11/14/2014 | Posted in: Chess 101, Chess Boards, Chess History, Chess Pieces
Reproduction of ancient Shatranj board and figures.
“An apocryphal story – the word “apocryphal” here means “obviously untrue” – tells of two people, long ago, who were very bored, and that instead of complaining about it they sat up all night and invented the game of chess so that everyone else in the world, on evenings when there is nothing to do, can also be bored by the perplexing and tedious game they invented.”
– Lemony Snicket, Horseradish
Digging into the origins of chess is a bit like researching your family history. You need to understand a little about history, a bit about geography, and just a smidgeon about languages. Also, you need to accept that there are going to be long standing arguments about who did what first.
In spite of much research, there is little exact knowledge about when “chess” was created. Why couldn’t the inventor at least have put out a press release? Well, maybe they did, but it has been lost in some dusty archive somewhere.
I am not going to regurgitate all of the research on the history of chess. You can Google it and find more than enough reading material to occupy a rainy afternoon. [Warning: You should take everything you read on Wikipedia with a touch of skepticism. Double check with reliable sources.] Instead, I want to make just a few points that I have found interesting, and that seem to have a continuing impact on the game today.
Map of the Middle East, showing the Sasanid Persian Empire ca. 550AD
The game that we would recognize as “chess” became prominent in Persia around 500-600AD. There is argument about whether the Persians got it from the Indians, or vice versa, and there are even some who claim it came from the Chinese. A glimpse at the history of the period shows that there were large migrations of people in the Middle East at that time, with lots of conquest happening. This makes it difficult to find the original source. However, there is clear evidence that the game existed in Sasanid Persia by the end of the 6th century.
The field of play is an 8×8 square grid (64 squares), called an “ashtapada”, a Sanskrit word meaning “having eight feet”. This board may have been used for other games popular at the time. The squares were all the same color. The common “checker boarding” was not added until centuries later.
The game was called “chaturanga”. The term is Indian, meaning “four divisions”, as in four divisions of the military – infantry, cavalry, elephantry, and chariotry. The figures on the board originally represented these divisions. The Persians adopted the name into their culture as “shatranj”.
Link back later for more agonizing details about the game.
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