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Backgammon East & Past

Did you know that every number in backgammon - the checkers, the board and even the dice - have symbolic meaning?

The 30 checkers represent the days in the month
The black and white of the checkers symbolize night and day
The four quadrants on the backgammon board stand for the four seasons
The 24 points indicate the number of hours in one day and the 12 points on each side – the months of the year.
Add every number on the face of die with the opposite side - the result will be seven, as the days of the week.

And that is without including the numbers on the doubling cube: 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 and 64.

All this useful information (that will probably get Lost great excitement and would cause them to raise another wave of speculations and theories) was found in an article, originally appeared at the 1973 print edition of Saudi Aramco World magazine, discussing the rebirth of backgammon in the "Western world", with some puzzlement, coming from the Middle Eastern point of view.

Backgammon was born in the Middle East - this fact was known by 1973, long before the most ancient backgammon board was discovered in Iran - and never died there. Backgammon also has several names and variations in the Middle East. In Lebanon it is (or was?) known as trie trac (following French influence) or towleh (Arabic for table), and in Iran (and in today's Russia and Georgia) – nard, presumably after the Iranian king Ardashir.

Unfortunately, the article does not detail about the three common variations of backgammon in the Middle East and gives standard backgammon rules (minus the doubling cube). It does, however, reports about two international backgammon tournaments held in 1971 and 1972 with players from ten different countries, that are not mentioned elsewhere in the history of backgammon world championships.