For one who had the privilege of displaying to the first readers of Iraq some specimens of a game long favoured in many parts of the ancient East, it may not be inappropriate to celebrate this journal's recommencement with a less substantial allusion to a like subject. This is a reference in a Babylonian augural text to something which, as I shall try to make plausible, may perhaps be a game with some likeness to Chess. A reinforcement of this will then be sought from the observation of a single detail in the archaeology of Chess, which seems to point back to a Babylonian prototype of unique character.

In A. T. Clay's Babylonian Records in the Library of J. Pierpont Morgan, part IV, is published as No. 13 a tablet from Erech of the Seleucid period, inscribed with a chapter of ‘omens, derived from inspection of the entrails of a sacrificed victim. The tablet in question is the seventh of the augural work called as a whole barûtu, i.e. ‘seership?’ and at the same time is the third tablet of the section called šumma tiranu, i.e. ‘if the guts (&c.)’. Though this copy was written in the year 213 B.C. that is, of course, no reason for supposing that its contents were composed at that time. A fragment of the same compilation was in the Assyrian royal library at Nineveh, and this takes it back to the seventh century B.C. at least. No doubt most of its contents are older still.