Board games were played in many parts of the ancient world and so it is very difficult to attribute the origin of any board game to a particular region or culture. Board games have been found in ancient Mesopotamia, the oldest from the city of Ur, but one must also mention the game of Senet in ancient Egypt. Often board games were placed in the tombs of the pharaohs and sometimes the dead are shown playing with the gods, for example one scene shows Rameses III (c. 1270 B.C.) playing with Isis to gain access to the nether world. The importance of this image lies in the depiction of the cosmological and religious significance that ancient peoples attributed to board games—they were not just games played for pleasure. Reference to board games in Persia can be found as early as the Achaemenid period, where, according to Plutarch, Artaxerxes played a board game with dice.

A major ambiguity attaches to the zurkhanah, the traditional gymnasium of Iran. It is celebrated as an abode of chivalry and traditional values such as generosity, forbearance, and fair play, but it also has a reputation of harboring unruly elements on the margins of legality, men who are willing to rent their strong-arm services to whomever pays most. In this article I propose to explore this ambiguity and trace its roots in the social history of the institution. To do this, I shall first provide a quick update on the state of traditional athletics today, then expound on the paradox, and finally attempt to explicate it by discussing the identities of three social types that frequented the zūrkhānah.

The Iranian zūrkhānah, literally “House of Strength,” is the traditional gymnasium in which athletes practice a series of gymnastic and bodybuilding exercises that have been called “ancient sport,“ varzish-i bāstārī, since 1934.

In the spring of 1939, Tehran's recently Constructed Amjadieh stadium hosted a part of the public celebration of the wedding ceremony of crown prince Mohammad Reza and Princess Fawzieh of Egypt. Several thousand spectators, mostly men and women well-clad in ‘international’ dress, enjoyed a spectacle featuring short presentations of over a dozen so-called ‘new’ and ‘old’ sports such as soccer, acrobatics, and zūrkhānah exercises. Wearing his Boy Scout uniform, Mohammad Reza was present(ed) as the energetic leader of these sportsmen and women and reflected in persona the hope for a healthy productive nation, while the athletes on the ground below were proving to the Egyptian guests that not only the husband-to-be of Fawzieh, but also many of his countrymen were imbued with the spirit of modern sport and a healthy life.

It was not the first time that the Pahlavis had placed sport at the center of a public celebration. After the crown prince's return from schooling in Switzerland, similar spectacles—although on a smaller scale—had been organized on his birthdays, and he often appeared in public as the leader of the Boy Scout movement, too.

In late 1997 Iranian football made international headlines. In an article on the Islamic summit held in Iran, The Economist wrote that almost "anything can become a political football in Iran, including football." This attention was precipitated by the political ramifications within Iran of the national team's tie against Australia in Melbourne on November 29th, which secured it a place in the 1998 World Cup in extremis. Since then, major international soccer games have often given rise to massive street demonstrations by young people. That football should cause so much excitement in Iran is not astonishing if one looks at it from a global perspective. Football is a game in which each team works together to try to occupy as much of the "territory" of the other as it can, culminating in attempts symbolically to "conquer" the other side's stronghold by kicking the ball into the goal. The playing field thus becomes a metaphor for the competition between communities, cities, and nations: football focuses group identities.