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The History of Chess. H. J. R. Murray
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isbn 4064066383275
Автор произведения H. J. R. Murray
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PART I.
CHESS IN ASIA
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY
European chess of Indian ancestry.—Asiatic games of similar ancestry.—Classification of Board-games.—Indian Board-games.—The Ashṭāpada.—Speculations on the nature of the original Indian chess.—Previous theories as to the ancestry of the game.
Historically chess must be classed as a game of war. Two players direct a conflict between two armies of equal strength upon a field of battle, circumscribed in extent, and offering no advantage of ground to either side. The players have no assistance other than that afforded by their own reasoning faculties, and the victory usually falls to the one whose strategical imagination is the greater, whose direction of his forces is the more skilful, whose ability to foresee positions is the more developed.
To-day, chess as we know it is played by every Western people, and in every land to which Western civilization or colonization has extended. The game possesses a literature which in contents probably exceeds that of all other games combined.1 Its idioms and technicalities have passed into the ordinary language of everyday life.2 The principles and possibilities of the game have been studied for four centuries, and the serious student of chess starts now with the advantage of a rich inheritance of recorded wisdom and experience. Master-play reaches a high standard, and has rightly earned a reputation for difficulty. This reputation has often been extended to the game itself, and has deterred many from learning it. Moreover, Western civilization has evolved other games, and teems with other interests for leisure moments, so that chess to-day can only be regarded as the game of the minority of the Western world. In the Middle Ages chess was far more widely played, and the precedence among indoor games that is still accorded by courtesy to it is a survival from the period when chess was the most popular game of the leisured classes of Europe.
The ancestry of this European chess can easily be established. A number of the mediaeval European chess terms can be traced back by way of Arabic to Middle Persian. Thus we have
The name of the game in most of the European languages, e.g. Eng. chess, Fr. échecs, It. scacchi, can be traced back, through the Latin plural scaci (scachi, scacci, meaning chessmen), to the Arabic and Persian name of the chess King, shāh.
The names of the other chessmen—King and Pawn (L. pedo, a foot-soldier), everywhere; Horse, in Southern Europe—reproduce the meaning of the names of the corresponding men in the Arabic and Persian games.
The names of the game of chess in modern Spanish or Castilian (ajedrez) and Portuguese (xadrez) not only confirm this evidence, but supplement it by taking the pedigree a step farther back. For these two forms appear in older Castilian as acedrex, and this word is simply the Arabic ash-shaṭranj, the shaṭranj, in a European dress. Shaṭranj, again, is only an Arabicized form of the Middle Persian chatrang, and this Persian word is an adaptation of the Sanskrit chaturanga. All these terms are in their respective languages the ordinary names for the game of chess.
The names of the chessmen in Persian and Sanskrit are synonymous. In each game there was a King, a Counsellor, two Elephants, two Horse, two Chariots, and eight Foot-soldiers.
This philological evidence derives some support from the documentary evidence. The earliest works which make mention of chess date from about the beginning of the 7th century A.D., and are associated with N.W. India, Persia, and Islam. It is difficult to assign exact dates, but the oldest of a number of nearly contemporary references is generally assumed to be a mention of chess in a Middle Persian romance—the Kārnāmak—which is ascribed with some hesitation to the reign of Khusraw II Parwīz, the Sāsānian king of Persia, 590–628 A.D. The others belong to N.W. India.
It is interesting to note that early Persian and Arabic tradition is unanimous in ascribing the game of chess to India. The details naturally vary in different works, and the names in the tradition are manifestly apocryphal. Chess is usually associated with the decimal numerals as an Indian invention, and its introduction into Persia is persistently connected with the introduction of the book Kalīla wa Dimna (the Fables of Pilpay) in the reign of the Sāsānian monarch Khusraw I Nūshīrwān, 531–78 A.D., and European scholars of Sanskrit and Persian generally accept the traditional date of the introduction of this book as established. The so-called Arabic numerals are well known to be really Indian.
Finally, a comparison of the arrangement and method of the European game of the 11th to 13th centuries A.D. with the Indian game as existing to-day and as described in the earlier records supports the same conclusion. In both games the major pieces occupy opposite edges of the board of 8 × 8 squares, and the Foot-soldiers are arranged on the row in front of the major pieces. The corner squares (a1, a8, h1, h8) are occupied by the Chariol with identical move in most of the games;4 the next squares (b1, b8, g1, g8) by the Horse with the well-known move of the Knight; the third squares from the corners (c1, c8, f1, f8) by the Elephant;5 and the two central squares (e1, e8, d1, d8) by the King and Counsellor respectively with moves that were for long the same in India, Persia, Islam, and Europe.6 The move of the Foot-soldiers, arranged on the 2nd and 7th rows, was also for long the same in the chess of all these countries.
We must accordingly conclude that our European chess is a direct descendant of an Indian game played in the 7th century with substantially the same arrangement and method as in Europe five centuries later, the game having been adopted first by the Persians, then handed on by the Persians to the Muslim world, and finally borrowed from Islam by Christian Europe.
Games of a similar nature exist to-day in other parts of Asia than India. The Burmese sittuyin, the Siamese makruk, the Annamese chhôeu trâng, the Malay chātor, the Tibetan chandaraki, the Mongol shatara, the Chinese siang h‘i, the Corean tjyang keui, and the Japanese sho-gi, are all war-games exhibiting the same great diversity of piece which is the most distinctive feature of chess.
There is naturally far less direct evidence respecting the ancestry of these games than in the case of European chess, but there can be no doubt that all these games are equally descended from the same original Indian game. The names sittuyin (Burmese), chhôeu trâng (Annamese), and chandaraki (Tibetan) certainly, and the names chātor (Malay) and shatara (Mongol) probably, reproduce the Sanskrit chaturanga. The names of some of the pieces in the Malay, the Burmese, and probably the Siamese games, have been borrowed from the Sanskrit.
If we examine the nomenclature of these games we also find the same meanings recurring throughout. Thus we have—
The Malay, Tibetan, and Mongol games are played on a board of 8 × 8 squares, and the initial arrangement of the pieces corresponds closely to the Indian game. The three games of Further India are played on a board of the same size, but the arrangement of the pieces differs from that of the Indian game. The moves of the chessmen are consistent with an Indian ancestry.
The relationship of the Chinese, Corean, and Japanese games is not so obvious. The first two are played on the lines, and not on the squares, of a board of 8 × 8 squares with a space between the 4th and