TEHRAN—Iran’s Ministry of Cultural Heritage, Tourism, and Handicrafts has formed a working group to study and catalog indigenous games played across the ancient land.

The ministry’s National Sports Tourism Committee has formed a working group tasked to examine and classify local games which have long been played in every corner of the country, IRNA reported on Tuesday.

Moreover, the tourism body has formed other working groups concerning adventure tourism and sports tourism in a bid to “achieve serious synergy” in domestic and international tourism.

Compilation of native and local events calendar, registration and revival of traditional sports and native and local games, joint events, the establishment of specialized training courses, training of specialized sports tourism guides, serious benefit from international events, etc. should be researched and placed on the agenda, the report said.

The oldest reference to the Iranian games, as mentioned by Encyclopedia Iranica, can be found in a Pahlavi text that probably dates from the 9th century.

From the early centuries after Islam, various games are mentioned in lexicons and other sources. For instance, In his book Hedayat al-motaʿallemin fi’l-tebb (Guide for medical students) Abu Bakr Rabi Ahmad Akawayni Bokari (second half of the 4th/10th century) discusses different sports and the merits of games and describes a few of them.

In a vast ancient culture like Iran, with its varied climates and lifestyles, a great variety of games and entertainments have commonly given life to its people.

The history and whereabouts of games have not been recorded. It is only by scrutinizing ancient books, one can trace some of them.

There have been different factors involved in the field of games in Iran. They are such factors as type, age, range, gender, number of players, location, time, roles, means, etc. Some of the games were played with a little difference or different names in several parts of the country.

For instance, in ancient Persia, parents usually taught horse riding, shooting, and polo games to their children among wealthy families.

Modernization and industrialization have initiated radical changes in the lives of people all over the world. Iran is not an exception to such developments. New technologies, time-consuming everyday activities, the transformation of some games to international sports, modern human international rules, etc. have all forced away the old traditional entertainments and games. People set aside the recreations of vast plains, awesome forests, high mountains, and sand beaches and rush into big cities.

So, experiencing hard situations and gaining the necessary skills are not so important to people anymore. New games in Iran have replaced old ones. Therefore, various goals have ended in different games in the ancient land.

The growing interest in Iranian folklore in recent decades has resulted in the publication of descriptions of many games played in various parts of Iran, often to be found in dialect glossaries, but no comprehensive effort has been made to record the games and their local and regional variants systematically and to classify them scientifically.

AM