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Table of Contents

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 5th rows which virtually makes the board one of 8 × 9 squares; the third is played on the squares of a board of 9 × 9 squares. There is, however, no doubt that both the Corean and the Japanese games are derivatives of an older form of the Chinese game. Chinese works refer to the introduction of modifications in their game after 1279. These games introduce new pieces, but the salient fact remains that the Chariot with the move of the Rook (modified in Japan) occupies the corner squares (a1, &c.), and the Horse with the characteristic move of the Knight (slightly modified) occupies the adjoining squares (b1, &c.). This coincidence is too striking to be dismissed as merely accidental. Moreover, it is well known that other Chinese games are of Indian origin.

We may contrast the position of these games in Asia with that of chess in Europe. If we except Japan, there are only the beginnings of a literature. Each generation accordingly has to start again from the commencement and to evolve its own science of the game. The standard of play remains of necessity low, and there is nothing to deter any one from learning to play. The game has few rivals with which it must compete for popular favour, and it has had no difficulty in most places⁷ in retaining the first place. Thus the majority of Asiatics are chess-players, and chess may without exaggeration be described as the national game of Asia.

It is in the wider sense, in which I have just used the word, that I propose to use chess in this book. I include under it all the games which I trace back to the Indian chaturanga, and all the freak modifications that have been attempted from time to time. The first part of this history is devoted to a record of the Asiatic varieties of chess, and the evidence rapidly summarized above will be developed at greater length in the sequel. The broad lines of the diffusion of chess from India are fairly clear. Its earliest advance was probably westwards to Persia; the eastward advance appears to have been rather later, and at least three lines of advance may be traced. One route took the game by Kashmīr to China, Corea, and Japan. A second, possibly the same route by which Buddhism travelled, took chess to Further India. At a later date chess spread from the S.E. coast of India to the Malays. The route by which the game reached Tibet and the Northern tribes of Asia is still doubtful. Persia had meanwhile passed on chess to the Eastern Roman Empire, and, as a result of the Muhammadan conquest of Persia, Islam learnt the game. Henceforward the Muslims became the great pioneers of chess, carrying their game as far west as Spain, and east to India where they imposed the Arabic nomenclature on the Northern and Central Provinces of the Peninsula. Christian Europe had begun to learn chess from the Moors as early as 1000 A.D. From the Mediterranean shores it spread northwards over France and Germany to Britain, to the Scandinavian lands, and Iceland.

In its outward furniture chess is only one of many games which require a specially arranged surface for play. Games of this type are conveniently grouped under the generic name of Board-games, Ger. Brettspiele, although, as Groos⁸ has pointed out, the name is not a very fortunate one, since the surface of play is not always a board. Board-games are not only of very wide distribution to-day, but are also of great antiquity. They are by no means confined to the more civilized races: with the exception of the native tribes of Australia and New Guinea, practically every known people has its game or games of this type. It has also been remarked that the difficulty of a board-game is no criterion of the development of the race playing it, for some of the most involved and complicated varieties known are played by tribes that stand lowest in the scale of civilization. Board-games were played by the early inhabitants of Egypt; boards and pieces have been found in tombs even as old as the pre-dynastic period (a. 4000 B.C.),⁹ they are depicted in paintings in tombs of the Fifth Dynasty (3600–3400 B.C.),¹⁰ and the masons who built the temple at Kurna (1400–1333 B.C.) cut boards on slabs which were afterwards built into the roof of the temple.¹¹ Boards, apparently for games, have been found in prehistoric ruins in Palestine.¹² Board-games are mentioned in the earliest Buddhist literature of India,¹³ and in early Chinese works.¹⁴ They were played in classical times in Greece and Rome,¹⁵ by the Celts in Ireland and Wales before the Norman Conquest of England, by the Norse vikings before they began to harry the coasts of England and France,¹⁶ and by the native tribes of America before the time of Columbus.¹⁷

All known board-games, greatly as they vary in arrangement and method of play, appear to fall into one or other of three well-defined groups:

(1) Race games, in which the men are moved along a definite track. The typical European example is the game of Backgammon (tables, nard).

(2) Hunt or Siege games, in which one side endeavours to block or confine the adversary. The typical European example is the game of Fox and Geese.

(3) War games, in which the capture of prisoners plays a considerable part. The typical European example is the game of Chess.

This classification is convenient, but it must not be pushed too far. In particular, it must not be assumed without further inquiry that it involves any necessary connexion between the individual games of different groups, or even of a single group. However tempting it may be to assume a common ancestry for board-games, it is clear from a closer examination of the various methods of play that the majority have arisen independently, and that only in the case of a small minority in any class is there any evidence of a common origin. The sameness of type which is the foundation of the above classification is at most due to the fact that the games are ‘based upon certain fundamental conceptions of the universe’ (Culin, Korean Games), but more probably, in my opinion, to the universality of the activities which the games symbolize.¹⁸ Identity of origin can only be established by the evidence of reliable historical documents, by the linguistic evidence derived from the nomenclature of the games, or by the fact that these show so great an identity of feature that the chances of independent invention are mathematically infinitesimal.

The existing games which I include under the name of chess form one of the few groups of games whose common ancestry can be established in this way. It will obviously be far more difficult to carry the pedigree farther back, and to discover the origin or relationships of the parent Indian chaturanga, a game already in existence in the 7th century of our era, in still older games. We shall first have to ascertain what board-games were in existence in India at that remote period, and to attempt to elucidate their nature.

Unfortunately, the general characteristics of early Indian literature are not very favourable for such an inquiry. The earlier Sanskrit literature of the Vedic age, and also of the later centuries when the Brahmanas and Sutras came into existence, was religious in tone and almost entirely poetical in form, and references to games must be exceptional. The later Sanskrit literature gradually extended its field to include secular subjects in general, but as it widened its field the defects of its literary style became more pronounced, and the conceits of the poetry and the extraordinarily condensed character of the prose deprive the allusions of definiteness, and leave too much to depend on the view of the commentator or the personal fancy of the translator. Our knowledge of the older Indian games is thus very vague, and based only upon the comparison of passages, all more or less obscure.

But we do know that board-games were in existence in N.W. India and the Ganges valley considerably before the commencement of the Christian era. We know this from the occurrence in Sanskrit works of words which are used as the names of boards or surfaces upon which games were played. The commonest of these words is phalaka, but this is simply a generic term for a game-board and conveys no information as regards shape, size, or arrangement. There are next the terms used in connexion with the simplest forms of dice-play, in which everything turns upon the result of throwing the dice and nothing in the nature of a game with pieces is required. Obviously, all that is necessary in this case is a level surface upon which the dice may fall, and Lüders (Das Würfelspiel im alten Indien, Berlin, 1907, 11–15) has shown that adhidevana (used in the Atharva Veda, and usually translated dice-board) meant simply a smooth flat surface excavated in the ground for this purpose. Of more importance for our present purpose is a group of terms which are restricted to boards of definite shape and arrangement. There are two words of this kind: ashṭāpada, meaning a square board of 64 squares, 8 rows of 8 squares, and dasapada, meaning a similar board of 100 squares, 10 rows of 10 squares. These boards were employed for a more complicated form of game in which the use of the dice was combined with a game upon a board (Lüders, op. cit., 65). Both terms appear to have been used also for the games played upon these boards.

The ashṭāpada would seem accordingly to have been identical in shape with our chessboard or draughtboard, and so it is often translated, though the rendering is to be deprecated as suggesting to the ordinary reader that the board was used for a rudimentary form of one of these games. For draughts there is no evidence at all, for chess none before the 7th c. A.D. Still, the coincidence is so striking that it is worth while to try to discover what the ashṭāpada game really was, in order to see whether it has not some connexion with the rise of chess.

The meaning of the word is established by Patañjali in his great commentary on the grammar of Pāṇini, the Mahābhāshya, which, according to Macdonell (Skr. Lit., 431), was written between the latter half of the 2nd c. B.C. and the beginning of the Christian era. It is here¹⁹ defined as ‘a board in which each line has 8 squares’. In the absence of any reference to any alternate colouring or chequering of the squares, we may assume that it was unchequered, like all other native Asiatic game-boards. Two early comparisons suggest that the ashṭāpada was a familiar object. In the first book of the Rāmāyaṇa,²⁰ according to Jacobi added after the 2nd c. B.C., the city of Ayodhyā (Oudh) is spoken of as ‘charming by reason of pictures consisting of ashṭāpada squares, as it were painted’. The regular plan of the city is probably intended, and the passage may be compared with later ones from Muslim historians. Thus Ḥamza al-Iṣfahānī (c. 300/912), writing of the building of Jundī Shāpūr by the Sāsānian king Shāhpūr (240–270 A.D.), says: ‘the plan of this city was after the fashion of a chessboard; it was intersected by 8 times 8 streets,’ to which a later Persian historian adds the pertinent comment, ‘the figure was after this fashion, but chess had not yet been invented at that time.’ The later geographer Mustawfī (740/1340)²¹ has a similar statement about the plan of Nīshāpūr in Khurāsān: ‘In the days of the Chosroes, as it was reported, the old town of Naysābūr had been originally laid out on the plan of a chessboard with 8 squares to each side,’ There is also a passage in a Northern Buddhist work, cited by Burnouf in his Lotus de la bonne loi, Paris, 1852–4, 383, in which the world is described as ‘the earth on which ashṭāpadas were fastened with cords of gold’—probably alluding to the division by roads, seas, and mountains, or to the succession of field, forest, and desert.²²

Of more importance is a passage in the Pali²³ Brahma-jāla Sutta, or Dialogues of the Buddha,²⁴ according to Rhys Davids one of the earliest of Buddhist documents, purporting to record the actual words of Gotama himself, and dating back to the 5th c. B.C. The Buddha is contrasting the conversation and thoughts of the unconverted man with those of the disciple:

It (sect. 7, p. 3) is in respect only of trifling things, of matters of little value, of mere morality, that an unconverted man when praising the Tathāgata, would speak. And what are such trifling, minor details of mere morality that he would praise?

He then proceeds to enumerate all the many trifles which occupy the thoughts of the unconverted man, and finally comes to games, and gives us a most interesting and valuable list of games—quite the oldest known—which from its interest I quote entire:

Or (sect. 14, p. 9) he might say, ‘Whereas some recluses and Brahmans while living on food provided by the faithful continue addicted to games and recreations; i.e. to say—

1. Games on boards with boards with 8 or 10 rows of squares.

2. The same games played by imagining such boards in the air (Pāli, ākāsaṃ).

3. Keeping going over diagrams drawn on the ground, so that one steps only where one ought to go.

4. Either removing the pieces or men from a heap with one’s nail, or putting them in a heap, in each case without shaking it. He who shakes the heap loses.

5. Throwing dice (Pāli, khalikā).

6. Hitting a short stick with a long one.

7. Dipping the hand with the fingers stretched out in lac, or red dye, or flour water, and striking the wet hand on the ground, or on a wall, calling out ‘What shall it be?’ and showing the form required—elephants, horses, &c.

8 Games with balls (Pāli, akkhaṃ).

9. Blowing through toy pipes made of leaves.

10. Ploughing with toy ploughs.

11. Turning somersaults.

12. Playing with toy windmills made of palm leaves.

13. Playing with toy measures made of palm leaves.

14, 15. Playing with toy carts, or toy bows.

16. Guessing at letters traced in the air, or on a playfellow’s back.

17. Guessing the playfellow’s thoughts.

18. Mimicking of deformities.

Gotama the recluse holds aloof from such games and recreations.’

This passage is quoted at length in many other early Buddhist works, e.g. in Vinaya, ii. 10, and iii. 180. The translation naturally depends considerably on early native commentaries, and it must be remembered that the earliest commentators are considerably later than the original; indeed they only appeared when changes in the spoken language made the written work archaic and unintelligible to the ordinary reader. The commentator was often in a worse position than the modern scholar for interpreting the text, and we often find his explanation absurd or impossible. We are accordingly compelled to accept the above translation with some reserve.²⁵

We are only concerned now with the first two of the games named. These are the ashṭāpada—here in its Pali form aṭṭhapada—and the dasapada. One of the two commentators used by Rhys Davids, the Sinhalese Sanna, who belongs to the 10th C. A.D. or even later, says that each of these games was played with dice and pieces (poru, from purisa = men), such as Kings and so on.²⁶ His evidence is far too late to be of any value as to the nature of the games in question, but is important as showing that these boards were still used for dice games in his day in Ceylon. Yet, if the second sentence is accurately translated, the games must have been of a character which permitted ‘blindfold’ play without the use of material boards.

The game on the ashṭāpada also falls into condemnation in an early Brahman work, the Sutrakrilānga.²⁷ The devout Brahman, we are told,

should not learn to play ashṭāpada, he should not speak anything forbidden by the law, a wise man should abstain from fights and quarrels.

A more illuminating reference is to be found in the Harivaṃsa, or Family of Vishṇu, a supplementary book to the Mahābhārata, and generally recognized as a later addition. Macdonell (Skr. Lit., 287) has, however, shown that the Mahābhārata, including the Harivaṃsa, must have attained to its present form by at least 500 A.D. The passage²⁸ recounts a meeting for dice-play between Rūkmin and Balarāma. The former had the reputation of being an expert at dice, the latter was fond of it, but not very skilled in play. Enormous stakes were laid, and Rūkmin won thrice in succession. Finally, sorely provoked by Rūkmin’s expressions of triumph, Balarāma exclaimed, ‘Prince, I wager the vast sum of 100,000 millions, do you accept it? Let us throw the black and red dice on this splendid ashṭāpada.’ Rūkmin made no reply, but threw and lost. Then only did Rūkmin reply, ‘I refuse the wager.’ Neither this, nor Rūkmin’s continued references to his victory, upset Balarāma’s self-control, but when a voice from the skies awarded the victory to him on the ground that ‘silence gives consent’, Balarāma’s long-restrained wrath blazed forth, and seizing the large golden ashṭāpada, he struck Rūkmin to the ground. A second blow broke the teeth of the King of Kalinga. Then, tearing up one of the golden pillars of the hall, Balarāma strode forth, wielding it as a club.²⁹

We may probably find in this story a reason for the condemnation which Buddhist and Brahman alike pronounce upon the game ashṭāpada. Neither religion countenanced dicing, but neither has been able at any time to suppress it in India. Too great stress has been placed upon the efficacy of legislation, such as is to be found in the Code of Manu, against the use of the dice.³⁰ It is abundantly evident from the whole extent of Sanskrit literature that gambling with dice has been at all times the chief recreation in India. One of the very few secular poems in the Rigveda, occurring in the very oldest part of the collection, which can hardly be put later than 1000 B.C., contains the lament of a gambler who is unable to tear himself away from the dice, although he is fully conscious of the ruin he is bringing upon himself and his home. Lüders (op. cit.) has collected a large number of instances from the epic literature which show the extent of the passion for dicing in post-vedic times. In the Mahābhārata, Nala and Yudhishthira are represented as gambling away their very kingdoms in dice-play.³¹ The Arabic historian al-Maṣ‘ūdī, writing about 950 A.D., draws a lurid picture of what was currently believed in his day of the gambling propensities of the Indians. He is writing of the uses of ivory, and continues:³²

But by far the most frequent use of ivory is for the manufacture of men for chess and nard. Several of the chessmen are figures of men or animals, a span high and big, or even more. During the game a man stands by, specially to carry the men from one square to the other. When the Indians play at chess or nard, they wager stuffs or precious stones. But it sometimes happens that a player, after losing all his possessions, will wager one of his limbs. For this they set beside the players a small copper vessel over a wood fire, in which is boiled a reddish ointment peculiar to the country, which has the property of healing wounds and stanching the flow of blood. If the man who wagered one of his fingers loses, he cuts off the finger with a dagger, and then plunges his hand in the ointment and cauterizes the wound. Then he returns to the game. If the luck is against him he sacrifices another finger, and sometimes a man who continues to lose will cut off in succession all his fingers, his hand, his fore-arm, his elbow, and other parts of his body. After each amputation he cauterizes the wound with the ointment, which is a curious mixture of ingredients and drugs peculiar to India, of extraordinary effectiveness. The custom of which I have spoken is a notorious fact.

At the present day games of chance are among the most popular of Indian games, and are associated with religious festivals, especially with those in which it is necessary to keep watch the whole night through.³³

The ashṭāpada is also mentioned in an account of a game between Sakuni and Yudhishthira in Amarachandra’s Bālabhārata (II. v. 10 ff). In this game two dice (respectively red and black) are used, and each player has an ashṭāpada upon which he throws his die.³⁴ The game was played with pieces (sāri), of which half were red and the other half were black. These are moved in obedience to the throws of the dice; the ‘clatter’ which they make when placed upon the new position is mentioned, and the sāri are compared to monarchs, since like these they are set up, moved, taken captive, and released.

It seems clear that we have to do here with a game of the race-game class. We may find some confirmation for this conclusion from the comparative study of other Asiatic board-games in which dice are used to define the movements of the men. In India itself there exist a number of examples of games of this class, of which the best known are the games pachīsī and chaupur, which are played upon a four-armed board.

Games of this type appear to have been practised over the greater part of the world from the earliest times. A wide selection of examples is to be found in Mr. Stewart Culin’s books on games.³⁵ The underlying principle is practically the same in all. The board is arranged so that the divisions or points constitute a track along which the men (in Asia commonly called horses or dogs) are moved in obedience to the throws of the dice or equivalent implements (e.g. staves, shells, seeds, teetotums). The players, who may be two or more in number, are each given a certain number of men whom they have to enter on, move through, and remove from the board in a prescribed manner. Any player can remove, with certain limitations, an opponent’s man from the board by playing one of his own men to the point occupied by the former, and the man so removed has to commence again from the beginning. The player who first succeeds in removing all his men from the board after completing his appointed track, wins the game.

Probably the oldest and simplest Asiatic game of this type is the game for two players which we call backgammon. It is now played with little variety over all Southern Asia, from Syria to Japan. Chinese records mention its introduction from India with the name t‘shu p‘u (= Skr. chatush-pada, mod. Indian chaupur) as early as 220–65 A.D. Weber³⁶ has collected a number of references to games of this character from early Indian literature, the earliest being from the Mahābhāshya, in a passage in which Patañjali discusses Pāṇini’s explanation of the word ayānayīna,³⁷ in which the termination -ina has the force of ‘to move to’.

Board for Pachīsī and Chaupur.³⁸

Gavalata Board (Culin, C. & P. C., 851).

Ashta Kashte Board (Falk., 265).

It was possibly the desire to frame a game for four players on similar lines which led to the invention of the four-armed and square boards of which we have several Indian examples. All these boards exhibit a further modification in the special markings that are placed on particular squares. The device is not peculiar to Indian games: it represents an obvious way of adding additional interest to the game which occurred independently to players in many regions. A man which is played to one of these cross-cut squares is treated differently from one played to an unmarked point. It may secure the option of a shorter route home, as in the Corean nyout. It may secure immunity from capture so long as it occupies that point, as in these Indian games, and indeed in the majority of Asiatic race-games. It may be penalized by being compelled to return to the starting-point again, as in the American games of this class. It may be subjected to other penalties, or be given other privileges, as in the various race or promotion games which are invented annually in Europe, America, and elsewhere.

Board, Dice, and Men used in Saturankam (chaturanga), (Parker, 695).

Sīga Board (Parker, 607), The arrows show the direction of the moves. [The same game is in the Museum für Völkerkunde, Berlin, 1. c. 5708a, as Sadurañgam.]

Although specially arranged for four players, these games can easily be adapted to use by two players only, and the Indian games of which I give diagrams are often so used. The Ceylon game Gavalata is played by two or four players. When two play, the men enter at A and B respectively, when four, the centre point on each side is the point of entry for one of the players. Each player has one or two cowries instead of men, and four or five cowries are used instead of dice. The men move in the direction of the arrows, and the object is to traverse all the squares to the centre. A player returns an adversary to the starting-point when he plays one of his men to the same point occupied by the adversary, unless it stands on a cross-cut square, or castle. Sīga, which Mr. Parker (Ancient Ceylon, London, 1909, 607) describes as played in Colombo, is the same game, but men similar to the one shown in the diagram of saturankam are used when a proper board (generally of cloth) is employed. Often, however, the game is played upon a board marked for the occasion on the ground, and then the players make use of sticks of distinctive colour or length which they set upright in the square occupied. Saturankam and Ashta kashte are similar games on boards of 81 and 49 squares respectively. A similar game is probably depicted in the gambling scene Chitupada Sila on the coping of the Stupa of Bharhut, a Buddhist monument illustrative of Buddhist legend and history which is now considered to belong to the 4th c. A.D. Here we have four men squatting in pairs on opposite sides of a board of 6 × 6 squares. Beside the board lie 7 square pieces, 6 in a group and one nearer the board and in front of one of the players. They appear to be rudely engraved with dissimilar patterns, and have been variously identified as dice (or similar implements) or coins. The board is scratched on the ground and shows no cross-cut squares, but a short stick has been set up on one of the squares which—from the analogy of Sīga—probably represents a man in course of play.

The Bharhut Board.³⁹ The numbers show the positions of the players.

The existing board-games of this special type in Southern India and Ceylon are all played on boards with an odd number of squares, so that there is a single central square which serves as point of exit for all four players alike. In Pachīsī on the other hand, each player has his own point of exit, and there seems no reason why a similar arrangement should not have been tried upon a square board. In this case the square would obviously be one with an even number of points, and the four central points would serve as the four points of exit for the four players.

It is to this more complicated type of race-game that I assign the early Indian game on the ashṭāpada board. I find support for my belief in a peculiarity of the modern Indian chessboard which has no importance for chess and has never been explained in a satisfactory manner. On all native chessboards which I have seen, certain squares are cross-cut precisely as in the games of Pachīsī and Gavalata. Native books from the time of Nīlakaṇṭ·ha (17th c.) onwards carefully preserve the marked squares, but attempt no explanation of them. They have even survived the chequering of the board. In their complete form the boards contain no less than 16 cross-cut squares—a1, a4, a5, a8, d1, d4, d5, d8, e1, e4, e5, e8, h1, h4, h5, h8. Other boards omit some of these markings, but do not substitute other cross-cut squares for them. In the chequered boards the markings on the four central squares are not completed.

THE MARKINGS ON MODERN INDIAN CHESSBOARDS.

A. Hyde, ii. 74; Nīlakaṇṭ·ha; Brit. Mus.; Platt Collection.

B. Weber (v. d. Linde, i. 124, Bombay); Poona; Platt Collection.

C. Chequered board in Platt Collection.

D. Weber (v. d. Linde, i. 124, Tanjore).

E. Delhi.

F and G. Patiala.

This peculiarity is not confined to the Indian chessboard. There are markings on the Burmese, Malay, Chinese, and Corean boards, but these do not correspond to the Indian markings, and in some cases are now associated with special features of play. The older Muslim literature of chess makes no reference to the existence of marked squares, but Mr. Falkener possessed a modern Turkish chess cloth in which the squares a4, a5, d1, d8, e1, e8, h4, h5 are marked in one way and d4, d5, e4, e5 in another and more elaborate way.⁴⁰

The explanation of these cross-cut squares is, I believe, to be found in the fact that the Indian chessboard is simply the old ashṭāpada board, and preserves its original features, although their purpose has long been forgotten. The ashṭāpada game was, I believe, very similar to the modern gavalata. If two players played, each entered his men at opposite sides of the board; if four, then at each edge. The track ran round the outer edge, then round the inner blocks of 36 and 16 squares, and finished in the centre of the board. The cross-cut squares were citadels, or squares on which a man was immune from capture. As will be seen in the following chapter, this hypothesis provides a simple explanation for the curious fact that the Ceylon game of this type is now called saturankam, i.e. chaturanga.

The game of chess was invented when some Hindu devised a game of war, and, finding the ashṭāpada board convenient for his purpose, adopted it as his field of battle.⁴¹ The fact that he gave his game a new name, chaturanga, shows that his game had no connexion with the game of whose board he availed himself. The meaning of this name is perfectly plain. It is an adjective, compounded from the two words chatur, four, and anga, member, limb, with the literal meaning having four limbs, four-membered, quadripartite. In this original sense it appears in the Rigvēda (X. xcii. 11), in reference to the four-limbed human body, and in the Satapātha Brahmaṇa (XII. iii. 2. 2). It also occurs repeatedly in the Mahābhārata (which existed in its present form by 500 A.D.), in Rāmāyaṇa (which goes back in its oldest form to the 5th c. B.C.), in Kāmandaki’s Nītisāra (dating from the beginning of the Christian era), and in the Atharva Veda-Parisiṣṭas (which are not earlier than 250 A.D.), either in agreement with the word bala, army, or used absolutely as a feminine or neuter substantive, in the sense of army composed of four members, and army generally. It is clear that the word chaturanga became the regular epic name for the army at an early date in Sanskrit. Weber states that the use of the word, as also of the variant chaturañgin, is not only common in Sanskrit, but also in Pali.

What was meant by the four members of the Indian army is perfectly plain from the repeated connexion of the word chaturanga with chariots, elephants, cavalry, and infantry. In Rāmāyana (I. lxxiv. 4), in Mahābhārata (III. 1504. 4), and in Amarakoṣa (III. 8. 21), the army is expressly called hasty-ashwa-rat·ha-padātam, the total or aggregate of elephants, horses, chariots, and foot-soldiers. Macdonell (op. cit., 118) notes that this was the regular composition of the complete Indian army at least as early as the 4th c. B.C., for the Greek accounts of the invasion of N.W. India by Alexander, in 326 B.C., state that the army of Pauras consisted of 30,000 infantry, 4,000 cavalry, 200 elephants, and 300 chariots. The Greek historian Megasthenes, who spent some time at the court of Pāṭaliputra (Patna) about 300 B.C., when speaking of the military administration of the Indian state, says that there were six departments responsible for the management of the elephants, cavalry, chariots, infantry, baggage, and boats.⁴² The Code of Mann (vii. 185) also speaks of an army of six parts, to which the scholiast Kullūka Bhaṭṭa (16th–17th c.) adds that the six parts are hasty-ashwa-rat·ha-padāti-senapāti-karmakara, or elephants, horses, chariots, foot-soldiers, general, and camp-followers, i.e. the regular army with its commander and that motley following that always attends an Indian army on its march, and yet adds no fighting-strength to it on the day of battle.⁴³ The Nītisāra of Kāmandaki, ‘a work of policy dating probably from the early centuries of our era’ (Macdonell, JRAS., 118), contains an important and instructive chapter (ch. xix) of 62 slokas, which specially treats of the chaturangabala, or army. The chapter states that the army is composed of elephants, chariots, horse, and infantry; it discusses the ground most suitable for the evolutions of each of these members; it estimates a horseman as equal to three foot-soldiers, and the elephant and chariot as each equal to five horsemen. It suggests several arrangements as suitable for use in war, e.g., infantry, horse, chariots, elephants; elephants, horse, chariots, infantry; the horse in the centre, the chariots next, and the elephants on the wings.⁴⁴

We are, therefore, entitled to conclude that the fourfold division of the Indian army into chariots, cavalry, elephants, and infantry, was a fact well recognized already before the commencement of our era.⁴⁵

The same four elements—chariots, horse, elephants, foot-soldiers—appear as four out of the six different types of force in the board-game chaturanga. The remaining types prefigure individuals, not types of military force. The presence of the King needs no justification. The addition of the Minister or Vizier is in complete agreement with Oriental custom, and the Code of Manu (vii. 65) lays stress upon the dependence of the army on him. The self-consistency of the nomenclature and the exactness with which it reproduces the composition of the Indian army afford the strongest grounds for regarding chess as a conscious and deliberate attempt to represent Indian warfare in a game. That chess is a war-game is a commonplace of Indian, Muslim, and Chinese writers.

But the parallelism does not end with the name of the game and the chessmen. It extends to the termination of the play. The immediate object of warfare is the overthrow of the enemy, and in early times this object was secured with equal certainty either by the capture or death of the opposing monarch, or by the annihilation of his army. These are exactly reproduced by the two methods of winning in early chess—the checkmate and the baring of the opponent’s King.

It would be unreasonable to assume that the attempt to carry out the idea of arranging a war-game between Indian armies upon the ashṭāpada was immediately successful in producing the game as it appears in the oldest records, or even a workable game. But the comparative evidence of the Indian and non-Indian forms of chess shows that the period of experiment was practically past before the game had spread from its earliest centre, and that the moves, method of play, and rules were broadly settled as we know them in the oldest records. Still, one or two of the points of difficulty in the development of the game must be briefly considered.

1. 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 Captain Hiram Cox propounded a new view in his paper On the Burmha Game of Chess (Asiatic Researches, London, 1801, vii. 486–511) by claiming that this four-handed game was the rudimental game of chess, and that the two-handed game was a modification of it. In the hands of Prof. Duncan Forbes (B. 1798, D. 1868)⁴⁹ this opinion was further developed into a complete theory of the development of chess. Briefly stated, the Cox-Forbes theory is this: A primitive four-handed dice-chess was practised in India about 5,000 years ago. As a result of the action of certain rules, or from the difficulty of always securing a full quota of players, the game gradually became a two-handed game. At a later time the civil and religious ordinances against the use of dice led to the abandonment of the dice-character of the game; and finally, by a rearrangement of the pieces, the game of chess as known to the Persians and Muslims came into existence.

In its inception this theory depended solely upon the supposed priority of the evidence for the existence of the four-handed game, and when Weber showed the unsatisfactory nature of the evidence in support of the statement that the Indian text was derived from a Purāṇa, scholars abandoned the theory altogether. In any case the 5,000 years of Forbes would have to be reduced greatly in view of the fact that modern scholarship does not place the Purāṇa earlier than 500–550 B.C.

We possess three texts of the passage in question,⁵⁰ which, however, all appear to go back to the same source, the Tithyāditattvam (Tithitattva) of Raghunandana, a writer of the late 15th or early 16th century. All are written in the Bengali dialect of Sanskrit in which the remainder of this legal work is composed. Weber claimed that there was nothing to show that the account is not an integral part of Raghunandana’s own book. On the other hand, as will be evident from an examination of the translation which I give in Chapter III, the text of the passage is defective towards the close, and the verses appear to be disarranged. This looks as if Raghunandana had used an earlier source, though since the three existing texts all show the same lacuna and preserve the same order, we are probably right in regarding the Tithitattva as the immediate source of our knowledge of the passage. For the view that the ultimate source is a Purāṇa, we have only the bare word of the Brahman Rādhakant.

When Weber wrote his papers, the Bhavishya Purāṇa was not accessible to European scholars. Several MSS. are now known to exist in India, and the work has been printed at Bombay (2 vols., 1897), but this edition is of no value for purposes of exact scholarship, as the editors have made extensive additions on their own responsibility. More useful are two MSS. now in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, of which Aufrecht has given good analyses in his Catalogue of the Sanskrit MSS. in that library. He makes no mention of any chess passage, and there is no connexion in which it might conceivably occur. Weber had already stated that later works based upon the Bhavishya Purāṇa, as the Bhavishyottara Purāṇa, contain no chess passage. And the silence of all other Sanskrit works before 600 A.D. makes Rādhakant’s assertion improbable in the highest degree.

Another theory of the ancestry of chess has been put forward by Mr. Culin in his Chess and Playing Cards (Washington, 1898). He sees in our present games the survivals of magical processes adopted in order to classify according to the four directions objects and events which did not of themselves reveal their proper classification. Dice or some similar agent represent one of the implements of magic employed for the purpose. According to his theory, chess is a game derived from a game of the race type, and the steps of the ascent are (1) two-handed chess; (2) four-handed dice chess (chaturājī); (3) Pachīsī, a four-handed race-game; (4) a two-handed race-game. It is therefore a development of the Cox-Forbes theory, which aims at carrying the pedigree still farther back. Culin’s argument is thus stated (op. cit., 858):

The relation of the game of Chaturanga (i.e. the four-handed dice-chess) to the game of Pachisi is very evident. The board is the square of the arm of the Pachisi cross, and even the castles of the latter appear to be perpetuated in the camps, similarly marked with diagonals on the Chinese chessboard. The arrangement of the men at the corners of the board survives in the Burmese game of chess. The four-sided die is similar to that used in Chausar (i.e. Chaupur). The pieces or men are of the same colours as in Pachisi, and consist of the four sets of men or pawns of the Pachisi game, with the addition of the four distinctive chess pieces, the origin and significance of which remain to be accounted for. By analogy, it may be assumed that the board, if not indeed all boards upon which games are played, stands for the world and its four quarters (or the year and its four seasons), and that the game was itself divinatory.

After stating that students of the history of chess do not now generally accept the Cox-Forbes theory, Mr. Culin continues:

Apart from this discussion, the relation of chess to an earlier dice-game, such as Pachisi, appears to be evident. The comparative study of games leads to the belief that practically all games as Chess, played upon boards, were preceded by games in which the pieces were animated by dice, cowries or knuckle-bones, or by staves, as in the Korean Nyout, the Egyptian Tab, and many aboriginal American games.

All students of the history of games owe very much to Mr. Culin for his careful investigations into the nature, implements, and rules of existing games. His suggestion that race-games may have originated in magical processes deserves consideration,⁵¹ and there is much to be said for his view that dice-games preceded games of pure combination. But neither hypothesis has as yet been established as fact, and the further step in his argument which deals with the connexion of the war-game chess and the race-game pachīsī is a very weak one. It has yet to be established that pachīsī or chaupur is older than chess.⁵² Mr. Culin’s argument depends too much upon resemblances which are only superficial, or can be explained equally satisfactorily in other ways. It shows signs of insufficient acquaintance with the known facts of chess history.

The theory that chess is a development of an earlier race-game involves the hypothesis that some reformer changed the whole nomenclature in order to make it self-consistent as a war-game, and secured the agreement of all his contemporaries. I find this hypothesis incredible.