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HISTORICAL CHESS
Chessays
The Origin
of Chess and the Silk Road
by Horst Remus
Los Altos, California
The classical
research about the origin of Chess concentrated on investigating written
and archaeological evidence resulting in opinions about Indian/Persian
1 or Chinese origin of the game. The available evidence was, however,
not sufficient for a convincing theory. So the question about the
origin of Chess still has to be considered open. Some speculations
assumed military, mathematical, or divinification models as the basis
for the game. Most scholars of Chess history do, however, agree that
the relationships to these models showed after Chess already existed.
Another
idea, which was part of some theories, was the assumption that Chess,
with all its present complexity, was invented by a single person.
But this is extremely unlikely. A significant step towards the better
understanding was the founding of the Initiative Group Konigstein
(IGK2) in 1991 and its seminars, in which the present Chess historians
can present their research and opinions. Its member Gerhard Josten
looked for evidence in the structure of Chess. He came up with three
basic unique elements:the king, the pawns, and the officers (counters,
pieces). His theory is that these elements stem from different sources
and are combined into present day Chess. This was supposed to be done
by either Silk Road merchants, who were waiting for better weather
conditions in one of the major trading places like Kashgar in today's
Southwest China, or by game enthusiasts in the Kushan Empire.
The Kushans
had some experience with merging elements from different cultures.
Josten suggests that the king and its behavior is taken from the ancient
Chinese game Go, the pawns come from Indian racing games and the officers
are taken from divinification or astrological methods. I have added
an alternative for the astrological roots of the officer-moves with
the possibility that their moves are based on the images occurring
within the game of Tic-Tac-Toe. No matter which theory is valid, the
importance of the Silk Road for spreading the game is undisputable.
Forerunners
and the Chinese Variation Board games are very ancient and can be
traced back at least 4, 500 years to the first city of Ur and Egyptian
paintings. In the 19th century AD Stewart Culin created the theory
that all board games had magical or religious origin. This is not
evident, for instance, in the three-dimensional Tic-Tac-Toe (Mill),
for which a board was engraved by Roman soldiers on the cobble streets
of Old-Jerusalem. The Egyptian game Senet was clearly a religious
game. It was a racing game played on a 10x3 board. There is also a
version with 8 linear squares followed by 4x3, the "twenty-game".
The exact rules of either are not known, but boards have been found
together with half-flat sticks, the forerunners of dice. The names
or meanings of the squares had to do with the stations of the way
to the empire of the dead. There are numerous references to Senet
in inscriptions and papyrus scrolls. The use
of Senet as an Egyptian glyph gives an indication of its importance.
According
to the Nordic poem, The Edda, the Germanic gods spent their free time
in their residence Asgard playing board games, but The Edda was not
written down until the twelfth century AD. A possible forerunner of
Chess is an Indian game, known as Ashtapada, which means in Sanskrit
a square board of 64 squares, 8 rows of 8 squares. It was played with
dice and pieces, a race game possibly going back to the fifth century
BC. Chinese records mention its introduction from India to China as
early as 220 BC to 65 AD, roughly during the early Han Dynasty. The
likelihood of a race-game being a forerunner of Chess is preserved
in the promotion of a pawn to a piece when reaching the 8th row.
Hinduism
prohibits gambling. The revival of Hinduism during the Gupta Dynasty
led to an enforcement of this antigambling policy in the 6th century
AD. This is used as an argument by some scholars for supporting the
idea of an Indian origin of Chess. It is stated that the suppression
of dice forced the transformation of a race game into a strategic
game. When I discussed this with some Indian historians during a visit
to India, I got clarification that the gambling inhibition was local
and did not apply to total India. Chinese Chess today is played on
a board with 9x8 squares or 10x9 edges. The pieces, inscribed draughtsmen,
are placed on the edges and not on the squares of the 9x8 field. The
use of inscribed draughtsmen instead of stand-up figures means an
additional level of abstraction and would therefore speak against
an origin in China. However, sources suggest that originally Chinese
Chess was also played with standing figures. In the middle of the
10-row field is a "river", which was added later, meaning originally
that the board was 9x9, considering the edges, or 8x8 considering
the squares.
The number
nine has a special importance in China. Ancient Chinese regarded odd
numbers as being masculine and even numbers as being feminine. Nine,
the largest single-digit, odd number, was taken to mean the ultimate
masculine, and was symbolic for the supreme sovereignty of the emperor.
It was sometimes combined with the number five to represent imperial
majesty. Tiananmen Hall is 9 bays wide and 5 bays deep. The combination
9x5 also appears on the two halves of the Chinese chessboard (after
inclusion of the river). The transfer to a 9x9 board from an 8x8 one,
based on the imperial importance of the number 9 seems more likely
to have happened than the other way around.
Chess
Pieces and Boards The oldest clearly recognizable Chess pieces
have been excavated in ancient Afrasiab, today's Samarkand, in Uzbekistan.
These are seven ivory pieces from 762, with some of them possibly
older, meaning that they stem rom the 6th to 8th century AD. It is
not clear whether one of the pieces can be identified as a Queen.
Otherwise, the occurrence of the 6 different pieces within a sample
of seven out of the total 32 pieces is statistically surprising. The
pieces today are kept in a downtown museum in Samarkand. Some other
old pieces, possibly Chess pieces, are the occasionally named Chess
pieces of an elephant and a zebu bull kept in Tashkent. They were
excavated in Dalverzin-Tepe, an ancient citadel of the Kushan Empire
now in Southern Uzbekistan, and stem from the 2nd century. The Russian
Chess history expert Linder feels that they are not Chess pieces,
but belonged to a forerunner of Chess [Linder 1994]. They could mean
an earlier than previously assumed existence of Chess.
Second,
there is a piece in the Metropolitan Museum in New York from the 6th
or 7th century, bought in Baghdad around 1930, representing an elephant
out of dolomite stone of 2-7/8 inch height [Gunter 1991]. An ivory
piece, probably a Chess piece from the 6th century, has been excavated
recently at a Byzantine palace in the ancient city of Butrint in Albania.
This modifies the theory that Chess was moved to the West by the Arabs
in favor of Christian/Byzantine involvement. Written Reports The oldest
known Chess books or parts thereof are in Arabic, written about 850
AD. Before that, there are only incidental possible references to
the existence of the game in Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit, or Chinese
literature, but there is no complete description of the game, nor
an indication that rules had stabilized. The earliest mentions stem
from around 600 AD. Chess or Chaturanga 3 have not been mentioned
in an otherwise very complete travel report by the Chinese Buddhist
monk Fa Xian, who traveled through India at the beginning of the 5th
century AD. he total number of Persian references to Chess from around
600 is two out of a total of five works of middle-Persian secular
literature which are known to have survived from that period. Very
little is known about Chess in India for about half a millennium after
that. It is not clear whether the Chess mentioned by the Persian sources
was a game for two or for four players, whether it was played with
dice, and what moves were allowed.
The conclusion
by Murray [Murray 1913] and Eales [Eales 1985] is that before the
7th century, the existence of Chess in any land is not demonstrable.
Eales mentions that the compiler of a 12th century Chess manuscript
wrote "It is universally acknowledged that three things were produced
from India:the game, the book Kalila wa Dimna (a book of literary
fables) and the decimal numbers (including the Zero)." Ann C. Gunter
[Gunter 1991] reports about one of the surviving texts in Middle Persian,
The Explanation of Chess and Invention of Backgammon (Wizarishn i
catrang ud nihishn i new-ardashir). In a said competition between
the great Sassanian ruler Khusraw I, who ruled from 531 until 579,
and the Indian King Dewisharm, Dewisharm sent a Chess game to Khusraw
requesting that Khusraw's wise men explain the rationale of this game.
The wise man Wuzurg-Mihr explained the rationale of the game and then
proceeded to a challenge of his own to the Indian ruler. This supposedly
was the invention of Backgammon (called nard in nard in nard the literature),
and the invention of present day dice (the numbers of which correspond
to cosmological principles of the then common Persian religion, Zoroastrianism).
Dice were, however, already known by the ancient Egyptians and certainly
not invented as late as Khusraw I's time. It has not been possible
to locate Dewisharm, and to find out which of the kingdoms that existed
after the fall of the Gupta Dynasty that he ruled.
Sloan
[Sloan 1985]bases his theory about Chinese Chess origin on two Chinese
poems, one stemming from the 2nd century BC. Since Chess is often
wrongly confused with the far older Go, this could also be the case
here (or a mixup with another board game). The Sinologist Joseph Needham
and Pavle Bidev, both part of the Initiative Group Konigstein, (See Ed. Note - below) have,
based on the theory about religious roots for all board games, suggested
that the historical Chess of 7th century India was directly descended
from a divinatory game (or ritual)in China. Bidev suggests that Chess
has its roots in the cult of the Chinese god Thai Yi. Needham has
shown that there are references to an "image-game" (hsiang chhi is
elephant-game or image-game)in works of the 6th century, devised by
the Emperor Wu Ti (561-578) from the Northern Chou-Dynasty. The emperor
even gave lectures on the game to his staff. It was, however, not
Chess since according to early sources it had as its pieces the sun,
the moon, the stars, and the constellations, meaning that it was in
all likelihood a complex astrological ritual. Interesting in Chinese
Chess is the 3x3 fortress, an exact image of Tic-Tac-Toe.
Indirect
Evidence There is an analogy between the Indian army and the Chess
army. Chinese armies did not have elephants, or only very occasionally
had a limited number in the southwestern part of the China. The earliest
Chess terms appear in Sanskrit, the Persian and Arab versions are
very similar. Whyld points out the fact on the IGK website (http://www.netcologne.de/~nc-jostenge)that
the first Chess terms mentioned appearing in Sanskrit is not convincing.
He also mentions the fact that in the story of Chess moving from India
to Persia it is said to come from Hind, a name which was not used
for India until after the 11th century AD. Davidson [Davidson 1949]
studied the "Geography of Chess". Starting with India he finds four
major radiations:A northeast radiation into China, between 800 and
1000 AD along the Silk Road; a southeast radiation into Burma and Indo-China,
between 800 and 1100 AD;a westward radiation into Persia and the Arab
countries, between 600 and 800 AD, reaching Spain before the 1008
battlefield will of the Count of Uregel, which directed the inheritance
of his Chess-pieces; and a northward radiation into Siberia, between
1400 and 1500 AD.
Gerhard
Josten from the IGK bases his "merger theory" on three elements in
the structure of Chess. The element of hunt games is represented by
the king, the element of divination counters for the moves by the
officers and the element of race games by the pawns. The imprisonment
of the king occurs in a similar way in the Chinese territorial game
Go, called Weiqi 4 in China, which means this element likely comes
from China. Go is played on a 19x19 board by placing alternatively
black and white pieces on the board. Horizontal and vertical connections
of pieces of the same color form chains. The number of empty fields
neighboring any members of a chain horizontally or vertically give
the degree of freedom of the chain. A chain, including one consisting
of a single piece, without any degree of freedom is taken prisoner.
The situation of one piece taken prisoner could be the one which was
applied to a mated king in Chess. Josten believes that the officers
have their origin in old divination techniques, but in difference
to other authors he believes that the divination techniques apply
only to the officers and not to the complete game of Chess.
Based
on the fact that the geometry of the Babylonian astrolabe allows all
of the important types of moves of the Chess officers and the external
kinship of the astrolabe to the Byzantine Chess board, Josten states
that the Babylonian astrolabe is an adequate ideal for these pieces.
Supporting the astronomical/astrological connection is the 19th century
theory that all board games have religious roots. Chess has been from
the beginning a game for intellectuals and astrologists were considered
in ancient times part of the intellectual elite. In antiquity, the
stars were looked at as either images of gods or subjects with which
the gods chased around. This is the justification for astrology and
possibly for an early use of the game of Chess to obtain oracles.
The astrolabe constitutes an analog computation device 5, consisting
of various rings movable against each other. The user found the altitude
of the sun or stars by means of a graduated circle on one side of
the device and then turned to the other side to perform his calculations
on the movable star map, a two-dimensional representation of the three-dimensional
heavens. The straight line moves occur in these operations, the knight
move is a combination of both. These methods are also indicated in
ancient astroglyphs from Chaldaean times.
As an
alternative possibility to the divinification I offer, the game of
Tic-Tac-Toe could be viewed as providing the roots for the moves of
the counters. Tic-Tac-Toe is played by 2 players, e. g. Black and
White, with a set of pieces of equal value each, on a 3x3 board. The
players move alternatively with the goal to get three of the own pieces
in one horizontal, vertical or diagonal row. In the following diagram,
that goal is achieved by occupying the points 1, 2, 3, or the parallels;the
points 1, 4, 7, or the parallels;or the diagonals 1, 5, 9, or 3, 5,
7: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Tic-Tac-Toe was played at least 3000 years ago.
It is also called "Three Men'ss Morris", where "morris" is a corruption
of merels, the Latin word for counters [Pritchard 1994]. From a game-theoretic
point of view, it is always a draw and is trivial. A more challenging
extension was played extensively 6. The placing of the following piece
of the same color (2 moves ahead) is either vertical, horizontal,
diagonal or in diagram (1)the point 8 following the point 1, or equivalent
sequences this is similar to a knight's move in Chess. Thus all move
sequences of the pieces in Chess are represented.
The pawns
and their idea almost certainly come from India. Most of the ancient
board games seem to have been racing games played with dice or its
forerunner, sticks with one flat side, which were thrown and the number
being determined by the number of resulting flat sides being up or
down. Ashtapada is an ancient Hindu race game played with dice on
an 8x8 board, which later might have become the Chess-board. The method
of play for Ashtapada has been forgotten. It seems logical that there
has to be an incentive for succeeding in a race, which is given by
the conversion of a pawn into an officer, when the pawn reaches the
last row 7.
To change
a gambling game into a strategic race game requires some strategic
possibilities to block or speed up the race, such as opposite pawns
and the possibility to take an opposite piece by a diagonal move.
A challenge for this theory is to explain the use today, and in the
total history of Chess, military names for the officers with no previous
names for these pieces being known. Also in the early Arab sources
the king is not imprisoned but killed. As far as the area of origin
is concerned, Josten points to the Central Asian Kushan Empire, a
culture that had intensive contact with the Near East, India, and
China. It would have combined various elements from games from these
regions in one game. The Kushans, called "the forgotten Kushans" by
some scholars, ruled from about 50 BC until about 200 AD a big empire,
which included a substantial part of India, and included the excavation
place where the above mentioned 2nd century AD "Chess-pieces" were
found. The Kushans, having become affluent by trading on the Silk
Road, were privy to cultural mergers as shown by their contemporaneous
tolerance of Buddhism and Zoroastrianism, as well as their gold coins
displaying Greek, Roman, Iranian, Hindu and Buddhist deities. Josten's
hypothesis about the Kushan origin from the days of the Kushan Empire
would imply a lack of reports about Chess for about half a millennium
before 600 AD, which might be explained as having been a maturing
period. The two pieces from Dalverzin-Tepe could support the theory.
Another
thought would be that Chess emerged on the Silk Road, when merchants
were idly waiting for better weather conditions for travel, and playing
board games. A key place of this type was Kashgar in today's far western
China, which also belonged for a time to the Kushan Empire. Historic
Views There are a number of books on Chess history, in particular
the scholarly studies written by H. J. R. Murray [Murray 1913] and
Richard Eales [Eales 1985]. The German book by H. F. Ma§mann [Ma§mann
1839] dismisses older legends about the origin of Chess, like the
one that Palamedes of Euboa invented it during the 10-year siege of
Troy in order to help avoid boredom among the Greek soldiers. Ma§mann
is of the firm opinion that Chess was invented in India and came from
there via Persia and the Arabs to the West.
The beginning
of historical research about the origin of Chess is a 1694 publication
by Thomas Hyde, De Ludis Orientalibus. Hyde states the facts implicit
in older Arab sources, leading to his conclusion that Chess originated
in India and then traveled by way of Persia and the Arab world to
western Europe and on the Silk Road to the East. The myths and legends
before Hyde are all not historical, but all of them, except those
of obvious later invention, point to Persia or India as the country
of origin. Li [Li 1998] refers to a publication by Irwin, read in
1793 in Dublin [Irwin, An Account of the Game of Chess, as Played
by the Chinese,
Transactions
of the Royal Irish Academy (Dublin 1793), pg. 53-63]. According to
this paper, Chess was invented by the Chinese General Han Xin to mentally
occupy his troops during a long winter reciprocal surveillance in
204-203 BC. Li describes in detail how he believes Han Xin decided
on the layout and moves, which eventually led to the Chinese form
of chess. Han Xin died in 196 BC. Li mentions that there are citations
in Irwin's paper, but he does not give any. I agree with other authors
that a paper written 2, 000 years after the fact does not constitute
proof. Josten points to the history of the British colonialism in
India. The majority of India was under the control of the East India
Company in the first half of the 19th century. As a result of revolts
in 1857 the Company was dissolved and India was placed under the direct
control of the British Crown. In 1909 Britain granted India some self-government.
Josten suggests that the researchers Thomas Hyde and H. J. R. Murray,
who were active during the 19th and early 20th century found willing
ears with their claim of an Indian origin of Chess. This of course
neglects the contributions of the early German researchers who reached
similar conclusions to the British ones.
Summary
Unfortunately, written references to Chess or its development have
not been found yet from before the two Persian records of about 600
AD. It is very unlikely that Chess, almost as it is played today,
suddenly came into existence, invented by one person. The idea of
it being a combination of elements from other board-games has merit.
Since almost all known board games have religious backgrounds the
astrological component is entirely possible, even though I prefer
the version that all elements come from other games, e. g. Tic-Tac-Toe,
as the basis for the counters. Kushan as the area of origin is highly
possible, especially because of the 2 excavated debated pieces from
the second century AD, which were found in the area of the Kushan
Empire.
The books
are by no means closed. In my opinion, the Chinese origin is the least
likely one from the ones discussed. Josten's hypothesis is very intriguing
but still needs some more work. The theory about India being the original
country seems to hold together but will probably have to give in to
another theory because of the lack of reports about follow-up within
India during the next 500 years after 600 AD.
References
[Davidson 1949] Henry A.. Davidson, A Short History of Chess, New
York 1949, 228 pages.
[Eales 1985] Richard Eales,, CHESS -The History of a Game, New York
1985, 240 pages.
[Gunter 1991] Ann C.. Gunter, Art from Wisdom:The Invention of Chess
and Backgammon, in Asian Art, Winter 1991, pg. 7-21.
[Li 1998] David H.. Li, Who? Where? When? Why? How? The Genealogy
of Chess, Bethesda, MD 1998, 383 pages.
[Linder 1994] I.. M. Linder, The Art of Chess Pieces, Moscow, "H.
G. S." publishers, 1994, 288 pages.
[Mam§ann 1839] H.. F. Ma§mann, Geschichte des mittelalterlichen vorzugsweise
des deutschen Schachspiels, Quedlinburg und Leipzig 1839, 222 pages.
[Murray 1913] H.. J. R. Murray, A History of Chess, Oxford University
Press 1913,900 pages. [Pritchard 1994] Pritchard,, David:The Family
Book of Games, Time-Life Books, 1994,200 pages.
[Sloan 1985] Sam Sloan, The Origin of Chess, Copyright Sloan Publishers
ISBN 0-9609190-1-5, 27 pages.
Notes
1. The idea of Persia being the country of origin appears to be only
a slight modification of the theory about Indian origin and is therefore
not separately considered.
2. http://www.mynetcologne.de/~nc-jostenge
3. Indian name for Chess and/or a forerunner
4. "the surrounding gam"
5. The invention of the astrolabe is usually attributed to the Greek
astronomer Hipparchos, at around 170 BC. This would mean a relatively
late appearance of the astrolabe in Chaldaean astronomy.
6. I saw for instance an engraving of a corresponding board in the
cobblestones of Old Jerusalem. Boards of this Tic-Tac-Toe expansion
can also be found in some Roman museum collections.
7. There is no conversion in Chinese Chess.
ED NOTE: It has been recently (July 17, 2009) pointed out by G. Ferlito that neither Pavle Bidev nor Joseph Needham were members of the I.G.K.
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