Chess through the passage of time....

A.C. de Silva

CHESS: Perhaps the most universally popular of all games, chess has a recorded history of over 1,500 years, but it is of course very much older, at least in its ancient forms. It is played in every country in the world, its idioms have passed into everyday language, its principles and possibilities have been studied intensively for some of four centuries (over 3,500 books on the game are known, far more than any other), and in spite of countless other distractions and recreations, it remains the most intricate and interesting intellectual game ever invented by the wit of man.

Yet this is not surprising, for no game that was not out of the ordinary both in the skills it can exercise and the satisfactions it offers would have survived so long. At once simple and complex, the ideal recreation for the player of eight or eighty, chess can afford completely unlimited mental effort.

The beautiful subtlety of the many various combinations by which the checkmate is achieved, and the total dependence of the game upon each player's skill make chess unique, though chequer - board games of one kind or he other date back at least 6,000 years to the era of Ancient Egypt.

According to a tradition, chess originated in India as a pastime for strong, quarrelsome man with the intention of diverting their thoughts and energies from actual warfare, by setting them problems of warfare in miniature.

Certainly chess owes a great deal of its special appeal to its basic aspect of a military battle, with opposing forces ranged against each other, and the players in command of their armies.

Chess has always been essentially a "war-game", with victory invariably going to the player, or commander, with the greater strategical imagination and foresight.

It is as if man has always had the basic desire for struggle and conflict, which this game harmlessly channels off into amassment and mental stimulation.

Fair conflict

And it is a fair conflict. The board or battlefield, is equally divided into two, and the opposing forces are equal and identical save for their distinguishing colour.

The only difference lies in the skill and reasoning abilities of the players, and frequently the game develops so that these run closely parallel, with only the smallest advantage being gained by the victor. All this has invariably appealed to the human instinct for battle and for fair play.

The word chess, which has links in many languages, is thought to have been derived from shah, the Persian word for "king" and still in use, with the term checkmate from shah mat, "the king is dead". The names given to the pieces are also linked in many languages through to their original meanings in Persian and Sanskrit: King, Counsellor (Queen), two Elephants (Bishops), two Horses (Knights), two Chariots (Rooks), and eight Foot-soldiers (pawns). This basic array is exceedingly old indeed, and although in various countries substitutes for some pieces have been made (Boats for Chariots in India, Camels for Elephants in Egypt, etc.), the main lay-out for the game has remained the same ever since its origin.

This is interesting in our search for the true history of chess. The game's Oriental origin - has never been in doubt; only the country of its invention, and the probable date. All the available evidence now point to India, with a date perhaps as long ago as the second century A.D., up to the seventh century. We do know that the Indian Army of those far-off eras was indeed divided into four separate, but cohesive sections of chariots, cavalry, elephants and infantry, led into battle as often as not by their monarch.

When Alexander the Great invaded N.W. India in 326 B.C., contemporary Greek accounts tell us, he found arrayed against him an army of 30,000 infantry, 4,000 cavalry, 200 elephants and 300 chariots.

So, it is clear that chess-board warfare was a direct borrowing from real life, down to the destruction of the opponents forces and the isolation and capture of his king which gives us the answer of the termination of the chess game. The parallels with life are in fact closer in chess than in any other game.

Earliest works - seventh century

The earliest known works which makes mention of games of chess date from the seventh century, with special references to N.W. India, Persia and Islam.

The game undoubtedly spread from India into Persia first, and thence further westward into the Eastern Roman Empire. When the Moslems conquered Persia, the game spread throughout the Islamic world and became enormously popular. The Moslems in fact became the first great pioneers of the game, carrying it as far West as Spain, and eastwards to Central India.

Christian Europe learnt chess from the Moors in Spain as early as 1,000 A.D., while a parallel movement eastwards, following the route Buddhism had travelled, took the game from India to Malaya, kashmir, Tibet, Korea, China and Japan. By the early middle ages chess was an established game in all the Mediterranean countries, and it soon spread northwards over France, and Germany to Britain, Scandinavia and even Iceland.

Eastern players had reached a high level of skill, and although chess was an established pastime in all civilised lands by the 13h century, its greatest advance was made in Italy in the 15th and 16th centuries.... About 1475, the modern game, as played to-day, was developed, differing chiefly from the old in the greater freedom of action it gave to the Queen and Bishops. By 1510, the old Indian game was obsolete, and chess was set for immortality.