because according to my research and according to evidence, this game vanished from Babylon 3,000 years ago. So how did it end up being played here among a miniscule Jewish community in Kochi," Finkel said.
On Saturday evening, Finkel arrived in Kochi after a visit to the Muziris heritage site in Thrissur. At a session in David Hall, Fort Kochi, he spoke about his discovery of an ark that was built in 1,800 BC by the Babylonians that could possibly be the origin of the Biblical story of Noah's Ark.
"Everything in it was fresh," says Finkel referring to the cuneiform tablet on which he discovered the story of the lost ark.
"For one, the Ark was circular, the shape of a coracle. The tablet even mentioned exact dimensions of the ark which is how we could finally reconstruct it," he said. Finkel flew to Kerala to rebuild a scaled down version of the Babylonian Ark in Alappuzha's Punnamada Lake in April 2014.
Finkel's main area of interest lies in the history of board games, especially in the preservation of traditional board games in many non-western societies. He is currently working on a major project titled "The Indian Board Game Survey" in collaboration with the Anthropological Survey of India.