LITMIR.BIZ

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The number of players. I have already suggested that the use of square boards for race-games may have resulted from the desire to give the track a fourfold symmetry which would allow of four players playing at one time. We have, however, seen that the ashṭāpada was frequently used by two players only, so that we cannot assume that a square board necessarily suggested a game for four players. Moreover, the race-game and the war-game are not really similar. The former is a one-dimensional game, since it only requires a track; the latter is a two-dimensional game and needs a surface.

      We shall see that by the year 1000 there were Indian varieties of chess in existence both for two and for four players. In each variety the four elements of the chaturangabala are completely represented. In the two-handed game the King and his Minister are added, in the four-handed game the King only. The advocate for the priority of the four-handed chess might argue that its representation presents a closer parallel to the Indian army than does the chess for two players. He could also point to the fact that Indian policy has always had an eye on a warfare in which four kings were concerned, to wit, the aggressor, his foe, the neutral, and the one called the ‘middle-most’.⁴⁶ But I do not think that either argument carries much weight, I have already expressed the opinion that the presence of the Minister in a war-game can be justified from Sanskrit discussions of his functions. And this philosophical view of warfare as involving four Kings can only be looked upon as a generalization, for it is obvious that the aggressor and his foe would be quite capable of conducting a war without the intervention of the other two monarchs. So far as Indian evidence goes, I do not think that it is decisive for or against the priority of either form of chess, though the probabilities are stronger for the priority of the two-handed game. On the other hand the comparative evidence of the non-Indian games tells strongly in favour of the original game of chaturanga having been for two players. This conclusion seems to me also the more natural one. The development of a four-handed game may have been helped by considerations like the above: the analogy of the development of four-handed race-games from the simpler two-handed variety supplies a more probable reason for its appearance.

      2. The arrangement of the forces. Kāmandaki’s treatise shows us that the Indians paid considerable attention to the theoretical arrangement of an Indian army on the battle-field. The problem how best to arrange the elements on the ashṭāpada was a far simpler one, since all disturbing factors were eliminated. The advantages of a symmetrical arrangement must have been obvious from the first, and we may explain the duplication of the chariot, horse, and elephant, and the eight foot-soldiers in this way. The larger number of the last named is explained by the fact that the infantry is numerically the largest part of the army. The positions of the King and his Minister on the two central squares of the first row, and of the Foot-soldiers on the eight squares of the second row, follow so naturally that I think they must have been so from the commencement. But there is no obvious reason why the remaining pieces should be arranged in any particular way, and the existing arrangement, a1 Chariot, b1 Horse, c1 Elephant, was probably only arrived at after experiment. The position of the Horse (b1, g1) is so invariable in all forms of chess, that it must have been fixed very early. As regards the other pieces, the earlier Indian references show that there was uncertainty until comparatively late in India, and now the Chariot, now the Elephant appears on the corner squares. The comparative evidence of the non-Indian forms of chess points, however, to the arrangement a1, Chariot; b1, Horse; c1, Elephant; d1 and e1, King and Minister; f1, Elephant; g1, Horse; h1, Chariot, as having been the more usual Indian one.

      3. The powers of move. We have seen from Kāmandaki that the four elements of the Indian army were of very different values. If war was to be represented by a game, it was necessary to discover some means of reproducing this difference of value. This was cleverly achieved by the original idea of giving different moves to the chessmen, so that the freedom or range of the move should suggest roughly the actual method of movement of the original element in war. The general identity of move in the earlier forms of chess the world over shows the skill with which the idea was carried out: the variation in move of the Elephant recorded in early Indian chess, and exhibited to-day in existing Asiatic forms of chess, may be taken as showing that the final result was only obtained after experiment.

      4. The method of play. All race-games are dice-games, and it is probable that all board-games were in the first instance played by means of dice or other implements of similar import. There is no reason, as far as I can see, why we should make an exception to this in the case of chess. Previous writers have approached the question with a priori arguments. V. d. Linde (i. 79–80) lays stress on the incompatibility of dice and chess, and considers it a dualism that could not be original. V. d. Lasa (1) thought that the greatest probability was in favour of the original game having been a pure game of combination. Macdonell (JRAS., 140) is disposed to take the view that there was a dice-age in the development of chess, as offering a more natural development than that which the opposite view offers. The evidence of the earlier Indian references to chess is purely negative. Dice are nowhere mentioned, but nowhere of necessity excluded from use. It is only at a comparatively late date that we begin to hear of varieties of chess in which the moves were given by the throws of the dice. The four-handed game was a dice-game in its earlier history. The Muslims played their oblong chess on a board of 4 × 16 squares with the help of dice. Even in Europe varieties of dice-chess were not unknown in the 13th c., though it is probable that some of these were of European invention.

      But the later Indian references to the two-handed chess, and the comparative evidence of the non-Indian games show that at quite an early period the possibility of playing chess without dice had been discovered, and the resulting improvement of the game had been recognized. The excellence of the game because it depended upon the intellect alone is already praised in the Middle Persian Chatrang-nāmak.

      With the adoption of a rule of procedure by alternate turns of a single move each, a rule that does not always obtain in Indian dice-games, the game was complete so far as concerns essentials, and players had a workable game of war. Whether its invention may be ascribed to the Buddhist disapproval of bloodshed, which suggested to some enthusiast the possibility of replacing actual warfare by a game, it is impossible to say. It is at least suggestive that we shall find the game first mentioned in India in connexion with a stronghold of Buddhism, and that other early references will be associated with Buddhist regions.

      The date when it occurred to some Indian to represent the chaturanga and its evolutions in a game cannot be fixed, though naturally it cannot be earlier than the organization of the army on which it is based. Chess was certainly in existence in the 7th century A.D., and it had already at that time penetrated to Persia. The evidence upon which the same has been asserted of China is unsatisfactory. The silence of Greek writers as to its existence, although after the time of Alexander the Greeks enjoyed an uninterrupted intercourse with India for two centuries, has been claimed by v. d. Linde (i. 78) as evidence for the non-existence of both the game of chess and also the ashṭāpada at that time, and although his conclusion has been disproved as far as the ashṭāpada is concerned, it is probably correct as regards chess. Writers who romance of ‘five thousand years ago’ and the like are indulging in mere speculation; the real position has been well put by Prof. D. W. Fiske:

      ‘Before the seventh century of our era, the existence of chess in any land is not demonstrable by a single shred of contemporary or trustworthy documentary evidence….. Down to that date it is all impenetrable darkness.’⁴⁷

      The foundations of the modern investigations of early Indian literature for references to chess were laid by Prof. Albrecht Weber (B. 1821, D. 1901) in a series of papers read before the Berlin Royal Academy of Science in 1872–4. Before his attention was directed to the question by v. d. Linde, the only Sanskrit passage known to relate to chess was one which was first given in translation by Sir William Jones (B. 1746, D. 1794) in his essay On the Indian Game of Chess (Asiatic Researches, London, 1790, ii. 159–65). This gave a description of a four-handed dice-chess, and according to his informant, the Brahman Rādhakant, the Sanskrit text was an extract from the Bhavishya Purāṇa. Sir William Jones himself regarded this game as a modification of the primitive two-handed non-dice chess.⁴⁸ The exaggerated views current in the early part of the 19th century with regard to the antiquity of Sanskrit literature necessarily led to similar views regarding the age of this four-handed game, and

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