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Literary references.—The Kārnāmak.—The Chatrang-nāmak.—Probable introduction under Nūshīrwān.—The story in the Shāhnāma.

When Ardawān saw Artakhshīr, he rejoiced and esteemed him highly. He commanded him to accompany his sons and knights to the chase and to the games of ball. Artakhshīr did this, and by God’s help he became doughtier and more skilled than them all in ball-play, in horsemanship, in chess (chatrang), in hunting, and in other accomplishments.

So runs the earliest reference to chess in all literature, occurring in the Kārnāmak-i-Artakhshatr-i-Pāpakān, a middle-Persian or Pahlawī romance which is based upon the career of Ardashīr (Artaxerxes), the son of Pāpak, the founder of the Sāsānian dynasty, who ruled over Persia A.D. 226–41. This interesting romance is largely mixed with legend and fable, and the mention of chess establishes nothing more than the fact that chess was known and esteemed at the time of its compilation. This date, however, can only be fixed approximately. Nöldeke¹ states frankly that there is no linguistic evidence available to fix the real date of any particular work. In the case of the Kārnāmak the external evidence is also very slender. There is a doubtful indirect reference to it in a 7th cent, work, another in a work of 815 or 816, while the first direct mention occurs in al-Maṣ‘ūdī in 943–4. On the other hand, the references of the Greek historian Agathias (A.D. 580) to written Persian chronicles of their kings in his accounts of Sāsān, Pāpak, and Ardashīr show that works of the class of the Kārnāmak were already in existence in his time. Nöldeke’s final conclusion is that there is much in favour of ascribing it to the last period of the Sāsānian rule—possibly to the reign of Khusraw II Parwīz (A.D. 590–628). With this verdict competent authorities have generally agreed; Prof. Browne, in his luminous Literary History of Persia, London, 1902, p. 122, sums up the general opinion thus—‘The Kārnāmak was probably composed about 600 A.D.,’ and Jacobi, calling attention to the form chatrang, accepts the same date when he says that this reference is at most 50 years older than the earliest mention of chess in Indian literature. But even if it prove to be later than the references in Subandhu and Bāṇa, it cannot be denied that the present mention would still imply the greater antiquity of the game. For not only does it imply that the game was fairly generally known in Persia, but also that popular opinion had seized on chess as a characteristically national game in which it was fitting that the national hero should be skilled. Such opinions do not grow in a day, and a considerable period of time must be postulated for their growth in an age of slow and imperfect methods of communication. Even in mediaeval Europe it took chess more than a century to achieve a like result. And beyond this there is the further interval required for the passage from India to Persia, and the previous life in India itself.

The Kārnāmak reference has also a philological value. Scholars have long perceived that the Arabic shaṭranj and the Greek ζατρíκιοv both point to an older Persian chatrang as an intermediate step from the Sanskrit chaturanga. With the discovery of the present passage philological theory has been replaced by historic fact.

Another non-religious Pahlawī romance—considered to be of later date than the Kārnāmak, though still older than the Shāhnāma, and ascribed by Nöldeke with some hesitation to the first centuries of Islam (say 650–850)²—treats much more fully of chess under the same form chatrang. This is the Chatrang-nāmak, also called the Mātīgān-i-chatrang, a short work which treats of the introduction of chess into Persia, and of the invention of nard, in the time of Khusraw I Anūshak-rūbāno (Nūshīrwān, 531–578).

Although it would have been very easy to over-estimate the importance of this little work, this has not happened. It obviously stands in some sort of relationship to the poetical version of the same story in the Shāhnāma, and the extreme caution of Nöldeke’s references³ has led v. d. Lasa and other chess historians to put it aside as of no independent value. To Persian scholars its sole interest has consisted in its relationship to the Shāhnāma, and in the problems to which this question gives rise. But quite apart from any questions as to the literary or historical value of the Chatrang-nāmak, the romance has a certain importance as being the first work that we possess which throws any light upon the nature or nomenclature of chess. Nowhere else can we ascertain the names of the chessmen in Persia before it was swallowed up in Islam, nowhere else can we learn for certain that the Persian chatrang was a two-handed game of skill.

Nöldeke’s conjectural date receives some confirmation from the use of the word chatrang rather than shaṭranj. In modern Persian the latter Arabic form has completely displaced the older chatrang: so early as Firdawsī (A.D. 1000) this had taken place. Indeed the change must have been still earlier and have been complete within 200 years of the conquest, for not only do we find no trace of the remembrance of the older form in any of the Arabic grammarians, themselves largely of Persian blood, but we should hardly have found so careful a historian as al-Ya‘qūbī (end 9th cent.) explaining shaṭranj as derived from the Persian ‘hashat-ranj’ (eight-sided) if any recollection of its real origin had survived to his day.

The Chatrang-nāmak is one of the works contained in the oldest MS. of Pahlawī works (J2) of 1323.⁴ The following version is based in the main on Salemann’s German translation.