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Chess not a classical game.—The name zatrikion.—First references in Arabic works.—References in late Greek literature.—Ecclesiastical censures.—Chess in the Turkish rule, and in modern Greece.

It was a common belief among mediaeval writers that chess was a game, if not of Trojan, at least of Greek invention, and that various references to the practice of games among the Greeks and Romans in classical times related to chess. In the light of the facts of the history of the spread of chess which have been narrated in the preceding chapters, this view can no longer be seriously maintained. Quite apart from the fatal anachronisms involved in the claim, it can be shown to be improbable, if not impossible, on a priori grounds, from an examination of the character of the references and allusions to board-games in classical Greek. When these references are carefully examined, it is found that they reveal not the slightest trace of any allusion to any characteristic at all similar to the essential characteristics of chess—pregnant in possibilities of allusion, simile, or metaphor as these have proved in every chess-playing country. It is inconceivable that such a silence could have existed throughout Greek and Latin literature had any of the classical games shown those peculiarities of piece, form, and move which are the special property of chess. Nor, again, would it have been necessary, as v. d. Lasa has acutely pointed out, for the Byzantines to have introduced a new name for chess if the petteia, or the game of the sacred way, or any other of the classical games had been chess. Slight and conjectural as is our knowledge of these games, whether requiring the agency of dice or not, this much at least is certain: none of them was chess and none of them was like chess.¹ Games of skill some of them certainly were, but all lacked the vitality that chess has always shown, and it is clear that they had dropped into desuetude by the sixth century of our era, for long before that date commentators were revealing, by their curious and inconclusive attempts to explain the classical allusions to the petteia and other games, their complete ignorance on the subject.

With the games of the Byzantine period (A.D. 365–1450) we are not much better off for information. Our knowledge is small and goes but little beyond the names of a few of the games that were current. Our want of knowledge may, it is true, be due in part to the uninviting nature of the later Greek literature. The number of scholars who have ventured upon that dreary and unprofitable field is very small, and we are practically indebted for what little we know of the Byzantine games to the first zeal of the scholars of the Renascence; no later writer has added anything of material value to the information first arranged by the four scholars of the 17th c., Jules-César Boulenger, Johannes Meursius, Daniel Souterus, and Andrew Senftleben, the salient facts of which may be seen most conveniently in the pages of Gronovius or the lexicons of Ducange.²

That chess should be found among the games of the later half of the Byzantine period is not surprising. On the contrary, when the political intercourse which subsisted between the Eastern Empire and the later Sāsānian monarchy and the ‘Abbāsid caliphate is remembered, together with the general adoption of Persian customs and luxuries at the court of Constantinople, it would be strange indeed if a knowledge of chess had not penetrated to the Imperial court.

The earliest references to Eastern games in Byzantine Greek are probably those relating to tabla, in later Gk. taula, which was probably identical with the Persian and Arabic nard or nardshīr. Etymologically the word tabla is merely an adaptation of the L. tabula, table, which was already used by Juvenal in the sense of gaming-table, and at a later time appears to have become the ordinary name for the ludus duodecim scriptorum of the classical period.³ If this game was ever played in the Eastern Empire, it was soon supplanted by the Persian nard, a game of the same class, and the name of tabla was transferred to this latter game.⁴ It is this game tabla which is mentioned in some epigrams of Agathias the scholastic of Myrine in Asia, who flourished A.D. 527–67; the longest of these (Anthol Pal., IX. 482) describes an extraordinary position in the game which had occurred to the Emperor Zeno (A.D. 475–81). The position has been recovered independently by M. Becq de Fouquières and by Prof. Jackson of Cambridge, and their reconstruction shows that the game was identical with the Persian nard. Hyde (ii. 255–6) quotes notes on the Gk. tabla from Cedrenus, Suidas, and Isaac Porphyrogenitus which contain the germ of the astronomical explanation of nard which we have met already in the Chatrang-nāmak. It is noteworthy that this Greek name for nard has replaced the older name in Syria, Turkey, and generally along the S. coast of Asia, where the game on the backgammon board is now commonly called tawūla.

Chess makes its appearance in Byzantine Greek under the name ζατρíκιον, zatrikion. This word is unknown in classical Greek, and is incapable of explanation from native roots. As Hyde and Forbes have shown, the word is ‘simply a barbaric or foreign word with a Hellenic termination’. It can be shown that this form answers exactly to the Middle Persian chatrang, when allowance is made for the different range of the Greek and Persian alphabets. ‘The Greek alphabet’, writes Forbes, ‘had no letter or combination of letters capable of expressing the sound of the Persian ch-, and as the nearest approximation they employed for that purpose the letter ζ, z.’ For similar reasons they had to transliterate the Semitic sh-, by σ, s, or by σι, si-. The nearest Greek approximation to Per. chatrang would be ζατρáγκ or ζατρέγκ, and this, on Greek analogies, gave ζατρíκιον, the form actually found. (An n sound in such a position was often transposed or altogether suppressed.) Shaṭranj, the Arabic and modern Persian name of chess, would have given satrantz. Ducas has σαντράτζ (with n transposed).

The form zatrikion accordingly becomes of importance in connexion with the date of the introduction of chess into the Byzantine Empire. The presumption is that the knowledge of the game was obtained at a time when the Persians still used the older form chatrang, and not from the later Persians, the Arabs, or the Syrians, all of whom had substituted the form shaṭranj for it. Forbes (190–5) assumed that this required the introduction to be anterior to the Muhammadan conquest of Persia, i.e. before the middle of the 7th cent., and fixed upon the exile of Khusraw (II) Parwīz as the date which with ‘strong possibility’ saw the introduction of chess into Eastern Europe. That would place it in the first quarter of the 7th century.

Forbes, however, assumed that the influx of Arabic words and forms into Persian was an immediate result of the Islamic conquest, A.D. 638–51. Such was certainly not the case. Chatrang may have easily remained in use for another 200 years, the earliest evidence for its disappearance belongs to the 3rd century of Islam (A.D. 830–930). All we can assert is that the philological evidence points to the introduction of the word zatrikion not later than the 9th century A.D., while it does not at all necessarily follow that the practice of the game began so early: the knowledge of the existence of a thing may precede its use by a considerable interval of time. It is quite possible that the word zatrikion came into Greek first in accounts of travel in Persia, or in descriptions of Persian life.

Sound as these conclusions undoubtedly are, they cannot be substantiated by contemporary Greek records, and not one of the earlier uses of the word zatrikion can be dated with any approach to exactness. The earliest evidence exists only in Arabic works, and establishes a knowledge of chess and its technicalities at Byzantium by the year A.D. 800. In the K. akhbār ar-rusul wal-mulūk of the historian at-Tabarī (B. 224/838, D. 310/923)⁵ we read:

It is related that when Niqfūr (Gk. Nicephorus) was king, and the Byzantines had assembled in allegiance to him, he wrote to ar-Rashīd: ‘From Niqfūr, King of Byzantium, to Hārūn, King of the Arabs, now the Empress to whom I have succeeded estimated you as of the rank of the Rook, and estimated herself as of the rank of the Pawn, and paid a tribute to you, which you rightly should have paid to her. But this was because of a woman’s weakness and folly. When therefore you have read my letter, return the tribute that has been previously paid to you, and come yourself with what you have to repay. If not, the sword is between us and you.’ It is reported that when ar-Rashīd read this letter, his wrath was kindled … and he called for an ink-pot and wrote on the back of the letter: ‘In the name of God! the compassionate and merciful! From Hārūn, Commander of the Faithful, to Niqfūr the dog of Byzantium. I have read your letter, son of an infidel woman. The answer is what you will see, not what you will hear.’ And he struck his camp that day, and marched until he encamped at the gates of Hiraqla (Gk. Heracleia, 65 m. N.W. of Tarsus).

The ruthless conduct of this invasion soon compelled Nicephorus to consent to continue the tribute that his predecessor Irene had paid. The incident is told under the year A.H. 187 (= A.D. 802), in which Nicephorus became Emperor.

The rather later geographer and historian al-Maṣ‘ūdī (D. 345–6/956) refers to the Greeks in connexion with chess in two places in his Murūj adh-dhahab. At the close of his account of the invention of chess in India in the reign of the mythical King Balhait, he says:

The Greeks (al-Yūnānīyan) and Byzantines (ar-Rūm) and other peoples have special theories and methods about this game, as we may see in the works of chessplayers from the most ancient down to al-‘Adlī and aṣ-Ṣūlī

And much to the same effect at the conclusion of a digression on the modifications of chess (among which is ‘the round board attributed to the Byzantines’) he remarks:

The Indians and others, the Greeks, Persians, and Byzantines who play at chess have given accounts of the manner and fashion of the pieces in chess, its arrangements, its beginnings, the various motives underlying it, its peculiarities, and the classifications of the qawā’īm and mufridāt, and the classes of the noteworthy manṣūbāt.⁶

Greek literature and tradition are alike silent as to the existence or otherwise of these works and theories, and when we turn to the Arabic chess MSS. which are based upon the works of al-‘Adlī and aṣ-Ṣūlī, we find the only references to Greek chess relate to the philosophers Hippocrates and Galen, and to Aristotle. Hippocrates and Galen apparently found in chess a potent antidote to diarrhoea and erysipelas, and prescribed it with success, while Aristotle figures among the many hypothetical inventors of chess. Another story tells how Galen once met a friend whom he had not seen for some time, and learnt that he had been into the country to see a farm which he had purchased with the result of his gains at chess, whereupon the physician exclaimed with what sounds like a strong flavour of irony, ‘What a fine thing chess is, and how profitable!’ Pure fiction, the whole of it, of course.

Most of the MSS. agree with al-Maṣ‘ūdī in giving some account of round chess under the title of ash-shaṭranj ar-rūmīya, or Byzantine chess, while they lay stress upon the fact that it is only a modification of the ordinary or Indian chess,⁷ It is difficult to understand its designation unless there were some historic justification for it.

It would appear that the earliest use of the word zatrikion occurs in works treating of the interpretation of dreams. This is a Science which was apparently first exploited by the Greeks,⁸ but soon passed to Persian and Arabic writers. The Muhammadan tābι‘Muḥammad b. Sīrīn (B. 33/653–4, D. 110/729), of Persian parentage, was skilled in this lore, and became the first of a long line of Oriental writers on the subject. One of these Arabic works was retranslated into Greek, and thence into Latin by Leo Tuscus in 1160. A later Latin version is due to the German traveller John Leunclavius (B. 1533, D. 1593), who ascribed the Greek work to Apomazares, in whose name we may recognize the Arabic oneirocritic Abū Ma‘shar (D. 272/885). Nicholas Rigault (B. 1577, D. 1654) printed the Greek text in 1603 with Leunclavius’s translation, and ascribed it to Achmet fil. Seirem. This is generally understood to mean Muḥammad b. Sīrīn, though on the strength of the Greek version Achmes appears in some lists of Greek authors as flourishing, now as early as A.D. 750, now as late as A.D. 950! Since the work contains the interpretation of a dream that happened to al-Ma’mūn, who reigned A.D. 813–833, it cannot be b. Sīrīn’s work, and Bland has shown⁹ that there are grounds for believing that it is of Christian authorship. The Greek can hardly be earlier than the 10th century. Chapter 241 treats ‘Of zatrikion. From the Persians and Egyptians’.¹⁰

If any one dreams that he plays chess (zatrikizo, vb.) with a man he knows, they will quarrel over money affairs, &c.

If a king or grandee or general dreams that he plays chess, he will think of the place for joining battle with the enemy, &c.

If he dreams that he takes many pieces in the game,¹¹ he will take many of the enemy, &c.

If a king or grandee or general dreams that he has lost or broken or been deprived of his zatrikion, he will lose his army, &c.

Besides this passage, Ducange quotes two other references in MSS. accessible in his time, one attributed—but certainly wrongly—to Astram-psychus, in which twice occur the words ‘chess and tables’,¹² the other from an anonymous MS. on Persia, De arte Persica, ‘slaves and games of bolgon and chess and love of women.’ Neither of these passages can be dated, and the present location of the MSS. is unknown to me. The only point of importance about either appears to be that chess is associated with other notorious features of Persian luxury. It has probably never been in worse company.

A fourth instance occurs in a scholiast’s commentary on Theocritus, Idýll, vi. 18,¹³ where there is an allusion to the Greek game of petteia—‘he moves away the pebble from the line’ This, the commentator explains, ‘is a figurative expression borrowed from the phraseology of those who play at the game commonly called zatrikion’—an absurdity that provoked Dr. Hyde’s scornful comment, ‘quantum hallucinatus est Scholiastes!’ Here again we have no clue to the date of the writer.¹⁴

It is not until we come to the 12th century that we have an instance of zatrikion to which we can assign a definite date. In the twelfth book of the Alexiad of the Princess Anna Comnena (D. 1148), a laudatory biography of her father, the Emperor Alexis Comnena (D. 1118), we read in an account of the Emperor’s recreations:

He had certain familiar friends with whom he played chess, a game that was discovered in the luxury of the Assyrians, and was brought to us.¹⁵

Here again chess is associated with Oriental luxury. Assyria, of course, was no longer a kingdom in Anna Comnena’s day, and her use of the name probably only refers to the traditional splendour of the earlier Oriental empires.

The Emperor Alexis’s fondness for chess may have been the cause of raising a powerful and bitter hostility to the game. It is at least singular to find that the first ecclesiastical denunciation of chess on the part of the Eastern Church was voiced by John Zonares, who, after filling the post of commander of the Emperor’s bodyguard, retired as a monk to the Monastery of Mt. Athos and died there in 1118. It was during his retirement that he wrote, his commentary on the canons of the Eastern Church.

That the early mediaeval Church viewed the use of dice with strong disfavour is evident from the attempts that were made to suppress it by legislation. The early list of rules known as the Apostolic Canons¹⁶ requires both clergy and laity to give up the use of dice.

42. A Bishop, Priest, or Deacon addicted to dice (Gk. κύßoι, Lat. alea) shall either give them up, or be deposed.

43. A Sub-deacon, Reader, or Singer doing the same shall either give them up, or be deposed. So also the laity.

These rules were adopted by the Trullan Synod (Third Council of Constantinople) in 680,¹⁷ and have since then formed part of the Nomo-canon of the Eastern Church. It was natural that, in the course of time, the attempt should be made to explain the prohibition of kuboi or alea by defining exactly the games which were to be included under these terms. This attempt was not confined to the Eastern Church: the later Latin use of alea as the name of a game helped to confuse the lawyers of the Western Church, and we shall find Cardinal Damiani arguing in a letter of 1061 that the prohibition of alea extended to chess. The Western Church took this view for a considerable time.

Zonares makes the following note on the 42nd rule of the Apostolic Canons:

Because there are some of the Bishops and clergy who depart from virtue and play chess (zatrikion) or dice or drink to excess, the Rule commands that such shall cease to do so or be excluded; and if a Bishop or elder or deacon or subdeacon or reader or singer do not cease so to do, he shall be cast out: and if laymen be given to chess-playing and drunkenness they shall be excluded….

We shall see later that this extension of the term kuboi was for long adopted by the Russian Church, and we may probably account in part for the paucity of references to chess in the Eastern Empire as being due to the intolerance of the Church.

The beginning of the 13th century saw the Latin or Western Emperors established in Constantinople, who must have known chess in Western Europe before they laid hands on the Empire of the East. The result of this may be detected in the latest reference to Zatrikion in Byzantine Greek. The history of Ducas, written about 1400, nearly at the close of the Eastern Empire, contains an account of the incidents which led to the naming of Tīmūr’s son Shāhrukh from a technicality of chess. In this passage Ducas adds the information that the Persians call zatrikion santratz (σαντρàτζ), and the Latins call it scacum (σκáκον). Later on he uses σκáκον for a chessman and σκáκον πατγνíον for the game of chess, which are evidently adaptations from the Latin scacus, a chessman, and scacorum ludus, the game of chess. Shāhrukh is transliterated Siachrouch (σιαχρούχ), with the information that the Latins call it σκáκω ζóγκω, a curious misrendering of scac-roc. It seems clear to me that Ducas knew more of the Latin than of the Greek chess.

There is one branch of the later Greek literature, fairly circumscribed in extent, which might possibly give us some reference to chess earlier in date than any I have cited. The mathematical problem known as ‘the doubling of the squares of the chessboard’ may have been known to the later Greek mathematicians, as we find it included in the oldest Western mediaeval MSS. on mathematics. The Greek MSS. have not so far been examined for this purpose.

With the fall of Constantinople (1453) and the last outposts of independent Christianity in Asia Minor (1461), the last vestiges of the Byzantine Empire passed away, and the Greeks became a subject race and largely adopted the language of their conquerors. The game of zatrikion, whatever special points and rules it may have possessed, must be held to have become obsolete, and its very name soon passed into oblivion. Whatever chess was played would assuredly be the Turkish chess of the ruling race. A curious confirmation of this at the very end of the Turkish dominion over Greece itself is to be found in the name, ‘the Greek Defence’, which Allgaier, following the usage of Viennese chess-players, gave to the Fianchetto defences, which are still to-day a striking characteristic of the native Turkish chess. This result was probably assisted both by the small degree of popularity that chess would seem to have secured among the Greeks,¹⁸ and by the ecclesiastical opposition to its practice.

With zatrikion forgotten, it is only natural to discover the use of a new name more closely representing the Turkish shaṭranj. The poverty of the Greek alphabet necessitated changes in the form of this word when the attempt was made to reproduce it in a Greek dress. The Semitic sh was variously replaced by s or si, the j by tz or z. Shaṭranj accordingly gives rise regularly to santratz, as in Ducas, or santraz, the form which Hyde gives as in use in his time.¹⁹ Modern dictionaries give santratsi as in vulgar use, and add still another form, Satrengion (Σατρένγιον, σατρέγγιον), which is a modern adaptation from the Egyptian dialect of Arabic.²⁰

Turkish chess has met the same fate in Greece that befell zatrikion, and the modern Greek has turned to the West for his knowledge of chess, and the name of the game, skaki (σκáκι), and the translations from the French which do duty for the names of the chessmen, betray at once the origin of the modern Greek chess of our day. The attempt to revive the word zatrikion, as seen in the title of the only Greek work on the game, the Encheiridion Zatrikion of Leo Olivier (Athens, 1894), is due to the workings of national aspirations.