THE BIRTHPLACE OF CHESS - Some Reflections

Kenneth Whyld, Caistor, Great Britain, 1996

 A personal note first. For fifty years I was convinced by Murray and van der Linde. I believed that the Indian sub-continent was almost certainly the birthplace of chess. Now I am less certain. To be brief I can outline the factors that trouble me.

The Arguments for India

1.Etymology. The earliest chess terms appear to be Sanskrit. Murray shows that Pahlavi words in the game are adapted from Sanskrit, and the Arabic in turn from Pahlavi.

2. The Firdausi legend. It describes the arrival of chess from India, although written long after the events which it claims to depict. That this provenance was not at the time disputed by Persians (or Arabs) convinced Murray that it had a factual basis.

3. Fables. Much of the folk-lore about the birth of chess is from in the sub-continent.

Counter-Arguments

1.Sanskrit is the most distinguished member of a family of languages, including closely-linked contemporary relatives used outside India, such as Avestan.

2. Firdausi describes chess as arriving from Hind. According to Majid Yekta´i this name was not used for India until after the 11^th century. He says that here Hind means Khuzistan. Others have extended Hind eastwords to include Baluchistan. There are other puzzling elements in the Firdausi story. As Bidev pointed out, nobody could possibly generate the rules of chess only by studying the array position at the beginning of a game. On the other hand, such an achievement might be made by looking at nard.

3. Any suggestion that, if there is any historical basis for the tale, the two games have been transposed, might seem unlikely on the face of it. However, there are points which need to be made to a Western European. Firdausi´s purpose was to extol the vitues of Chosros I, and his text has as much historical reliability as Shakespeare´s Henry V, also written long after the events it portrays. There would be more merit in ´cracking´chess than nard. Finally, we here (especially chessplayers) think that games of skill are more worthy than games of chance, but at the time and place of this legend the opposite was true. Games of skill were mere diversions, but games of chance engaged the gods in dialogue.

4. The Indian sub-continent is the source of the world´s greatest literary treasures. The tradition of story-telling is a rich one, and the proliferation of the (conflicting) Indian legends about creation of chess may merely reflect that narrative tradition. There are similar, if fewer, stories from elsewhere.

We know that while chess flourished in Baghdad in the 9^th century, the earliest reliable account of chessplaying in India date only from the 11^th century.

ON THE ORIGIN OF CHESS