ON THE ORIGINS OF CHESS:

"In Search of Lost Time"

By Sergio Ernesto Negri

“…and whereas God is worthy of all blessed

seriousness, Man (as we said before) is contrived as a
kind of ´plaything´ of God, and this is really the best
thing about him; and thus I say that every man and
woman ought to pass his life in accordance with this
character, playing the noblest forms of play” (Plato,
Laws, Book VIII, 803)1

“We are just puppets of fate”, the lovely

Theresa told me in the twilight of her existence.

INTRODUCTION
We want to know all: what is beyond the infinitely microscopic or what
can hide on the stellar depths; if there is a divine plan and the mystery of
life; the reasons for the history and the prospects of evolution; if the
human being is good and even the possibility that there are
multidimensional universes; everything enters into the radar of a
mankind always interested in the search of knowledge. Therefore, it is
logical to ask ourselves in what moment, in what geographic space, under
what authorship, in the context of what culture, the chess, the most
influential, metaphoric and enigmatic of the pastimes created sometime
did its appearance on Earth.

In the field of determining the origin of chess, paraphrasing Marcel

Proust, and as we title the present work, we are "In search of Lost time", in
the search for the exact initial milestone when, as the Argentine and
universal Jorge Luis said Borges: "… It was in the East this war took fire./
Today the whole earth is its theater”. The poet, in his unsurpassable work,
immediately adds: “Like the game of love, this game goes on forever.”2 The
game of love, in short, that of life; hence the importance in unraveling the

1
Source: Theory of education in Plato´s “Laws”, by R G. Bury, Revue des Études Grecques, Vol. 50, N° 236,
1937, at http://www.persee.fr/doc/reg_0035-2039_1937_num_50_236_2825.
2
Source: https://libraryofbabel.info/Borges/Borges-SelectedPoems.pdf.

1
first source of chess since it is a real Big Bang that embodies a
foundational mystery that is necessary to try to catch.

Much research has been done on this subject in the past. Chess, as a board
game, is symbol, myth and rite, more than enough reasons, for its
connection with such deep values of humanity, to pretend to know its
genesis. Recently, at the same time as new evidence of old hypotheses
was obtained, other possible explanations were proposed that could be
considered even as novelties. This document will try to make a
comprehensive review of all of them, with special attention to the most
relevant theories; and mention will be made of others that have been
practically abandoned or that correspond to speculations not based on
science or history representing myths, legends or literary tales.
As an epilogue, after enumerating what we know, what we suppose and
what we ignore in this subject, considering the state of the art of research
in the matter nowadays, basing on truthful arguments and discarding the
false, will be urged to build a vision holistic (a theory of everything?) to
explain the origin of chess.
The fact is that if one adopts a line in which the prejudices and biased
visions are abandoned, considering only the findings based on the
scientific evidence, it is very probable that a single explanation can be
erected that converges in a common trunk. We believe that it is possible
to reach that goal although, we know, there is a wide space yet to be
traveled.
Maybe we're not that far away. When we will solve this issue it could say
itself, as Proust baptized the last of the volumes of his great novel that we
are in the presence of a "Time regained", a moment in which we will end
up discovering how, when and where the chess appeared. Proverbial play
in which, at least man believes so, the will can impose itself on fate.
WITHOUT CONSENSUS AS REGARDS THE ORIGINS OF CHESS
Numerous theories have been drawn regarding the genesis of chess.
Several of them had only the force of legend or myth; or the beauty of the
literary imagination, which was often associated with poetry.
In the foundational myths, the game generally emerges as a model
representation of battles in which opponents try to resolve supremacy.
Thus it will be for example in the legend that it was invented by the wife

2
of the king of Asuras, Rāvana, with the idea of distracting her husband
with a warlike image, less committed than the real bloody combats, in
times when his kingdom was besieged by the god Rama. In the same
sense, there is another story originating in India indicating that the game
was conceived representing an armed confrontation between the forces
of Talkhand and Gav, seeking at once the consolation of Paritchea, the
queen who was the mother of both, who was very affected not only
because of this struggle between brothers but also because of the death of
one of them.
This specificity in terms of confrontation was highlighted by the Austrian
orientalist Frey Paulinus of San Bartholomew who, in the eighteenth
century, pointed out that in Indian culture "Brahmins teach youth the
science of war through games." On the other hand, in the Chinese tradition,
concordantly, it is said that the game was created following an image of
an important warlike action that faced two kingdoms, preamble of the
constitution of a new empire with the assumption of the dynasty Han in
the era pre-Christian.
Epic stories, which only demand beauty in their utterance, are contrasted
with the rigorous analyzes of scientific nature based on history, from
which one can construct hypotheses that result from the highest possible
degree of verisimilitude. So only these require the strength of evidence
and demonstration. The others will remain in the field of the persuasive
magic.
Some theories, such as those that support themselves an original
Egyptian or Greek source, had momentarily some force, and then lost
explanatory power by what, one might say, they passed from the plane of
historicity to that of myth. On the other hand, the one that puts the accent
in India, although in some cases relied on epics or legends, ended up
decanting as historically very real, remaining with energy from the
moment of its own enunciation, although it has lost its aura of paradigm
exclusive. It is that powerful alternative approaches have emerged that
point to a Chinese origin or even to the possibility that the game would
have been the product of a process of syncretism with multicultural
contributions.
In reviewing the positions of those who hold each of them, it is possible to
notice an attitude that is humanly understandable: the generation of what
we might consider problems of bias. It is often seen that the respective

3
researchers, by explicitly or implicitly (perhaps a priori) ascribing to a
given position, uncritically magnify the factors that are favorable,
ignoring or minimizing the relevance of those others that may be
contradictory or conflicting to their own ideas. In addition, they end up
ignoring alternative explanations that, in many cases, can provide
elements that allow, by integrating the proven evidence of each position,
the construction of a broader and univocal hypothesis.
Throughout this work is our interested specially to try to recreate, with
the greatest possible objectivity, which are the main theses in force about
the origin of chess, pointing out their weaknesses and strengths. Rather
than ascribing to a specific posture, without preconceptions, each of them
will be analyzed taking the elements that are feasible and discarding the
improbable, with the purpose of establishing a shared inventory. We base
on an implicit assumption: the last word on the issue is not yet said, so it
is recognized that there is a vast path to be explored in this quest for
truth.
Perhaps we could imagine that we will never know for sure (unless at
some time it will be enabled travel through time) what was that magical
moment in which the game appeared on Earth. In any case, in the richness
of the diversity of hypotheses raised, we notice an incontrovertible fact:
Chess is an object of study of maximum interest so it is far from being
indifferent to all of us.
INITIAL POINT OF AGREEMENT: AN INDIAN PROTO-CHESS3 ENTERS
BAGHDAD IN THE 6TH CENTURY AD
In the evolution of knowledge, the first undoubted landmark comes with
the entry into Baghdad in the sixth century after Christ of a proto-chess
from an Indian kingdom.4 From that moment it has been determined, with
sufficient precision, what has been the progressive sequence of diffusion

3
Chess as we know it today is an evolutionary product. When we referring to pioneering times, the most
correct thing is to talk about that in each case we are in the presence of a prototype of chess or proto-chess.
Such are the cases of chaturanga or xiang-qi, among others, which will be discussed in detail in the course of
this document.
4
On this point the stories almost absolutely coincide. Except for the doubt raised by the Italians Gianfelice
Ferlito and Alessandro Sanvito who, perhaps because of problems of homonymy, instead of recognizing that
this episode occurred during the reign of Xusraw I (531-579), as it is widely accepted, they give as alternative
that this would have happened during the mandate of his grandson, Xusraw II (591-628). Source: Origins of
Chess - Protochess, 400 B.C. to 400 A.D., Ferlito & Sanvito, in The Pergamon Chess Monthly September 1990
Volume 55 No. 6, at http://history.chess.free.fr/papers/Ferlito-Sanvito%201990.pdf.

4
of the game until its definitive universal consecration after a successive
process of metamorphosis that took it to its present identity.
When the Muslims, a little later, in the second quarter of the seventh
century, conquered the territories of the Sassanid Empire, they took the
game for themselves and, with slight modifications, in particular, making
sure that the design of the pieces might not have images so as not to
contradict the prohibition of the Qur'an, will be mainly (but not the only
ones) in introducing it to Europe, always in the course of that long period
that was the Middle Ages.
It will be in that continent where, after a process of incorporation,
transformation and systematization, it will mutate to its modern and
definitive form; particularly from the contribution of the Valencian School
that introduces the enlarged movements of the bishop and the queen.
This is a Western contribution replacing the exotic vizier, which will give
the special circumstance that a female figure, for the first time, makes its
appearance in the game, revolutionizing it, both in its format and content.
The vector of further transmission of chess, from the moment in which it
was verified its entrance to Baghdad at the hands of an Indian entourage,
can be traced with absolute clarity. The same happens even if we place
ourselves in the other predominant theory, the one that puts like
primordial source to a model originated in China. What happens is that,
under this latter assumption, it is understood that in any case that game
expanded to the east and west, including India, so that its propagation
channel ends up converging with the axis of the sequence known that
goes from this last territory until Persia.
In both cases we are geographically in the course of the silk route in
which no only goods were transported; but also, of course, did people and
with them, elements of travelers' culture, including their main pastimes.
Board games, in that context, were useful as distracting elements and had
a feature that favored their inclusion in the caravans: because of their size
they were easily manipulated.
Established precisely the temporal environment (sixth century AD) and
spatial (the entry from India to Baghdad), it remains to be seen what
happened before with the great game. We access, therefore, to the field of
conjectures; the certainties are left aside; the controversies appear, and
different views coexist. Therefore, we will have to direct the research

5
efforts going back in the chronology, extending the field of analysis to all
the confines, in order to approach the determination of the mythical
foundational moment in which the chess appeared.
PERSIAN ORIGIN OF CHESS: HYPOTHESIS DISCARDED BY ELEMENTS
OF ITS OWN CULTURE
It is quite understandable that theories about a specific paternity of chess
come from direct sources of each culture, beyond the origin of the authors
who eventually support it.5 In this process of determination, we appeal,
fundamentally, to the chronicles contained in stories often epic and, when
possible, to the dating of physical findings from archaeological
excavations.
In the case of Indian primacy it is notable that the most conclusive
chronicles do not correspond to their own literature, but come from
Persian sources. In a rupture of the usual nationalisms, expressions of this
last origin are primordial to recognize that the game was exotic to them.
In saying that the game came from India, the Persians implicitly admit
that they were not their inventors. So the looks in principle should be
directed to the neighboring nation. This circumstance is based on
concordant written accounts that have been admitted by all the historians
in the subject reason why, although for epistemological reasons we do not
dare to consider that we are in the presence of an absolute truth, at least
it approaches sufficiently.6
Thanks to early manuscripts7 in Pahlavi (Middle Persian) language,8 and
other highly influential works of literature in the Middle East9 at the end

5
It will be for instance a Spanish author (Catalan) who will hold with more strength the idea about an
Egyptian origin of the game. English scholars, for their part, will be primarily responsible for the
development of the thesis on an Indian genesis.
6
When one proceeds to consult the work of the various specialists who deal with the origin of chess, it is
usual to note that an issue, even one that seems more evident, may be the subject of an alternative look.
For this reason, we will try, throughout this work, not to speak of truths absolute or unanimous, following
the line of the German epistemologist Karl Popper, for whom all theory can be considered only as
corroborated momentarily, but not reputed of absolute true due that it can always be refuted by the
appearance of a counterexample.
7
Several authors addressed the issue, including the Iranian Touraj Daryaee. It is considered like the oldest
Persian manuscript where the game is spoken, to Vizārišn ī catrang ud nihišn ī nēvardašēr (The explanation
of chess and the invention of backgammon). Its date has not been precisely determined, although it would
not be later than S. IX (see text at http://www.rahamasha.net/uploads/2/3/2/8/2328777/vc.pdf). Also of the
Persian culture, and always with some indeterminacy as to the moment of their respective writing, there are
references too in Xusrō ud Rēdag (The page of Xusraw), Kārnāmag ī Ardaxšīr ī Pābagān (The book of the

6
of the first millennium, such as The Meadows of Gold and Mines of Gems of
Al Masudi (896-956) and the Shāhnāma (The Book of kings) of the Persian
Ferdousí (935-1020), we know that a proto-chess, it is believed that the
chaturanga (catur-aṅga, चतु रङ्ग in Sanskrit), enters Baghdad in the sixth
century AD from a region of the northeast, as part of the precious gifts
sent to Xusraw I by an Indian Rajah who wished to ingratiate with the
mighty King of Kings, who was duly assisted by the wise Bozorgmehr
(Burzmihr).

Image of a chess game in Persian culture corresponding to a 14th century manuscript.

Source: Iran Chamber Society web, at
http://www.iranchamber.com/sport/chess/chess_iranian_invention.php.

wanderings of Ardashir the son of Babag) and Ēvēnnāmag (Book of Manners). In all of them the Indian
paternity of the game is recognized, at http://www.sasanika.org/wp-content/uploads/Backgammon-2.pdf.
8
It was the official language during the Sassanid dynasty (3rd - 7th centuries AD) and in the liturgy of the
Zoroastrianism that extended its influence to later centuries, so that the manuscripts in that language
corresponded to that approximate temporal period.
9
In this case, and throughout this document, when we speak of the East, we must not fail to emphasize that
this characterization depends on a specific geographical point of view from which the gaze is realized (that
of a world that assumes itself as Western). This, which is valid in principle to emphasize a spatial location
(which certainly does not take into account the roundness of the planet), has implications still more relevant
in other senses, since they implies an intellectual, philosophical and even metaphysical perspective that, by
definition , is far from the culture that ought then to be defined like Oriental.

7
If the Persians, therefore, cannot be considered the parents of chess,
according to what is revealed in their own historiography, will have in
change a decisive role as agent of diffusion. First they will appropriate it
under the name of čatrang (‫ چترنگ‬in Middle Persian), from which the
Arabic šatranj (‫ شطرنج‬in Arab)10 will emerge, mode with which it would
later be divulged until, after experiencing its respective metamorphosis, it
will become in Western chess.
In spite of these clear evidences of the Persians considering that the game
was of Indian origin,11 the researcher Nathaniel Bland12 in century XIX
has come to maintain that the paternity could have corresponded to the
nation to which it belonged. When analyzing an anonymous manuscript,
which is not dated (it would have at least five centuries old and consists
of ... sixty-four pages!), it states that chess was invented in Persia, passing
then to India and finishing returning in an abbreviated and "Modern"
shape. It refers to two types of game, the conventional and the so-called
shatranj Kamil or perfect chess (later known as of Tamerlán or Timur), an
extended version that is played in a board of 112 squares and with the
presence of 56 pieces. The first would be the Persian, which Bland
considers the original; the second is the one that the Indians would send
back later (supposedly during the reign of Xusraw I).
It is credited with the invention of that complete chess to a sage named
Hakim13 and it is posed different histories of how the game is reduced in
India, which will make another adviser, the famous Sissa (or Sassa, son of
Dáhir) who, in a tradition which has come strongly to nowadays, will
require for its invention a reward in cereal grains. The concept of the
game was very high considering that it was: "... the nourishment of the
mind, the solace of the spirit, the polisher of intelligence, the bright sun of
understanding, and has been preferred by the philosopher, its inventor, to
all other means by which with arrive to wisdom”. An interesting point is
10
These successive denominations (also chatrang and shatranj, respectively), according to philological and
lexicographic analyzes, appeared from phonetic adaptations in the Persian and Arabic worlds, from the
name of the game that they received from India: chaturanga.
11
Even Brunet and Bellet have allowed themselves to speculate that the game may have entered to Persia
from the Byzantine Empire and not from India. The logical thing would be the opposite, as the Englishman
Duncan Forbes points out in commenting that Xusraw II, grandson of the king of the same name, when he
was deposed of the throne, took refuge in the court of the emperor Mauricio with soothes in
Constantinople. The truth is that both cultures were closely intertwined.
12
It´s possible access his work at https://archive.org/details/jstor-25228633.
13
It should be noted that in the Muslim religion, one of the names of Allah is precisely Al-Ḥakīm (‫)الحكيم‬, or
"The Most Wise, The Most Judicious."

8
the religious connotation assigned to it since: "…the board represents the
Heavens, in which the Squares are the Celestial Houses, and the Pieces
Stars”.
Bland, in support of his thesis, pointed out a very interesting fact: the
names of the pieces assigned by the Persians remain, with slight linguistic
corruptions, in other cultures, after the successive stages that they had in
their evolution. On the contrary, those who originally had in India, have
been definitely forgotten and do not even subsist in the own
subcontinent.14 Another element that has been used independently to
emphasize a supposed Persian primacy is of a geographical nature. It has
been argued that when his scribes in ancient times spoke of a Hindu
kingdom, in the context of borders that have been so mobile, perhaps the
caravans that brought the game from the east could come from a territory
that was not India but corresponded to a province of the own Persian
empire (in Khuzestan).
The Spanish researcher Ricardo Calvo,15 for his part, insists on the
possibility of an eventual Iranian origin, for which it is based on several
arguments, mainly in that the first mentions written are Persian, and not
Indian, and in the fact that no there are archaeological finds of pieces of
this last provenance although they do exist corresponding to Persia. In
spite of the exposed, it will end up admitting that the chaturanga is a
proto-chess that, therefore, is previous to čatrang. And that's precisely
what it's all about: locating the game that, being part of the cycle of
cultural diffusion, is one that would have appeared in the previous era.
This approach, as well as in general the problematic that we address,
connotes an important question: what can be considered chess or in any
case proto-chess and what not? In this respect some possible
interpretations have been designed over time. Without being exhaustive,
we could assume that at least the following situations must be verified to
consider a given game within this taxonomy: 1) That it is played on a
board of 64 squares; 2) That there are 32 pieces available to players
(regardless of the number of these, can be 2 or 4, which allows to
consider the chaturanga of four players and the chaturaji; 3) The pieces

14
Exception is the case of the denomination of the tower: rat'h / rot'h in Sanskrit, an expression somewhat
related to the rook of English that surely derives from the rochus of Latin.
15
Source: On the origin of chess – Some facts to think about, Ricardo Calvo, Madrid, 1996, at
http://www.cais-soas.com/CAIS/Sport/chess_calvo.htm.

9
have different forms of movement (due of that situation they have diverse
hierarchies), and 4) That one of them (without specifying its
denomination, can be the king or the general) is tried to dominate,
attacking it without possible escape (and, with that, to finish the game). In
these conditions it would not be a proto-chess Kamil or Tamerlane chess
since it does not cover the first two conditions.

Image of a chess of Persian origin that evolved to its Arabic form (shatranj)
corresponding to the XII century exhibited in the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Source: Pinterest, at
https://www.google.com.ar/search?q=persian+chess+new+york+metropolitan+museum
&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjZ0tfRkrfZAhWBDZAKHWcFAisQ_AUICig
B&biw=1777&bih=854#imgrc=XjgQLuR5OMyToM:.

Returning to the argumentative line that attempts to place to the Persian

culture at the beginning of the time segment in which chess has
developed, it can be assured that it is very limited since, in addition to not
having sufficient explanatory force, it does not affect the other powerful
theories that have been held, based in India or China or in the context of a
cultural syncretism, all with much stronger empirical evidence and dating
much earlier than those offered in the case of the Iranians.

This does not prevent the Persian region from constituting a central point
for chess in its process of diffusion and evolution: it is a milestone along
the way, an intermediate one, very important indeed, but not the
foundational one.

10
What the Iranians can feel especially proud of is the fact that from their
former domains it emerged the nard, a game that is a direct antecedent of
backgammon which, by its design, has components that are much more
representative of its culture. It reflects with great precision the dualistic
cosmogonic concept of Zoroastrianism, a religion that had emerged
around the 6th century BC and was the predominant one in the country.
Zoroaster established a divine principle of good, Ormuz or Ahura Mazda,
and another of evil, embodied by Ahriman.

The space in which it was practiced, symbolizes the sacred Earth, the
white and black pieces of the nard represent the days and the nights, the
dice refer to the revolution of the planets (there are seven, that is, the sum
of the opposite sides of the cubes), the twelve fields of the board allude to
the zodiacal signs, the movements of the cards refer to the birth and, in
their evolution, respond to the stages of growth in life until death (given
at the time of capture); and its reintroduction denotes the possibility of
resurrection.

On the other hand, from a political and historical point of view, this
ancient Persian game is associated, from its own denomination, nardshir,
to Ardashir, to the founder of the Sassanid dynasty, fact which occurred in
the third century of the Christian era.

It has been speculated that, having entered chaturanga from India in the
four-player game modality, in any case the Persians would have
immediately simplified it to two, to adequately reflect a strong dilemmatic
struggle.

The chess that came from India, then, in its character of image of war that
consequently refers to earthly planes, would not have been the best
exponent of the metaphysical values that prevailed in the Persian society
during so many centuries of splendor, those values that the nard
represented more fully.

11
INDIAN ORIGIN OF CHESS: THE PREDOMINANT PARADIGM
Traditional casuistry attributes the paternity of chess to an exclusive
source. In this line of analysis, the one that has had the most relevance
since the times when it was conceived is the one that emphasizes an
Indian origin. However, there is a remarkable particularity: when it
comes to sustaining it, there is greater support in documentary finds that
are exotic to that culture and not so much in other derivatives of its own
annals. On the other hand, the conceptual contributions for its
formulation and subsequent disclosure correspond mainly to European
historians, especially British.16
Conversely, the hypothesis of a Chinese origin was not adequately
explored. This situation may be due to a certain political asymmetry:
while India was for a long time an English colony, China remained closed
to foreign scrutiny.17 Although the evolution of the state of things is
capable, from the elements of judgment that arise or are reexamined, to
strengthen the sinological perspective, for now the thesis that places
India as the starting point of chess is what remains predominant.
In that order, two key concepts are seen: chaturanga, expression used to
refer to the Indian proto-chess par excellence, and ashtāpada which,
while also it is applicable to its entertainment condition,18 is more widely
used for alluding to a board of 64 squares in design of 8 horizontal lines
by 8 verticals on which different games are disputed. When ancestral
Indian literature is revised, in Sanskrit language, it seeks to find allusions

16
Successively, this thesis was supported by the British Thomas Hyde, at the end of the seventeenth
century; Hiram Cox and Duncan Forbes, in the eighteenth and early the next; the Dutchman Antonious Van
der Linde, the Frenchman Nicolas Fréret, and the Germans Hans Maßmann, Tassilo Von der Lasa and
Albrecht Weber, in the 19th century. Their developments will be collected and deepened by another great
English historian, Harold Murray, as early as the twentieth century, who established the prevailing canon in
the field. In the eighteenth century another inhabitant of the island, William Jones, in addition to ascribing
to this current, more poetically will assign to the game a mythical origin, when creating a specific goddess:
Caissa. In that same century there will be another writer, who is usually ignored, who also sustained the
Indian precedence: the Austrian friar Pauline of St. Bartholomew.
17
The German researcher Gerhard Josten, perhaps jokingly, wondered what would have happened to
theories of chess sources if the British, instead of colonizing India, would have done the same with China.
18
The ashtāpada in so much game could be similar to pachisi (derived from the chaupar) very popular in
India and Pakistan. It is the type of racing game, the dice are used and the objective of each competitor is to
move all the four pieces completely around the board, to the left, before his opponents do it. Its probable
rules, as well as those corresponding to different versions of chess from the East, are presented in the work
of the Lebanese Nader Daoud Daou, at https://es.scribd.com/document/334725415/Historical-Chess-
Variants.

12
to both terms as they can offer us important clues about the age of these
ludic practices.
When analyzing the Rigveda (Ṛgveda), the oldest of all the texts of Hindu
culture, which is the second millennium BC, it is observed that one of his
Hymns (X - 34) is dedicated to the dice player, clear evidence of the
relevance of his practice in those times. The mention is not exactly
indulgent since they are assigned such a powerful and disturbing value
that they could exert a demonic influence on the player. Fernando Tola,
the Argentine translator of the work, understands that in that text "the
dice are praised, their power is exalted and they are finally begged to free
the victims who have bewitched." A significant part of the aforementioned
hymn occurs when the player is asked to do the following: " Play not with
dice: no, / cultivate thy corn-land. / Enjoy the gain, / and deem that wealth
sufficient. /There are thy cattle/ there thy wife…” And the song ends by
questioning the dice in this way:"Make me your friend: show us some little
mercy. / Assail us not with your terrific fierceness. / Appeased be your
malignity and anger, / and let the brown dice snare some other captive.”19
These dangers could somehow extend to the earlier Indian versions of
chess if the dice were considered to be part of their practice, at least for a
rather prolonged period of time,20 as we know by the great British
historian Harold Murray. If their use could encourage irrational behavior,
and therefore be repulsive to the religions that successively dominated
the subcontinent (Hinduism and Buddhism), the game could also be
condemned by being in many cases associated with the betting regime.21
This kind of interpellations will continue in the future, also in the Muslim,
Jewish and Christian worlds, well into the middle Ages, so even chess will
at times be subject to prohibitions.
In chaturanga and chaturaji, both Indian proto-chess, is observed the
same etymological root: chatur that means four, a number that in Hindu

19
At http://www.sacred-texts.com/hin/rigveda/rv10034.htm.
20
There is no exactness at what time the die stopped being present in these board games. Cox assures the
existence of a Burmese chess in the second century BC in which it had already been left aside. It is very
reasonable to suppose, however, that during a good time the chaturanga (or the chaturaji) coexisted in its
two modalities, with and without dice, in a process of transition. According to some opinions the die was
suppressed in Indian culture; according to others, this happened in Persia.
21
The bets were not limited to money or material goods: women could also be offered, such as in the case
of the famous legend of Princess Dilaram in the Arab world and, in the Indian experience, it is even known
that it could be offered as a reward parts of its own body (the fingers, for example), which implied
horrendous consequences due to auto-mutilations that had to be provoked by those who lost a game.

13
culture has a great symbolic value. Four are the castes in which Indian
society is divided (even today!); four are the faces that the god Brahma
has (to be able to see his beautiful wife on all sides); four are his hands (in
one holds the Rig Veda); four are the original Vedas; four are the stages of
life. And four is the number of forces (anga) that participated in the battle
inside the board as symmetrical image of other fights of real content.22
The Macedonian philologist Pavle Bidev emphasizes that the number four
also acquires a special value if it is associated to the natural elements to
each one of which assigns a class to him of chessmen: Water, to the horse;
Earth, to the car; Fire, the vizier; Air, to the elephant. The king, for his
part, is represented by a fifth, which corresponds to the Ether. It is
interesting to note that these five concepts correspond perfectly to those
recognized in Hinduism and Buddhism.
In addition to the respective kings (rajī), in the modality of four players
appear pawns, horses, elephants and chariots (or ships)23. On the other
hand, in the design for two persons also presents the adviser of the king.
In both cases, 32 pieces are involved in the games.24 The rivals could be
four or two25 since, ultimately, when one of the armies fell, the fallen force
was combined with another.

22
When the Indian king Porus confronted Macedonian Alexander the Great in 326 BC at the Battle of
Hidaspes, he fought with 20,000 using 300 chariots, 200 elephants and 2,000 horses, that is, the four anga
required by the Indian chess. The correspondence is very clear: the soldiers of infantry represent the pawns;
the artillery and cavalry forces refer to the mighty chariots and to the graceful horses of proto-chess, and
the elephants appear as a typical element of the country's warlike forces and also as part of the game.
23
The chariots could be transformed into ships (nauka) since, being India a very floodable territory, those
pieces had to acquire a nautical profile that corresponds to the battles that were disputed fundamentally to
the side of zones adjacent to the great rivers (like the Indus).
24
That is sixteen per player or group of players (in the modality of four, two of the armies operate coalition).
In Cabalistic, it should be noted that this number, sixteen, coincides with the rites of Hinduism, the
samskaras. It is the third religion in the world nowadays, can be itself seen as such or like culture, their
sacred writings go back to the fifteenth century BC. The samskaras, which are also followed in Jainism and in
some Buddhist lines, are fulfilled throughout existence, beginning with the ritual of fecundation (of the
parents) and ending with the funeral of the own person . Although their number sometimes may vary, there
are sixteen sacraments, according to the Grija-sutra, as many as the chess ´pieces of each player.
25
While it is not the theory that prevails today, it has been argued that it could have evolved from a game of
four contenders to another of two. If it had been so, it could have a historical explanation: in India originally
there were numerous kingdoms, so there could be multiple clashes between them in search of domination
(in these conditions a game of four participants is more reasonable than one of merely two). When the
country is unified, there is already only one enemy, the external, so that the struggle is circumscribed
against the others. The first empire in the subcontinent, the Maurya, lasted little more than 100 years,
collapsing towards the second century BC. After the dismemberment in various kingdoms, the country will
be reunited under the great Gupta Empire, which will begin to reign from the fourth century AD, time when
Buddhism will spread, including in China. This era could coincide with the validity of a proto-historic version

14
As for the dice, so powerful according to the Rigveda, they served as the
aid of the chaturanga or the chaturaji and alternatively they could be the
classic entertainment when being thrown on flat surfaces in form of
board, like the ashtāpada, that had a quadrangular design of 64 squares of
eight horizontal and vertical lines.
That was a very important number, both for Hindus and Buddhists. The
temples for both beliefs had to dissolve the boundaries between man and
the divine, reason why they were conceived like a miniature of the
cosmos. The priest-architect made his plant as a grid, made up of
equilateral squares and equilateral triangles arranged in the form of a net,
representing a mandala (a model or map of the cosmos) that had sixty-
four figures (for temples) and eighty-one (for houses). It is the vastu
purusha mandala, space that symbolizes the existence and the action of
the divine powers. There Devas fight against the Asuras (angels against
demons). And in the center lies the creative God: Brahma. In these
conditions, the board must be seen not as a mere spatial representation
or a place in which a human activity is concretized but, more broadly, as a
cosmogram, being both a representation and actualization of divine
power and a path to lighting.26

Design of the ashtāpada in which various kinds of games were played and the dice were
thrown (It´s possible to see some marked squares -for reasons unknown- and their lack
of coloration). Source: Jean-Louis Cazaux, at http://history.chess.free.fr/ashtapada.htm.

of the chess that was already played exclusively to two players. The chaturanga had therefore the
appropriate context for its appearance.
26
Source: Traditional Cosmological Symbolism in Ancient Board Games, Gaspar Pujol Nicolau, Catalan
academic of the Universitat Internacional de Catalunya, Barcelona, 2009, at
http://www.tdx.cat/bitstream/handle/10803/387431/Tesi_%20Gaspar_Pujol_Nicolau.pdf;jsessionid=40585
8543239776932B35A7395F5740A?sequence=1.

15
Vinaya Piṭaka (Basket of Discipline) is a text from the 4th to 3rd centuries
BC: is part of the Dialogues of Buddha. Although it is not considered a
sacred book (Buddhism does not have them), it acquires a great relevance
since it establishes the rules of conduct that must be respected. In that
order the monks (samanas and brahmanas) are required to be focused on
the moral practices and, therefore, refrain from playing games, since their
use weakens vigilance, punctually not “playing chess on eight-squared or
ten-squared boards; playing imaginary chess using the sky as a chess-board;
playing chess on moon-shaped chess boards". It is clear, then, that the
recommendation points to the pastimes in the ashtāpada or daśapada
which extends to the action of throwing dice on them.27 The German
researcher Andreas Bock-Raming points out that a mention in the same
sense is included in another Buddhist text of the time: BrahmajÅlasutta.28
On the other hand, in Sūtrakṛtāṅga, which is of the same approximate
period as the previous ones, considered one of the earliest writings that
belong to Jainism (non-theistic religion that arose in India in the sixth
century BC), their practice is also discouraged; specifically: "He should not
learn to play ashtāpada, he should not speak anything forbidden by the
Law; a wise man should abstain from fights and quarrels."29
In the Mahābhāṣya, a grammar of the second century BC that is due to
Patañjali, the term ayanayan ("to move ayanaya"), which two centuries
ago had been presented by Pāṇini in his influential first work of the
genus: Aṣṭādhyāyī, is analyzed. With that expression alludes to the
movements of some pieces on a board, so it is interpreted that this is a
first Indian reference to a table game differentiated from the space on
which it was disputed, which could well be antecedent of chess, according
to the studies of the German Paul Thieme, an expert in Indian culture.30
27
Source: Brahmajala Sutta, The Supreme Net, Discourse on “What not to Do”, at
http://www.americamyanmar.net/Buddha/Book/Brahmajala_Sutta.pdf.
28
Source: The Gaming Board in Indian Chess and Related Board Games: A Terminological Investigation, at
http://ex.ludicum.org/publicacoes/bgsj/2.pdf.
29
Source: Ninth Lecture, called The Law, in Sūtrakṛtāṅga, at
http://www.archive.org/stream/sacredbooksofthe025070mbp#page/n343/mode/2up/search/chess. In
other texts of this belief, however, his practice should be recommended to young princes, as Bock-Raming
points out.
30
As the board was used to throw the dice, the explanation of a movement that could be given in the sense
of the clockwise or otherwise, denotes the appearance of differentiated pieces. This could be the pattern of
the existence of a game that is practiced on the surface (the chaturanga?).
Source: Chess and Backgammon in Sanskrit Literature, in Indological Studies in Honor of W. Norman Brown,
American Oriental Series, Volume 47, New Haven, Connecticut, 1962, at
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=inu.30000011343575;view=1up;seq=232.

16
However it is very probable that the game in question is the pachisi or the
chaupar, like it is supported by the Indian professor Madhukar Anant
Mehendale.31
The Mahābhārata, the great Indian epic that was written at a rather
imprecise time, though it is at least from the third century BC32 that is
attributed to Vyasa, reflects the war between two related families (the
Kaurava and Pāṇḍava). In its course the theme of the game acquires
centrality since, throwing the dice, there are decided central questions.
Thus, Yudhishthira, son of the god Dharma, who had inheritance rights to
the royal throne, will lose everything, including his brothers and his wife,
and will be taken into exile for twelve years.33
There is a unique translation to Spanish of this very extensive work that is
due to the Argentine author Hugo Labaté, who was consulted on the
eventual inclusion of the chess in her. He points to a single moment that
could be associated, in the Virata Parva, Volume 4, Section 1, where
Yudhishthira is appeared returning from exile after allegedly learning in
the interregnum "the science of the dice". In this context he is presented
before a king and made the following reference: "Yudhishthira replied, 'Ye
sons of the Kuru race, ye bulls among men, hear what I shall do on
appearing before king Virata. Presenting myself as a Brahmana, Kanka by
name, skilled in dice and fond of play, I shall become a courtier of that high-
souled king. And moving upon chess-boards beautiful pawns made of ivory,
of blue and yellow and red and white hue, by throws of black and red dice, I
shall entertain the king with his courtiers and friends”.34

31
At Does Patañjali on Pāṇini 5.2.9 refer to Chess? Included in the book of Deshpande y Hook quoted in the
bibliography. The German Orientalist Heinrich Lüders, meanwhile, in the nineteenth century had also
speculated that the game could be backgammon.
32
Due to its monumentality, this story was written in a great space of time, without precision of authorship.
For some corresponds to a temporary environment located in the 3rd century BC. For others, it goes back to
much older times. As it is written in modern Sanskrit (unlike the Vedas that are in ancient Sanskrit), its
dating is less distant in time although, as the text contains testimonies of the oral tradition, they correspond
to histories that are in any case very ancestral.
33
After all, the god Kṛṣṇa will come to his aid, will lead him to victory and, ultimately, to the opening of a
new era.
34
At http://www.holybooks.com/wp-content/uploads/Mahabharata-VOL-4.pdf. As it is appreciated, this
source indicates that the boards are of chess which in any case is a license of the translator of the text:
Pratap Chandra Roy. In the version of Labaté, on the other hand, it is spoken more correctly of “game-
boards” and not “chess-boards”.

17
Version of Mahābhārata in Sanskrit. Source:
http://www.exoticindiaart.com/book/details/mahabharata-malyam-text-with-hindi-
translation-NZA482/.

The translator adds: "It is probably a reference to the chaturaji, a board

game played with four-colored pieces one for each player: white ivory
(däntän phalair), yellow gold, green stone (vaiéüryän) and red stone (jyotï
rasaiù ) and throw black and red dice (kýáíäkáä and lohitäkáä). The
translation should read: ´mobile pawns of ivory, gold, green stone and red
stone, throwing dice red and black.´ Unlike chess, in this game comes the
chance". That is, although in the Mahābhārata the chaturanga is not
mentioned, it is referred to another board game, in which we could
register movements of pieces in a greater complexity than the mere fact
of throwing dice. Perhaps, instead of the chaturaji suggested, it is rather
the gyan chauper, a very ancient Indian game that was popularized all
over the world subsequently under the name of game of snakes and
ladders. In the passage quoted there is one more element: it could be a
version for four players since that is the number of colors of the different
pawns involved.35

35
In the chaturanga four colors are also appreciated for the different armies: red, in the east; Green in the
south; Yellow, in the west; Black, in the north. The alliances were marked between the green and black
rows, on the one hand, and the red and yellow, on the other. One particularity of the board is that the

18
In the same way in the Rāmāyaṇa, the other Indian epic text, in this case
attributed to Vālmīki, that is of approximately century III BC, considering
the regularity of the streets and houses of the sacred city of Ayodhya (in
segment 1.5.16), is described as colorful, it praises the beauty of their
women and it mention the palatial buildings of a city which "is arranged
like a board". The term that is exactly used is that of astapadakaram,36
that is to say that of the ashtāpada, which can be considered as squared
surface37 as in this quotation or, also, as table game, in both cases closely
linked with the future chaturanga.38 Also in this influential account
appears several times mentioned the army with the precision that it was
compounded by "four angas". India's only world chess champion,
Viswanathan Anand, confesses that his grandmother, at the tender age of
six, alluding to this text, told a story that the demon king Ravana invented
the chess to entertain his wife Mandodari.39
One should also review the Arthaśāstra, which was written in the third
century BC (alternatively it is placed between the second and fourth
centuries AD) by Chanakia Pandit, a prime minister of the Mauria Empire.
In that text, according to some approaches, there was talk of a board
game that could be antecedent of the chaturanga. As it is a treatise on the

squares were not colored. As for the pieces, the chariot (equivalent to the tower), the horse and the king
moved as at present, the elephant (which will evolve into a bishop) did so with restrictive movement
diagonally. If it is accepted that the passage was from four armies to two (which is controversial), the
incorporation of a new piece, the one of the royal councilor (vizier for Persians and Arabs, is generated, from
which later in Europe will arise the Queen, which originally retained the original much reduced mobility).
The coronation existed in early versions of the game (it is speculated that in the variant of four players ...
could be crowned king!). The rules of chaturanga are not precisely known, in the absence of texts that study
and present from a technical perspective.
36
The respective passage in Sanskrit reads as follows: “citram astapadakaram varanariganair yutam”. At
http://nitaaiveda.com/All_Scriptures_By_Acharyas/Historical_Works/Ramayana-sanskrit/Ramayana__Balakanda.htm.
37
It is interesting to note that in other Indian texts, including some corresponding to the Vedic period, such
as the Kåêhakam, which dates from the 9th century BC, it is said that the dice were thrown on surfaces
conformed by cloths and not yet on boards which that will be of diverse materials. Source: The Gaming
Board in Indian Chess and Related Board Games: A Terminological Investigation, by Andreas Bock-Raming, at
http://history.chess.free.fr/papers/Bock-Raming%201999.pdf.
38
“As royal Indra, throned on high,/ Rules his fair city in the sky./ She seems a painted city, fair/ With chess-
board line and even square./ And cool boughs shade the lovely lake", is other specific reference to the
chessboard according a Griffith´s version of this passage, at http://www.sacred-
texts.com/hin/rama/ry007.htm. However for Goldman it is understood that in using the expression
ashtāpada in rigor could be referring to the gold ornamentation of the beautiful city. It is that word is
ambiguous as it connotes such the board and the game as the precious metal.
39
At https://www.chess.com/article/view/where-was-chess-invented. We have not been able, from
consulting the translations of the Rāmāyaṇa to which we had access, to verify the inclusion of this story.
But, beyond its pertinence, it is to imagine the great influence of this familiar story in the mind of who, in
time, will have to transform itself into one of the best chess players of all time.

19
art of governing, economic policy and military strategy, in fact it is the
first Indian text in which the art of war is studied; the four angas of the
game in question are recurrently mentioned.
We see clearly that, in the most relevant Indian texts of this early period,
at most concrete references are made to the game of dice and others
alluding to the ashtāpada considered preferentially as a board, but
nothing is said about the chaturanga, whose footprints will then have to
be found in periods corresponding to the Christian era.
The first mention of proto-chess is appraised in the Harṣacarita (The
deeds of Harsha),40 text of Bāṇabhaṭṭa (Bāṇa), poet and writer of the court
with capital in Kanyâkubja (Kannauj), a biography of the Buddhist
emperor of that name who ruled the destinations of a northern kingdom
of India in the first half of the seventh century. It would be appropriate to
remember that, according to the Persian accounts, it was from that capital
of an Indian kingdom that come the game to Baghdad in the time of
Xusraw I.
On the one hand, when speaking of the wise Durvāsas, a being by nature
excessively angry that he was "brother of the Moon", describing one of his
classic irritations, clarifies that "... gathering a frown that darkened the
chess-board of his forehead, like the presence of the god of death ... ". A
parallel is drawn between the lines of the board and the furrows on the
face of the character, with a Sanskrit expression in which appear the
board (aṣţāpadam) and the game (caturaṅgaphalakam), intimately linked
for the first time. Later, when speaking of the virtues of Harṣa, it is
pointed out that “Under this monarch are found only the cloth worn by
devotees in meditation, and not forged documents; the royal figures of
sculptors and not the vulgar disputes with kings; only bees quarrel in
collecting dues; the only feet ever cut off are those in metre;41 only
chessboard teach the positions of the four members...“ a reference to the
angas that participate in the battles and in the game, for which the term
caturaṅga is used.
Kādambari,42 another work of Bāṇabhaṭṭa, includes the following
reference when tracing the panegyric profile of a called king Çūdraka:

40
At https://archive.org/stream/harsacaritaofban00banaiala#page/6/mode/2up/search/chess.
41
It is a reference to a collection context.
42
At http://www.gutenberg.org/files/41128/41128-h/41128-h.htm#pb10.

20
“While he, having subdued the earth, was guardian of the world, the only
mixing of colour was in painting; the only pulling of hair in caresses; the
only strict fetters in the laws of poetry; the only care was concerning moral
law; the only deception was in dreams; the only golden rods were in
umbrellas. Banners alone trembled; songs alone showed variations;
elephants alone were rampant; bows alone had severed cords; lattice
windows alone had ensnaring network; lovers’ disputes alone caused
sending of messengers; dice and chessmen alone left empty squares; and his
subjects had no deserted homes. Under him, too, there was only fear of the
next world…” The expression that alludes again to the board or to a game
that is not necessarily the chaturanga, is in Sanskrit
astapadaparicayacaturabhih. Since it is a romantic novel, it might be
thought that, following the order of the preceding enumeration, the so-
mentioned lovers' dispute could be associated with the situation in which
it is indeed possible for the dice and pieces of the game leave empty the
squares of the board, an image that could be poetic, at least to chess
lovers.

In the Vāsavadattā43 of Subandhu, romance written in an imprecise time

that some place between the fourth and fifth centuries (others place it in
the seventh), this passage is included: "The (rainy season) even the (fate of
rain), played, as if with chessmen coloured with lac, with yellow and green
frogs jumping in the enclosures of the irrigated fields”. The pieces appear
with an unusual yellow and green tone that is typical of the animal in
question. Murray emphasizes in the point the use of words: nayadyütair,
that could be translatable by pieces of some proto-chess and koshthikā
that would be equivalent to the existence of a board bi-color. However in
some translations it is considered that, instead of pieces there are dices.
For the British philologist Frederick W. Thomas the colors of the frogs are
associated with those that characterize the pieces (of chess or perhaps of
backgammon); and their leap is representative of their movement on a
board whose boards, in their judgment, are black.44

43
At https://archive.org/stream/vasavadattasansk00suba#page/134/mode/2up/search/chess.
44
Source: The Indian Games of chess, ZDMG, 1899, at http://menadoc.bibliothek.uni-
halle.de/dmg/periodical/titleinfo/63131.

21
Since there is evidence that the game entered Baghdad in the VI century
AD, these references from Indian literature belonging to the Christian era
should be considered late since the first specific ones, those of Bāṇa, are
of the seventh century. To deepen the absent of synchrony, Murray
affirms that it will be necessary to wait still to century IX to obtain more
conclusive precisions on the game in literary sources of the country, what
will happen with works and poets of the northern region of Kashmir.

The first reference is the one of Haravijaya (The Victory of Shiva)45 of

Ratnākara, epic poem in which the board (an-ashtāpadam) is mentioned,
but not the game, in spite of which it is alluded. It is presented Shiva, with
his assistant Attahasa, who, thanks to his skills in tactics and strategy,
could repel the forces of his enemies even though they were made up of
the four angas: patti (infantry), ashwa (cavalry), rat-ha (chariots) and
dvipa (elephants).

One can also appeal to the Kāvyālaṅkāraḥ of the poet Rudrata, that is of
the year 875, in which is mentioned successively the movements of the
pieces: chariots; horses and elephants, as is particularly studied in the
work of the Indian professor C. Rajendran.46 In the case of the steed, it is a
remarkable antecedent of an issue that years later would inspire so many
mathematicians, among them the Swiss Leonhard Euler in the eighteenth
century, in terms of a sequence in which it is possible to traverse half the
board (a surface of 8x4) without repeating a square when the respective
course is undertaken.47

Of equal geographical origin we have the Kāvyālaṅkāraḥ of the poet

Rudrata, a work of the year 875, which answers a question that will
eventually become a classic, as to whether it was possible to visit all the

45
See work at http://muk.li/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/magisterarbeit.pdf.
46
Source: Caturaṅga Movements described in Rudraṭa´s Kāvyālaṅkāraḥ, at
https://www.academia.edu/12039179/Caturanga_Movements_in_Rudratas_Kavyalankara.
47
For this reason, the resolution of the course of the horse by the board of 8x8 without touching twice the
same square is scientifically defined as "The cycle (path or problem) of Rudrata". Numerous researches on
algorithms were based on it, evidence that game has always been the subject of analysis in the field of logic
and mathematics. While Rudrata in his resolution puts the accent on the vertex, Euler will do it at the edges.
Source: Algorithms, S. Dasgupta, C. H. Papadimitriou y U. V. Vazirani, 2006, at
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B_iQberlDeu5aS1DM3NuRGx2MVU/view.

22
squares of the board without passing twice by the same site with a piece
of the game. It provides solutions for the case of the tower (rat-ha), the
elephant (gaja) and the horse (turaga), which makes it a remarkable
antecedent, especially in the case of the latter, a question that will become
a obsession of many mathematicians and chess players (including the
Swiss Leonhard Euler in the eighteenth century).

If, until now, the Indian literature, being epic or fictional, speak about the
board in which some kind of proto-chess is practiced, and always without
too much detail, it will be necessary to wait until the XII century to obtain
in a technical text more explicit mentions. This will occur in the
Mānasollāsa (The refresher of the mind), also called Abhilaṣitārtha
Cintāmaṇi (The magical stone that fulfills desires), an encyclopedia
produced in the western and southern portion of the territory which is
attributed to Someśvara III, and a king of the Chalukya dynasty. In this
book several games are indicated, including some variant of the nard, and
specifically talk about the versions for two and four hands of the
chaturanga.

This work is very complete from a technical perspective; in its various

chapters, there is talk of the initial position of the pieces on the board and
of three alternative arrangements preset to start the game (similar to the
ta'biyat of shatranj), the form of movement of the chessmen, is foreseeing
the possibility of coronation of a peon becoming a minister, and some
possibilities to stale-mate and check-mate the king. It could be argued
that the manuscript is the translation of an Arabic text on chess, a game
by then widespread in that culture. However this possibility is discarded
by Bock-Raming for whom we are in presence of a genuine Indian text.48
In the variant of chess for four participants, of course the figure of the
minister disappears, and the kings in this case can be taken by a rival
force; in addition, the die is not used and the colors are only two: red and
white.

48
Source: The varieties of indian chess through the ages, by A. Bock-Raming, at
http://history.chess.free.fr/papers/Bock-Raming%201995.pdf.

23
From the same period, although now returning to the north of the
country, the geography that could have been the cradle of chess, we have
the Rājatarangiṇī (The River of the Kings), work of the Brahmin
Kalhaṇa,49 that centers in the legacy of Kashmiri dynasty kings, which
includes this fragment: “The king, though he had taken two kings (Lothana
and Vigraharāja), was helpless and perplexed about the attack on the
remaining one, just as a player at chess (who has taken two kings and is
perplexed about taking the third). He had then no hidden plan (of game) to
give up for its sake (his figures). Yet he did not pay regard to his antagonist
who was taking his horsemen, peons and the rest".

In this regard, it must be remembered that in the modality for four

contestants, when one of the monarchs falls, his forces begin to be part of
the army of another of the rivals, reason why the passage in question is a
clear allusion to the chaturaji modality that, for then, it seemed to have
gained a lot of prominence in comparison to what could be happening
with the classic scheme for two players or chaturanga. Perhaps this can
be interpreted as a signal of precedence: the version for four might be
having worth more attention due novelty effect generally associated with
some state of dazzling.

Indian proto-chess in four-player design. Source: http://history.chess.free.fr/.

49
Source: Kalhana's Rajatarangini, a Chronicle of the Kings of Kasmir, translated by M. Stein, Vol. I and II, at
https://archive.org/stream/RajataranginiVol2/1900%20Kalhana%27s%20Rajatarangini%20Vol%202%20tran
slated%20by%20Stein%20s#page/n237/mode/2up/search/chess.

24
Already in modern times it has been said that: "Kṛṣṇa and his close friends
sometimes played to fight or to struggle with their arms, other times they
played ball and others played chess." This parliament appears in The
Nectar of Prabhupada Swami, author of the twentieth century. The idea
that Kṛṣṇa (Krishna), one of the main gods of Hinduism (and avatar of the
great Vishnu), practices chess, is wholly suggestive and meaningful, and
somehow connects with a tradition that for India is millennial.

Kṛṣṇa playing chess (chaturanga) on the ashtāpada. Source:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Radha-Krishna_chess.jpg.

If, as we have seen, Indian histories are rather unspecific in the case of the
earliest; and very late when it comes to more conclusive expressions
about the existence and characteristics of the game, interestingly it could
be said that also the records derived from the archaeological finds are not
old enough.

In this regard, when referring to terracotta figurines found in excavations

in the areas of Mohenjo-Daro and Lothal (formerly very important sites of
the Indus Valley),50 it is generally said that hardly correspond to some
type of proto-chess. However, German researcher Joaquim Petzold does
not rule it out51 and, if he would be right, considering that these places
50
At https://www.thebetterindia.com/60143/mohenjodaro-harappa-indus-valley-civilization/.
51
This is what Greenberg asserts in the book cited in the bibliography.

25
correspond to far past civilizations, one would have to believe that a game
at least related to the future chess might have appeared in the third
millennium BC.

Image of objects found in the Indus Valley exhibited at the Archaelogical Museum in
Harappa, Pakistan. Source:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/primaryhistory/indus_valley/games_and_toys/.

There is, however, consensus on the relevance of other images, also in

terracotta, found in this case in the vicinity of Kanyâkubja,52 that is to say
in the same head´s city of the kingdom from which the caravans departed
carrying the chaturanga to Baghdad. Although they have diverse dates, in
any case they correspond to times of the Christian era, reason why it is
not a proof that the game originated in India has a great antiquity.

Furthermore, in these analyzes, it will always be possible to discuss

whether we are actually in presence of pieces corresponding to a board
game. It is that, alternative, and especially when it comes to images very
past, perhaps more probably it can be amulets, toys, religious or
ornamental elements. In that order, it is difficult to admit like chessmen in
the case of two images, an elephant and a bull, that in 1972 were located
in Dalverzin-Tepe (currently in Uzbekistan),53 which would be of the
second century of our era. Much less in the case of a piece of ivory dating

52
At http://history.chess.free.fr/terracottas.htm.
53
These findings are valid according to Russian scholars who, in that way, can argue that chess was invented
in the territories of that nation. As that city was part of the Greek-Bactrian Kingdom and then flourished
during the Kushan Empire, in any case its admissibility could better be an evidence of the legitimacy of the
confluence theory of the games that we will soon discuss in detail, at
http://history.chess.free.fr/dalverzin.htm.

26
back to the sixth century that appeared in 2002 in the course of
excavations of a Byzantine palace in the ancient city of Butrint, Albania, a
location that is quite strange from the perspective of the assumed way of
spreading chess.
The oldest pieces of which there is not much doubt that they belonged to
a proto-chess are called Afrasiab, which appeared in excavations made in
1977 in the vicinity of Samarkand.54 These are seven ivory figurines made
up of two soldiers (pawns), a horse, an elephant (which is mounted), a
feline who, as has a rider, speculates that he may be the king, and two
chariots. They would be of the seventh and eighth century, coinciding
historically with the times of the Sassanid Empire in Persia, so they
should belong to čatrang.

Image of some of the pieces Afrasiab. Source: http://history.chess.free.fr/.

This ancient city, which today forms part of Uzbekistan, had its heyday in
the late Middle Ages at the time of the Turkish-Mongolian warrior
Tamerlan and was always a strategic place in the link between the distant
and the Middle East. Therefore, these archaeological findings are
compatible with all the main foundational theories: the Indian, because of
its proximity to the subcontinent; the sinological one, since that region
was a Chinese protectorate; the one of cultural syncretism, for being part
of the route of the silk. The findings, then, despite their intrinsic
relevance, do not allow us to shed light on which of these explanatory
alternatives should be considered more likely.
In 2006 five other pieces were found in an area located in the north of
Afghanistan of similar characteristics to the previous ones. Although, for

54
At http://history.chess.free.fr/afrasiab.htm.

27
the moment, they were not determined its real antiquity, could
concordantly be of century VII to VIII.
In studying the subject, Jean-Louis Cazaux55 argues, in addition to the
surprising fact that there are no archaeological elements very old in
territories of India that the same happens in the case of China. Concerning
to its proto-chess, the xiang-qi (象棋), which will be discussed in more
detail in a timely manner, the first pieces discovered would be only the
tenth century; they were discovered very recently, in 2011.56 The French
researcher does not lose hope that in the future would appear elements of
this kind to shed more light on the question. We believe that this can be
crucial in the course of research on the subject.57
Faced with the detailed state of weakness in regard to the existence of
early evidence in their own culture, the admission of the Indian paternity
of the game of chess should be sought, alternatively, in other primordial
sources. The first of these, as far as writings are concerned, correspond to
manuscript that the American Christopher Brunner58 places no later than
the ninth century, the Wizārišn ī Čatrang ud Nihišn ī Nēw-Ardaxšīr (or
Čatrang-nāmag), where it is precise account of the entrance to Baghdad in
the sixth century after Christ of a game from India. Everything happens as
reflected in this parliament: "They say that, in the reign of Xusraw of
Inmortal Soul, a chess game (16 counters of emerald and 16 counters of red

55
Source: L'origine des échecs: d'après l'archéologie, at http://history.chess.free.fr/origins-archaeo.htm.
56
Sources: Old Chinese Chess (Xiangqi) Pieces, at http://primaltrek.com/xiangqi.html and Chinese Chess
Pieces Found in Old Tomb by Gary Askenazy, at http://primaltrek.com/blog/2011/08/14/chinese-chess-
pieces-found-in-old-tomb/.
57
The Indian theory would be reinforced, for example, if ancient archaeological remains of the game were
discovered in areas away from the silk route, which would be an unmistakable sign of the spread of the
chaturanga to the interior of the country. Conversely, the sinological thesis would be enhanced if there were
to be found pieces of ancient dating that referred to the xianq-qi.
58
The author emphasizes that, as the manuscript comes from the oral tradition, its real date corresponds to
previous periods, being able to be from the own century VI. However, in translations of the book of Ferdousí
(subject of which we will speak) who based on this text, ensure that it is of the seventh century. At
https://archive.org/stream/OnTheExplanationOfChessAndBackgammon2010/Daryaee2010OnTheExplanatio
nOfChessAndBackgammonAbarWzrinatrangUdNihinNw-ardaxr_djvu.txt and in the following source: The
Middle Persian Explanation of Chess and Invention of Backgammon, by Christopher Brunner, Encyclopaedia
Persica, Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society, Vol. 10, 1978, at
https://web.archive.org/web/20150420062115/http://jtsa.edu/Documents/pagedocs/JANES/1978%2010/B
runner10.pdf.

28
ruby) was sent by Dēwišarm, great ruler of the Indians, to test the
intelligence and wisdom of the Iranians…”.

In this context, it is urged to discover the logic of the game, asking the
sovereign of the country four days to solve the challenge in search not
only of exempting paying tribute to visitors but also for reasons of
national pride. In this required scenario the wise Bozorgmehr will solve
the riddle and, at the same time, invent the nard which, when reciprocally
taken to the neighboring court, its nature will not be discovered so, in
short, it will be the Persians who will receive the Indian offerings.

Then, it is possible to see a classic history of evident nationalist bias.

Although it leaves the culture of the empire in a better position with
capital in Baghdad, at the same time it implies a recognition that will be
definitive: proto-chess is not a product of its own but is an Indian legacy.
It is possible to appreciate in the story another relevant circumstance: it
was a game in the two player version that is to say that we would be in
presence, even though no name is assigned, of the chaturanga.

We have already seen that nard is a practice whose cosmology is linked to

destiny, within the framework of the Zoroastrianism prevailing in the
country. As for the game that comes from India, it is characterized by its
earthly dimension, being considered as a battle simile. Consequently, in
this old text the dialectical tension that exists between fate and free will is
presented. It could be said that, while in the nard, particularly due to the
influence of the dice, a dimension that could be considered superior
exists, and therefore assimilable to the destination, in chess, where the
strategies of the players are decisive, it is the freedom that prevails.

The text above belongs to the genre of Book of manners or Ēwēn nāmag,59
where it talks about the ways of behaving, the skills, customs, arts and
sciences. By including proto-chess in them, their relevance is recognized
for the sake of the instruction of the princes to whom these writings are
usually dedicated. In that context, in another of the series, the Qābus-
Nāma, which is from the eleventh century, will be recommended: "Never
59
Source: Encyclopaedia Iránica, at http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/ain-nama.

29
play with drunkards and desperate men and quarrelsome people for it leads
to a brawl”.60

Chess was not only part of the education in the Persian court, but also it
will be in the case of the Muslim caliphates and in Christian Europe, so
that in all geographies the game will be prominent in the formation of the
members of the ruling class. Thus, sultans, emirs, kings, princes, knights
will practice it. The game, then, evolve: from being originally a playful
instrument that reflected the actions of a battle, is now part, by its
intrinsic values, of the educational formation. And, going one step further,
it will become an instrument for the romantic encounters, being included
in this new quality by the troubadours who boasted of playing the game
and used it in their songs.

Going back to what happened in the Persian world, there are other
outstanding manuscripts that collect stories that correspond to an era
that does not surpass century VII AD. On the one hand we have the
Ḵusraw ī Kawādān ud rēdak-ēw (The Page of Kusraw, the son of Kawad)
and the Kār-Nāmag ī Ardaxšīr ī Pābagān (The Book of the Deeds of
Ardashir, the son of Pābag),61 in which it is stressed that the virtues of the
sovereign include sapience in čatrang. In the first, it is said that in order
to increase his lineage he must include the memorization of two sacred
texts (Avesta and Zand), courses in calligraphy, philosophy, history and
rhetoric, as well as the development of skills in riding, different weapons,
musical training and astrology, and learning various games, in particular
chess (also the nard). And in Kārnāmag ... it is assured that Ardashir: “By
the help of Providence he became more victorious and warlike than them
all, on the polo and the riding (ground), at Chatrang (chess) (…) and in
(several) other arts”.62 It is clear that čatrang had already been imposed

60
Source: A Mirror for Princes: The Qābūs Nāma, by Kai Iskandar Kā'Ās Ibn (Reuben Levy, translator), E. P.
Dutton, London, 1951.
61
Strictly there it deals with three games: the chatrang; the new-ardaxšîr (nard) and the haštpay. The latter,
in the interpretation of the Italian researcher Antonio Panaino, could be the adaptation of the Indian
ashtāpada seen as autonomous entertainment and not as board; hence its phonetic approximation, at
http://history.chess.free.fr/papers/Panaino%20a.pdf.
62
A point that implies a certain anachronism is given by attributing to a third-century ruler of the Christian
era, Ardashir, wisdom about a game which, elsewhere in the story, it is asserted that it entered its

30
on society, not only in the form of a pastime but, more importantly, it had
acquired a great reputation in the intellectual and axiological fields.

Although the Persian Empire had fallen under Muslim rule long time ago,
at the end of the first millennium the renowned poet Ferdowsi, wishing to
claim a culture that could not be forgotten, produced the ambitious Šhāh-
nāma (Book of Kings).63 In it included stories about the glories of the old
Empire of Sassanid, with a specific chapter, based on the Vizārišn ī
catrang ud nihišn ī nēvardašēr, 'explanati, about the subject of the
entrance of the chess to Baghdad.

Given the influence of this work, this mention will be crucial in the
universally admission an episode in which the game is protagonist: that of
its entry in the time of Xusraw I from India. The chapter in question is
entitled: "How the Rajah of India sent the Chess Game to Nushirwám64"
and, leaving no doubt as to the origin of the retinue, asserts: "The envoy of
the king oh Hind hath come/ With elephants, with parasols, with horsemen/
of Sind65…” Many valuable gifts will be offered, including: “A chess-board
wrought with cunning workmanship”; later it is clarified that it came from
Qanuj, the capital of a kingdom of India. In this context it will also be
perfectly clear that a game for two players was present since among the
mentioned pieces, which were of teak and ivory, it is specifically pointed
out that of the vizier (wazír), which is absent in the modality for four
participants.

dominions only two centuries later. It could be speculated, in any case, that given his high valuation as
founder of the Sassanid Empire, this supposed knowledge of the game rather than correspond to a strictly
historiographic record, must be reinterpreted in symbolic code by its reverential tone, at
http://www.avesta.org/pahlavi/karname.htm.
63
At https://archive.org/stream/shahnama07firduoft#page/384/mode/2up/search/chess.
64
That expression means "Immortal Soul", name with which Xusraw I it was known. In this way is perfectly
determined the question on whether the chess entered under its mandate or the one of its grandson,
Xusraw II.
65
Although the name of Sindh currently belong to a province located in Pakistan, in ancient times was the
denomination of a very important region of the north of the Indian Territory. In fact that expression is
derived from Indo River, Sindhu in Sanskrit. The city of Kannauj (Khannajo, Qanuj or Kanyakubjade), from
where the entourage left for Baghdad, is nowadays in northern India, in the state of Uttar Pradesh. In its
time of splendor, during the Harsha Empire, it was the capital, during Century VII AD. When we refer to the
book dedicated to the emperor of that name, founder of the dynasty, we said that it was there where for
the first time the chaturanga is explicitly mentioned. So, everything converges, in time and place.

31
Image corresponding to the Šhāh-nāma in Persian. Source:
https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Shahnameh3-1.jpg.

Ferdowsí's account is well known: that of the challenge to Baghdad to

discover the nature of the game brought by the Indians and the reciprocal
further challenge when the nard is presented to the neighboring court,
with the overall result of the evidence of Persian superiority, then they
will receive tributes from the Rajah. A relevant detail is added, since it is
reported that in India it will be told the story of the origin of their proto-
chess, according to the legend of Gav and Talkhand. They are brothers
through the maternal link who aspired simultaneously to the royal
throne, resulting in an armed confrontation in which the youngest dies.
As the mother blamed by the fact to Gav, the court sages tried to show
him that had not been so, for which they represented on a board, to which
were added statuettes, the indication of how the forces had been
positioned in combat and the subsequent development of the events.

32
Thus chess is born, as the image of a battle, to model it and to serve as a
consolation for a mother who, however, continued to pour out her
grieving tears.

What stands out from Šhāh-nāma in reference to the entry of chess into
Baghdad, then, is not so much its originality or antiquity but the inclusion
of that quotation in the book that was conceived to rescue the expressions
of the Persian culture during its time of imperial glory. In that order the
Indian foundational theory on the origin of this practice, has an
unconditional, rigorous and prestigious ally in Ferdowsi. Thanks to its
registration, it is possible without controversial to establish a space and
temporal landmark about the game that is the oldest within this field of
analysis: that in the sixth century a proto-chess enters the capital of the
Sassanid Empire. No one doubts this, so there is a before and after from
that initiatory moment.

Sharing geography with the aforementioned author, but not his cultural
origin, the Arab Al-Masudi will be another wise man who will take care of
the subject of the chess, perhaps in merit to his ample intellectual
restlessness that had like central axis to try to register scientifically the
world as he was known in the tenth century in which lived both. One of
his main works is Kitab Murug al-dahab wa-ma'adin al-gawhar (The
golden meadows and mines of precious stones)66 where it is asserted that it
was during the reign of Bahlit in India that chess was invented.

The chronological sequence that is given there is somewhat imprecise: it

speaks of King Poros (Fur), which we know died at the end of the fourth
century BC; it is told that he was followed by a certain Daïsalem, who is
said to be the author of the famous book Kalila wa-Dimna,67 which would
have been composed after the third century BC, a king who ruled
according to Masudi for 120 years. Then Bahlit (Belhith), his successor,

66
An English translation of this work can be found at https://archive.org/details/historicalencycl00masrich.
67
In fact that is the name of the Arabic translation (adaptation) that is of the year 850. The original Indian
text is called Panchatranta (today its composition is not attributed to a king but to an Indian writer called
Visnú Sharma) and, before to be taken by the Muslims, will first be translated into Persian during the reign
of Xusraw I. In the middle Ages it will be known in Europe, more precisely in Spain, in the version of Alfonso
X the Wise.

33
should have reigned approximately between the 2nd and 1st century BC
and, consequently, this date would have to be when chess would have
made its appearance in India, that is in times and in the space of
Bactriana, a very important region to which we will make reference when
speak of the thesis that puts the accent of the origin of the game in a
process of cultural syncretism. Nevertheless Ferdowsi assures that Balhít
is a contemporary king to the Persian Ardashir I, reason why his reign,
and the invention of the chess, should be located in Century III AD.68

In this work the king's, administrator's and the officers' pieces

(representing the movements of the light or heavy troops in a battle) are
mentioned, it is assured that each one of them is consecrated to a
different star and is considered that the game serves to preserve the
empire since it can practice the war ploys at chess-board. In a qualitative
level, he recommends the game over the backgammon (which according
to the author was also invented in India and not in Persia, even before
chess), since in that one wins the intelligent and not the idiot.69 In
addition, with his mention in this text, he will become one of the first to
convey the well-known legend of the wise Sissa and the sidereal reward
in grains,70 which we will talk about later.

It is reported in the text that the son of the third Abbasid caliph
Muhammad al-Mahdi, Prince Ibrahim (779-839), who was a singer,
composer and poet, also played chess; he did it with Harun al-Rashid
(786-809), the fifth ruler of the dynasty, so it is understood that this

68
In the period between a few centuries before and after Christ, India had successive periods of domination
and the existence of different regimes and regencies, quite changing, which were attributed to partial
territories that only in the fourth century AD. will unify under the Gupta Empire. Thus, some references,
especially in old texts such as the one analyzed, may be imprecise and should be subject to revision by
historians specialized in that culture.
69
In this line of analysis, a Muslim thinker is also alluded to who distinguishes chess from backgammon
since, while in the former one can see support for the doctrine of justice, where the rule of the free will
ultimately prevail ; in the other the fatalism rules, since one cannot do anything to twist fate.
70
The required reward gives the astronomical figure of 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 which represents grains
of cereal (wheat, corn or rice, according to the different versions of the legend) from all regions in all times.
That number, according to Masudi, was very important to the Hindus since it considered that they explained
what would happen in future centuries and the influence that the stars have and also, thanks to him, one
could predict how long the human soul would live in this world.

34
became the first caliph to practice it. He also mentions three great Arab
players of his time: al-Súli; al-Mawardi and al-Adli. Al-Suli, whose
nickname was “al-Shitranji” or "The Chess Player", with what may have
been the first person in history to be directly defined by his fondness for
the game, devotes two works: one called "Nougat and fritters"; and
another in which, in addition to mentioning that he was the player who
dethroned from the condition of being the best of all in the kingdom to al-
Mawardi in the early tenth century, records that the caliph al-Muqtafi,
amazed by his abilities, exclaimed: "... delights me more that these flowers
and all that you describe!”, with which chess could be considered, from
this panegyric, the maximum of the pleasures.

Masudi identifies six types of chess that were known in their time. In
addition to the traditional, which came from India in 8x8 board, mentions:
a surface variant of 4 rows wide by 16 long with horses and pawns;
another in 10x10 layout where the piece called dababba (that moved like
the king although it could be captured) is included; Byzantine chess
practiced on a circular board of 64 squares (formed by 4 rings of 16
squares in each one of them); a second also circular, somewhat more
complex, called zodiacal chess which has 12 divisions (correspond to each
of the signs) and 7 pieces (refer to the 5 planets then known plus the sun
and the moon); and finally, organic chess, which was invented at the time
of the author, which is for two contestants, played on a board of 7x8, with
12 pieces, each of which represented the organs or members that allow
men feeling, speaking, listening, looking, touching and moving.

With these references of Masudi, and several others that existed

concordantly on the part of other authors of the Muslim culture, in any
case it is clear that they will embrace with passion a game that will
become one of the main pastimes and that will be part of the formation of
its leaders, despite some religious prejudices that were held from
extremely orthodox perspectives that, preoccupied with their imagery
and their possible association with money and the bets regime, came to
propose its prohibition. It is possible that its time of splendor is located
during the Umayyad dynasty, which reigned from 7th to 11th century,

35
based first in Damascus and then in Cordoba, a move that evidently
favored the spread of the game across Europe.

It could be assured that chess is of Indian origin, consequently, not so

much by probative contributions of its own records, but by the
recognition made from Old Persian and Muslim sources, that are
convincing, concordant and conclusive, basing from a literature
committed and with quality.

From a more contemporary and well-diverse approach, the

reasonableness of a paternity of this origin is also ratified based on a
modeling based on phylogenetic analysis according to the work owed to
Alex Kraaijeveld.71 This Dutch researcher, by extending to the field of
chess the use of a methodology that is typical when studying the
evolution of biological species, raises several alternative hypotheses as to
the original source of the game, comparing forty modalities that are
related (including two that come from the field of the fiction),
constructing the respective evolutionary trees. After the work is
concluded, in a highly probabilistic tone it is assured that the first
ancestor of chess would be no other than the chaturanga.

In summary chess would have an Indian origin according to Persian and

Muslim literary sources, which were then articulated and disseminated
vigorously by European scholars, mainly British. The same would be
evidenced after applying the methodology of phylogenetic analysis that
focuses on the internal structure of related games.

Under these conditions, it is clear the reasons why the paradigm that
continues to prevail is the Indian. It is that we are in the presence of a
foundational explanation that remains quite unshakeable despite the fact
that, especially in recent times, it has been the object of interpellation.

Moreover, the explanation of a source of chess with shared civilization

contributions, at most could take away the exclusivity of merit to India,

71
Source: Origin of chess - a phylogenetic perspective, by Alex R. Kraaijeveld, at
http://history.chess.free.fr/papers/Kraaijeveld%202000.pdf.

36
but not leave itself away from the center of our eyes. This could only
happen with the other paradigm that has been acquiring leadership,
which recognize paternity to Chinese culture, a subject to which we refer
immediately

37
CHINESE ORIGIN OF CHESS: THE ALTERNATIVE PARADIGM

The investigation into a probable Chinese origin of chess has been the
subject of a lesser degree of deepening with respect to a possible Indian
source. European researchers, particularly the British, did not ignore that
chess was present in China in very ancient times, but always
subordinated its existence to a previous one: that of chaturanga. In that
sense, a French researcher, Louis Dubois,72 argued in the nineteenth
century that the game would have entered China from India, relying on
that statement in the Haï-Piène, a great dictionary, which ensures that
income was, verified the mandate of the emperor Vou-ty in the year 537
of the Christian era.73

Without even entering into the analysis of determining the order of

priority in that was verified the sequence of transmission between the
Indian and Chinese cultures, it can be noticed that, sharing an ancient
tradition, the games in both cases were originally raised as similes of a
battle. Although at the same time they could be ascribed to higher planes:
metaphysical, philosophical and religious.

In this perspective, according to the English sinologist Joseph Needham,74

who could be considered in modern times the precursor in assigning the
paternity of chess to xiang-qi (still practiced massively in the country),
this game had a ritual nature. In this context the board that is used, most
probably intimately linked to the surface where the ancient liubo75 was
developed, could be seen at the same time like a calendar and could
function as an oracle, that is to say it responded to the ancestral ones
fortune tellers techniques.

72
Source: Recherches sur le jeu des échecs, by Louis Dubois, at
http://www.bmlisieux.com/curiosa/jeuechec.htm.
73
It is very possible that the reference is to the emperor Wu Di, of whom it is spoken later, reason why that
dating could be slightly incorrect.
74
Source: Thoughts on the origin of chess, Joseph Needham, 1962, at
http://www2.kenyon.edu/Depts/Religion/Fac/Adler/Reln270/Needham-chess.htm.
75
The wise Confucius (550-470 BC) is credited with this reference: "It is difficult for a man who always has a
full stomach to put his mind into operation. And the players of liubo and weiqi? Even playing these games is
better than being idle". The wei-qi is the antecedent of the go, the other great millennial game that, like the
chess (and the xiang-qi!), transcended the boundaries of time.

38
The xiang-qi is explicitly mentioned for the first time in the year 569 of
the Christian era in a text titled Xiang Jing (Xiang Game Manual),
attributed to the Emperor Wu Di (561-578) of the north76 Zhōu dynasty,
who would be in addition the inventor of the game, with prologue of
Weng Pao that is the only part that is conserved, of which there exists an
English translation due to Dennis Leventhal.77

We are in presence of the first treatise referred to any of the known

proto-chess. Compared with the earlier Indian and Persian texts that
could have a similar didactic objective, it is much more precise since, for
example, in its own title the game is mentioned. Although it is not known
in detail its content, it is supposed that it had technical concepts and, at
the same time it was discussed on the implicit high values of the game
from the philosophical, cultural and also moral perspectives. In that
order, for instance, it is suggested that when one has a position of honor
we must be humble and, always on a plane of elevation, ensures that the
pieces represent bodies of the cosmos.

In the same vein, a few years later Hsiang Hsi fu appears a manuscript
that is by Yu Hsin, where the focus is again on the fact that the emperor
Wu Di is owed a game that symbolizes all the phenomena of existence
human.

In attempting to determine the origin of the xiang-qi, it is usually held that

it is derived from another older autochthonous game, the liubo.78 But

76
For those who hold the Indian theory, this temporary location is considered another test that favors its
position since, at this time, there was the maximum expansion of Buddhism in China, a religion that had
entered from the neighboring territory.
77
At http://www.banaschak.net/pdf/thechessofchina.pdf.
78
Its existence goes back to at least the fourth century BC although, for instance the historian Sima Qian
(145-90 BC) in Shǐjì (Historical records), the first systematic approach to Chinese history, mentions
allegorically the episode of Emperor Shang Wu Yi, who ruled between 1198 and 1194 BC who, very believed
in his omnipotence, wanted to play the liubo against God himself. This game had wide diffusion, but it lost
popularity towards the century VI AD, just when it gained strength the xiang-qi. Liubo means "six sticks", its
rules are rather unknown, although there are efforts to reconstruct them. It would be a racing game, that
had like pieces a general and five pawns (it has even been assured that they were actually fish, stones and
owls). Note the correspondence with the xiang-qi where there are only five pawns and not eight as in other
versions of proto-chess. As the main square of this game was called water, it is believed that from there
derives the row assigned to the river on the board in which Chinese chess is practiced.

39
Cazaux79 disagrees with this thesis because, although he does not rule out
some kind of influence, since, for example, both are disputed on the same
type of surface, he argues preferentially that in any case the liubo
operated like a contribution in the syncretic conception of chess, along
with the ashtāpada and the petteia, so that its link with the xiang-qi would
be more indirect.

Statuettes probably from the first to the second century of the Christian era representing two players
disputing a game of liubo. Source:
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liubo#/media/File:Met,_Earthenware_figures_playing_liubo,_Han_Dyna
sty.JPG.

There are several possible translations to the ideogram that represents

the term xiang-qi (hsiang-chi), being one of the best known, although it
would be linguistically not very correct, that of elephant chess, referring
strangely in the name of the game to a piece that, participating in the
battle, is not the main one. For several sinologists, however, the most
appropriate translation is symbolic chess or image chess.

At the moment it is necessary to emphasize that qi means “game” (it is the

same suffix that appears for example in wei-qi), although also more

79
The works of this historian can be consulted at http://history.chess.free.fr/.

40
specifically it is associated it to chess. It was also indicated that xiang-qi
can be translated as ivory chess (alluding to the material that pieces made
of, or, again, because of its link with elephant) or chancellor chess
(alluding in that case to one of the main pieces).

David Li adds two more: as the term is so phonetically close to ciang that
means “general”, understands that we are in the presence of the general's
chess (the main piece in combat); and another more suggestive, game to
capture Xiang, which is the name of the commander of the losing army in
the founding battle of the empire to be built under the dominions of the
Han Dynasty.

It should be borne in mind that, in addition to shaping a playful structure

in which a battle is represented, in the xiang-qi we are also in the
presence of an agonal struggle (or should we say complementarity?), of
Taoist concepts of yin and yang (Heaven and Earth) that come from the
millennial I Ching. The link is quite narrow if one considers that they are
64 the squares of the board, number that perfectly agrees with the one of
the hexagrams that form the base of the system of ideas of The Book of
the Mutations, that refer to the system of the old Chinese calendar as I
associate in the first century BC Jing Fang.

Image of the 64 hexagrams of I Ching (it is possible to note its correspondence with the
board). Source: https://www.pinterest.es/pin/306667055855444191/.

41
Chinese chess deserved little attention from Western glances in earlier
times, perhaps because of a certain closure of that culture, which did not
favor foreign scrutiny and thus be the subject of a systematic
investigation, contrasting with the Indian version of chess. For more there
was some kind of additional difficulty to ascribe to the xiang-qi, as proto-
chess, for the obvious differences in its design: it is not disputed in a
board of 8x8 but in one of 8x9 (there is in its central space a horizontal
line called river that looks something extravagant); the pieces do not have
the form of statuettes, but they are circular tokens (which can make it
confuse with some version of go); are located in the joints, and not in the
center of the squares; the number of pawns is five, instead of eight, and
there are two pieces that are absolutely atypical: the archer and the
catapult.

However, when delving into its essential characteristics, it is appreciated

that the points of contact are much more relevant than dissimilarities: it
is played by two persons; the board is 64 squares; the objective is to catch
the leader of the rival force (the general80 who, as another particularity,
can only move in a small space called the palace); there are 16 pieces for
each participant; many are idiosyncratic: pawns; horses; elephants;
chariots, that have the same movements that they acquire, for example, in
the chaturanga.

A legitimate question, first timidly drawn, but which has gained more
strength over time, is whether the xiang-qi is a derivative of Indian chess
or whether the reverse situation occurred. More recently, another
suggestive alternative has been drawn: that they may have emerged
concomitantly, in time, and of course independently, in space. In any case,

80
In the chaturanga the main piece is the King. The same thing happens in almost all the previous and later
proto-chess of the whole Eastern tradition and also European. But the Chinese case is different because,
what was expected does not happen: the Emperor does not appear as chessmen. This has an explanation:
according to a legend quoted by Pujol Nicholas, originally the xiang-qi contemplated it but it stopped
happening from the moment in which an Emperor of the real world, when learning that in a game one of the
players had captured to the opposite counterpart, decided to execute them both. An instinct of survival of
future game enthusiasts in the context of the fear of the sovereign, made the Emperor disappear as a figure
of the xiang-qi, symbolically increasing its relevance since its absence should not be interpreted as an
omission but as a sign of respect reverential.

42
the Chinese version of the game undoubtedly forms part of a family that
has a common trunk, from which chess will be derived as it will be known
later. What is still undetermined is whether it was the initial or
intermediate link in the respective chain of creation.

The findings after further study may have unexpected consequences:

researchers who once embraced the Indian theory, mutated their
positions, and now understand that it is the Chinese who are owed the
paternity of chess. This has happened, for example, with the Macedonian
Pavle Bidev81 who change his ideas basically due of the fact that the first
text of each culture with references to chess is from the year 569 in the
Chinese case (that of Wan Pao) and in 621 in the Indian (that of Bāṇa).82

Image of the board showing the starting position in the xiang-qi. Source:
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajedrez_chino.

81
Source: How I reorientated my chess beliefs; Yu Igalo, 1987.
82
Bidev adds another detail when he says that, in the moment, in what Emperor Harsha dies in India in 648,
there was only a proto-chess: the chaturanga. In change, in the moment that his Chinese counterpart Tsung
died two years later, there were three different versions; in the context of the Tang Dynasty (618-907),
when Su-Ku-Siang King publishes Su-Ku-Siang (Manual of the three games Siang), so it shows.

43
Always looking for literary backgrounds with mentions to the game,
Leventhal points out that, on a poetic level, The Man of P'a-ch'iung83
appears, where it is stated that, after an extraordinary frost, only two
giants trees of tangerines survived seeing that, in the interior of its fruits,
it is possible to see two elderly people who were very concentrated
playing hsiang-hsi.84 The author of this beautiful story is Niu Seng-ju (780-
848), who became Emperor Wu Zong's prime minister of the powerful
Tang dynasty, who is also owed Hsü-kuai Lu (Accounts of Mysteries and
the Supernatural) where the pieces that are used in the game are
described, that were of gold and bronze.

The terms xiang and qi, although separate, had been much mentioned
before, it is believed that for the first time in Chu Ci (Songs of Chu), of Qu
Yuan (the Homer of the Orient), text that would come from the third
century before of Christ: since there in this text is also reference to the
liubo (played with pieces of ivory and a bamboo die), it is not entirely
clear if it is considering the existence of differentiated games or instead
only allude to one of them. Later mentions, such as one found in Shuo
Yüan (Garden of Stories),85 work from the 2nd century BC, should also be
considered as inconclusive.

The terms xiang and qi, although separate, had long been mentioned for
the first time in Chu Ci (The Songs of Chu) by Qu Yuan and Song Yu, which
are from the third century BC. There they appear next to the reference to
the liubo, reason why it is not completely clear if it is spoken in that case
of differentiated games or only of one. Later allusions, as in Shuo Yüan,
from the first century BC, are also inconclusive.86

The Chinese professor David Li, in his award-winning 1998 book in which
he discusses in detail the origin of his country's idiosyncratic chess, has
allowed himself to claim that the xiang-qi goes back to the third century

83
It is the name of a region in the present Chinese province of Sichuan.
84
This is another way of denoting the game of xiang-qi.
85
It is a text presented to King Liu Xiang in which this reference is included: "Meng Changjun played Xiangqi
and danced with Mrs. Zheng".
86
Shuo Yuan is a text that was presented to King Liu Xiang in the 17th year of the pre-Christian era, which
includes the reference: "Meng Changjun played Xiangqi and danced with Mrs. Zheng".

44
BC, that is, to a time in which there were intense fights between
neighboring kingdoms that were the prolegomenon of the unification of
the territory. This is a period called "The Warring States", in which the
episode was given that has as its axis General Han Xin (who served King
Liu Bang, future emperor of the country) who more exactly, in the course
of the hard winter of years 204-203 in the pre-Christian era, could have
invented it to distract the troops and thus alleviate the adverse conditions
prevailing, while his army was preparing to give a battle that ultimately
would be decisive.87 Its design would have been inspired by the liubo88
and wei-ki. However it is admitted too, perhaps more appropriately, that
although the game should have been subsequent to those events, dating
them probably in times already installed in the Christian era, the image
that in any case could have had in mind at the time when the game was
conceived, it could have been precisely that battle considered epic and
foundational.

Indeed, already in 1793 Eyles Irwin89 had raised, not only the possibility
of the Chinese origin of chess but also associated its initial milestone to a
battle that was disputed "about two centuries before the Christian era"
which was headed by Hansing (Han Xin), who is syndicated as the
inventor of the game. The well-known Irish writer adds that from these
territories the subsequent sequence of transmission of the game would
have been given: to the west, first to Persia, and only later to India, by the
silk route; and to the east, successively, to Korea and Japan.90 Moreover,

87
Note that this story has many similarities with that usually supported when it comes to narrating the
possibility that chess had been invented in the context of the site of Troy.
88
Li locates the origins of game of liubo by tracing itself back to very old times, perhaps to the XXIII century
before Christ.
89
Irwin, who was born in Calcutta, India, worked for the British in the East. This thesis was sustained in a
letter addressed to the Count of Charlemont, the President of the Royal Irish Academy, written in the city of
Canton on March 14, 1793. He speculated that the Chinese game went to Persia where, In addition to
introducing to the vizier as a piece, the river will be removed from the board, which was resolved taking into
account the dry nature prevailing in that region, at https://archive.org/details/jstor-30078706. In the same
sense, a few years earlier (in 1789) the English lawyer Daines Barrington had been issued an article favoring
the theory that chess entered Tibet and Hindustan from China (Source: British Miscellany and Chess Player's
Chronicle, Volume 1, R. Hastings, 1841).
90
On the point Sam Sloan, an American scholar who also plays xiang-qi very well, will be even more precise.
Sharing the idea of Chinese primacy, understands that the routes of propagation will take place in all
possible directions: to Japan, Lao, Cambodia, Korea, Burma, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia (and through the

45
there is the exceptionality of indicating a precise date of invention: the
year 174 BC.

Li's position is acidly questioned by the German researcher Peter

Banaschak91 who considers that we are in the presence of a mere story,
eventually very well told (and perhaps persuasive) that, however, is not
adjusted to the reality of events because it does not rely on
historiographical or scientific elements, so, in any case, it is in the context
of a fictional terrain.

Images of a game of xiang-qi (and a western observer, the author of this work), at
Tiantan Gongyuan Park (near the Temple of Heaven), Beijing, October 2013. Pictures
taken by Hugo Orlando Lopez.

Beyond this critical exercise, in another work92 of the German researcher,

now assuming a proactive tone, after studying the term xiang-qi carefully,
he analyzes punctually the different chronologies in which the
appearance of the game in China could have been verified. Some very

island of Java he will arrive in Sumatra), by the eastern side; and, through Uzbekistan, it would be
generalized by the silk route to Afghanistan and Persia, and then arrive to the Arab world (and later to
Europe), to Ethiopia and to India, which, as we see, remains in a range completely peripheral. In this regard
Sloan comes to speculate that in the Indian subcontinent the game entered perhaps more than a millennium
after its invention in China. In doing so, it is asked how, having texts in Sanskrit dating back to 1500 BC, there
are no references about any proto-chess in India until only more recently periods. Source: The origin of
chess by Sam Sloan, at http://www.anusha.com/origin.htm.
91
Source: A story well told is not necessarily true, at
http://www.banaschak.net/schach/ligenealogyofchess.htm.
92
Source: Facts on the origin of Chinese chess (Xiangqi 象棋), at
http://history.chess.free.fr/papers/Banaschak%201997.pdf.

46
distant ones discard them of plane, by their temporary inconsistency, like
the one that go back to times of legendary emperors, such the case of
Shennong (he governed between centuries XXVIII to XXVII before Christ),
according to the idea exposed in the XIV century by a Buddhist monk
named Nianchang, or who focuses on his successor Huangdi, the famous
Yellow Emperor, creator of the game according to Zhao Buzhi, who lived
between the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Both hypotheses seem to
correspond rather to the field of the mythological.

Consider also the idea of Li who, as we know, suggested that the game
arose in China in the third century BC. But Banaschak decant, in a great
leap of time, in a last one, which places things in the sixth century, already
in the Christian era, noting that in any case the xiang-qi is not original of
the country but is an adaptation that it could come from either the Indian
chaturanga or the Persian čatrang.

However, and to show that the hypothesis of a Chinese origin of chess

necessarily remains open, it should be remembered that the first texts of
that origin, in which reference is made to xiang-qi, are earlier and far
more specific than those coming from India they referred to the
chaturanga. On the other hand, the archaeological findings in both
territories are not too conclusive and, those that have appeared in the
context of the silk route can eventually belong for both a theory (the
Indian) and the other (the Chinese). To make the situation more complex,
it could even be speculated that both games, instead of being
interdependent, and therefore admitting an order of priority among them,
could have arisen isolated and concomitantly. With this, those who
support a Chinese origin of chess, still have a wide open space to strength
their central theory, in the framework of a primordial question that is far
from having being able to be solved.

For the moment, let us stay near a beautiful poem that the Argentine
writer Alberto Laiseca93 dedicated to xiang-qi, which begins: "In the chess

93
Regarding the literary work with chess-like connotation of this extraordinary writer who was born in
Rosario, it can be consulted a work of my authorship: “Alberto Laiseca, el ´erudito en cosas raras´ que nos
conduce desde su poética al milenario ajedrez chino” (“Alberto Laiseca, the ´erudite in rare things´ who leads

47
of my land there is a cannon. / It does not simply attack the adversary. /
Never something so direct. / Take as an excuse an intermediate chessman; /
regardless of whether it is comrade or invasive value. / Because the cannon
doesn´t serve to shoot against the walls, but over them... ".94

These verses correspond to “Ajedrez de país central” (“Chess of Central

Country”). And, in fact, China has really been, at all times, a Central
Country! So central that chess could come to recognize, some day that
may not be so distant, it was in that immense and millennial territory that
once lit the flame of a game that captivated Humanity.

EGYPTIAN ORIGIN OF CHESS: AN INCONSISTENT HYPOTHESIS

A probable Egyptian origin of the chess in principle is based on classic

stories corresponding to ancient Greece that had much influence in the
Middle Ages, and even beyond, where the myth is held that its creation is
due to the god Tot, that of the wisdom, a deity who had authority over the
other gods of the pantheon corresponding to that civilization.

From that ancestral civilization it is that the Greeks inherited it, although
it is necessary to clarify that the table game by then more popular of
these, in rigor was the petteia, the one that hardly can be considered a
form of proto-chess. Although, and we will see later, as some view, it
could be located, along with other games, as a possible contribution to the
creation of a different and superior practice that could be considered as a
relatively direct antecedent of chess.

Plato in Phaedrus, a work written in 370 BC, in the context of one of his
well-known invocations to Socrates, assures that chess (petteia) came
from the neighboring culture, locating the events in the fifth and fourth
centuries BC. The passage in question says specifically: "I heard then that
at Naucratis, in Egypt, was one of the ancient gods of that country, the one

us to his poetic to the ancient Chinese chess”), at http://ajedrez12.com/2017/02/10/alberto-laiseca-el-

erudito-en-cosas-raras-que-nos-conduce-desde-su-poetica-al-milenario-ajedrez-chino/.
94
“En el ajedrez de mi tierra existe un cañón. /No ataca simplemente al adversario. /Jamás algo tan directo.
/Toma como excusa un trebejo intermedio; /con independencia de si es camarada o valor invasor. /Porque el
cañón no sirve para disparar contra las murallas, sino por sobre ellas...”. Thus reads the original text in
Spanish language.

48
whose sacred bird is called the ibis, and the name of the god himself was
Theuth. He it was who invented numbers and arithmetic and geometry and
astronomy, also chess95 and dice, and, most important of all, letters... ".

The maximum efforts in modern times to support the thesis of an

Egyptian origin of chess were made in the 19th century by the Spanish
(Catalan) researcher Josep Brunet i Bellet.96

Image of the original edition of the work of Brunet i Bellet. Source:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:El_ajedrez_;_investigaciones_sobre_su_origen
_1890_Brunet.jpg.

At the same time of warning certain weaknesses of the Indian explanation

(somehow it was proposed to break the predominant paradigm), he tried
to construct an explanatory alternative, placing the focus of attention on

95
Of course, we have to consider the various translations. In some of them chess is said when in others the
game of checkers is mentioned. In any case, Socrates, in the respective dialogue, speaks concretely of
petteia: in the original language it is said “petteías te kai kybeías”, at
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0174%3Atext%3DPhaedrus%
3Apage%3D274 and http://www.filosofia.org/cla/pla/img/azf02257.pdf.
96
A good profile of his figure can be seen in Josep Brunet i Bellet (1818-1905), a multifaceted character ...
and in love with chess, at http://clubescacssantandreu.blogspot.com.ar/2014/04/josep-brunet-i-bellet-1818-
1905-un_24.html.

49
the Egyptian culture. In that context, he came to suppose that not only the
game had that origin, but that the route of further diffusion was well
different from that which was conventionally established. For that author
passed from Egypt to Greece and Rome and only later to India and Persia
(in the time of Alexander the Great).
In this explanatory route was supported, in addition to some literary
references as the alluded from Plato, in some pictorial images and the
finding of statuettes in excavations made in the domains of Egyptian
culture that had great antiquity which were ascribed, then it would check
that improperly, to some kind of proto-chess.
After all it was possible to elucidate that the construction of this
argumentative line was something forced being clear that, beyond the
intentions, at least it was verified in the case a confusion of games. It is
that, when the ancient Greek philosophers talked about the matter, their
outlooks relapsed into the petteia, a board game that in itself is far from
being considered a kind of chess. The same could be said of the Roman
ludus latrunculorum to which the famous poet Ovid referred in very
earlier times.97
In concordant sense, the images found in murals and archaeological
pieces correspond to the senet (zn.t n.t ḥˁb in ancient Egyptian), a very
ancient game, one of the first to be given by humanity that, due to its
characteristics, morphology, system of rules and its own conception,
cannot be considered in a more or less direct linked to chess. An
association can only be established between them within the framework
of a chain of many links in which the senet occupies an initial space while
in that sequence the chess appears in a much later segment.

97
When Ovid (43 BC-17 AD) mentions the activities that beautiful women could do, of course he refers to
the ludus latronculorum and not to chess, despite very free translations such as the following: “I should wish
her to play chess with skill and caution. One piece against two is bound to go under. A king that is battling,
separated from his queen is liable to be taken; and his rival is often compelled to retrace his steps. Again,
when the ball bounces against the broad racquet, you must only touch the one you intend to serve. There is
another game divided into as many parts as there are months in the year. A table has three pieces on either
side; the winner must get all the pieces in a straight line. It is a bad thing for a woman not to know how to
play, for love often comes into being during play”. Source: The art of love (Ars Amatoria), Ovid, Book III, Part
VIII: Learn, Dancing, Games, translated by A. S. Kline, at http://www.sacred-
texts.com/cla/ovid/lboo/lboo60.htm. Ovid mentions in Latin latronum proelia lude that is to say "the game
of the battle of the thieves" or our ludus latrunculorum. The key phrase of the passage continues to be
"Ludere: ludendo saepe paratur amor", that is: "Play: playing always brings love", at
http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/ovid/ovid.artis3.shtml.

50
Brunet i Bellet based him in some iconic images correspond to senet,
probably the oldest that are available when it comes to showing
evidences of ancestral pastimes. In this sense, when the Catalan traced his
theory, a finding in the tomb of Thebes was known which corresponds to
the Pharaoh Ramses III (he ruled in the XII century BC) and another still
earlier, corresponding to the tomb of Queen Nefertari (she lived in the
14th century BC). It existed also a mortuary cloth, sewn in gazelle skin,
which would have belonged to Queen Isi-em-Kheb (in the time of
Solomon that is to say circa 1000 BC), in which it is possible to see a game
of table and several pieces with the shape precisely of gazelle, and also of
goose and beetle.

The image of Nefertari is convincing in the sense that the person to whom
the tomb is consecrated is playing a game with pieces in form of
statuettes, one of the first expressions of that type (previously, simpler
game figures with for example circle shape), which respond to the senet,
which is known to have an eschatological connotation since it was
practiced, as evidenced in the case, in the moment of the transit from the
earthly world to that of transcendence. That game, then, links its
protagonist with the final destiny, with the beyond. In the same way, it is
known that another pharaoh, Tutankhamun (14th century BC), had four
games of senet in his pyramid (mausoleum) to play during eternity and
that a century later an artisan (sign that the game was not only
circumscribed to the ruling class), named Sennedyem, appears in
inscriptions in his tomb with his wife playing the game.

In any case, the senet was associated with practices of divination in the
form of sortilege, since it represents the Judgment of Osiris (the Egyptian
god of death), the victory of the deceased and his entry into the Duat, the
underworld in which the souls of the dead had to wander, avoiding the
curses and being subjected to tests among which evidently was the need
to play the senet. The game is in fact mentioned in the Book of the Dead,
millenary funerary text dating back from the sixteenth century BC. In its
chapter XVII is presented a deceased person practicing a board game (in
some translations it is incorrectly said to be that of checkers), while
believing to remain a living soul in the presence of Osiris.

51
Image of a painting in the tomb of the Egyptian Queen Nefertari. Source:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Maler_der_Grabkammer_der_Nefertari_003.j
pg.

By the way, senet means "passage" or "transit", a clear signal of a path

from this terrestrial space to the definitive one. However, according to
some studies, this would not be the original game with the same
connotations, due it could have a close relationship with a previous one,
the mehen ("the God of board games"), an Egyptian modality, of which the
senet it would have inherited the metaphysical message linked to the
world placed in beyond.98

After the moment in which the work of Brunet i Bellet appeared, other
discoveries will be made that are also quite old, although they always
correspond to a game that cannot be considered a proto-chess. For
example, on one of the walls of the tomb of Hesy, pharaoh of the Third
Dynasty (c.2650 BC), one can see a painting showing pieces in the form of

98
This is expressed by Benedikt Rothöhleren in Mehen, God of the Boardgames, article published in Board
games studies 2, 1999, at http://ex.ludicum.org/publicacoes/bgsj/2.pdf.

52
statuettes. And it would also some hieroglyphics from Merknera's tomb
(3,300 to 2,700 BC) resemble the board as well as those that appear in
fragments of tables corresponding to the First Dynasty (c. 3100 BC).

It must be said once and for all. Although the senet could under some
perspective be considered a source of all subsequent table games,
including chess,99 it is absolutely forced try of establishing a close link
between them: the differences are much more important than the
similarities. For example, although both games are for two players, the
senet is played on a board of 30 squares arranged in three rows (well
different from the classic of 64 squares that characterizes all the proto-
chess that are known); the number of pieces, although there is no
absolute clarity in this regard, could be between 10 and 20 (and not 16 as
in the other case); its mobility, at least in its primitive versions, is similar
(and not differentiated as in chess), and the main objective is limited to
removing the ones from the board before the opponent does (instead of
catching, or giving check mate to the main rival piece). It is then a race
game and not one of strategy as evidently chess has always been, even in
its ancestral versions.100
It is necessary to recognize that the senet had some essential
characteristics that soon will be seen repeatedly in the diverse known
proto-chess: it was played on a chequered board; pieces were used in the
form of statuettes; its practice had a cosmogonic implication.101 However,
it is necessary to discard out of hand his direct relationship with chess
both for its lack of intrinsic correlation, as we pointed out, as for the
geographical and temporal disconnection with any eventual sequence of
diffusion of the game, if we consider the moment of entry of the proto-
chess to Baghdad. It is also inconsistent with the times in which the first

99
It is possible to trace a hypothetical line of inter-generational and inter-spatial transmission of games that
begins in the senet and continues with the Real (Sacred) Game of Ur, a Babylonian entertainment that is
from the middle of the second millennium BC. In the last one each player has seven pieces, identical amount
of the Sumerian gods and the floors of the temple tower dedicated to the sovereign Marduk (which is
supposed to be that of Babel). The Sacred Game of Ur has been considered (Schädler) predecessor of four-
player chess and with the use of dice. Source: On the Rules for the Royal Game of Ur, Irving Finkel, at
https://www.academia.edu/15173145/On_the_Rules_for_the_Royal_Game_of_Ur.
100
At this point we can follow the taxonomy presented by another Catalan, the contemporary scholar
Gaspar Pujol Nicolau, for whom the senet is a game of the type of path (the chips move in a one-dimensional
direction), in any case more related to ludo or to the backgammon, and not the kind of space games (it
could be said of strategy) to which all possible chess variants must be ascribed.
101
Some archaeologists claim that the Egyptians believed that they should face some deity to the senet in its
transit towards the beyond, having much to see the result of the game with the final destiny of each person.

53
traces of any theory about the origin of chess could have been verified, of
which there is evident documentary evidence, as studied in each case.

Image of a game of senet that may correspond to the pharaoh Amenhotep III (century
XIV BC). Source: https://clevergames.wordpress.com/2009/05/02/board-games-
history-senet-the-egyptians-ancestor-of-chess/.

Its importance in Egyptian culture was so great that it is named in the

Book of the Dead, a millennial funerary text dating back to the sixteenth
century BC, in which chapter XVII is presented to a deceased person
practicing a board game, which in some translations are said to be that of
draughts but undoubtedly is the senet, while he believes to remain a living
soul in the presence of the god Osiris.102 In fact senet means "passage" or
"transit", from this earthly world to that of transcendence.

Definitely, the direct interconnection of the senet with chess should be

discarded, by its lack of intrinsic correlation,103 with what loses
sustenance the Egyptian foundational theory. In addition, in the
hypothetical case that chess came from that geography, it is easy to see a

102
At http://www.holybooks.com/wp-content/uploads/Egyptian-Book-of-the-Dead.pdf.
103
It is now well known that senet is related to the Royal Game of Ur, the Roman tabula, and backgammon,
rather than chess. It is that your objective is to remove the pieces from the board before the opponent does,
following a series of rules, advancing the pieces themselves and capturing and blocking the opponent's. It is
a game for two opponents disputed on a board of three parallel rows with ten square squares each and, of a
number of pieces that, depending on the variant of the game, can be between ten and twenty in total.

54
disconnection both geographically and temporally taking into account the
episode of the entry of proto-chess to Baghdad and, in the same way, with
any complementary theory that is retrospective.
Is that the Egyptian civilization was more closely related to ancient
Greece and Rome, than to Persia and India. It is that the chronological
jump that is verified from the moment to which the images of the senet
are able to be assigned with respect to the times in which there are
records of some proto-chess in the mentioned India and Persia, or in the
Arab world and eventually the most distant China, it is gigantic. Under
these conditions, no sequence of dissemination based on Egypt is
plausible.
So, in addition to its interconnection with the Babylonian game of what
might be relatively contemporary (it is even speculated that they could
have appeared independently), in any case the senet may well have
influenced the emergence of Greek petteia and Roman ludus
latrunculorum. Recognizing this, the discussion of the link between chess
and the senet would be able to reopen for a simple and exclusive reason:
as we suggested, and will develop later, there are theories that the Greek
board game was an input for a proto-chess that would later emerge in the
course of the silk route. In this context, no longer directly and mistakenly
as Brunet i Bellet argued, just more indirectly now, it is possible to
contemplate the possibility of influence of the ancient senet in the
subsequent games that led to our chess.
Under these conditions, the efforts of Brunet and Bellet, valuable in their
interpellation against the prevailing theory (the Indian one), are far from
having served to cement an alternative paradigm. In fact, no subsequent
researcher will follow a trace that, at some point, for a short time, came to
have some base. His theory, in short, ended up being insufficient and
incorrect in its explanatory powerful.

55
ORIGIN OF CHESS IN MYTHS, LEGENDS AND THE FICTIONAL WORLD
So far we have seen the most common theories about the origin of chess.
Only the Indian and Chinese sources remain intact; but those that have as
axis to Persia and Egypt should be discarded. Let´s advance in this
chapter with other hypotheses that are also possible, beyond that they
are not necessarily ascribed to circumstances supported by
historiographic data.
So far, we have gone through the most common theories about the origin
of chess. It could be concluded for the moment that only the Indian and
Chinese sources remain intact, being discarded, on the other hand, those
whose axis is Persia and Egypt. The French researchers Jaques Dextreit
and Norbert Engel provide a taxonomy to which the various explanations
about the origin of chess can be ascribed. In his opinion, they can
correspond to the following casuistry: 1) death of the father (chess results
in that case a therapeutic remedy); 2) preparation for war (due the
lessons that are derived from the game); 3) the substitution of war (its
modeling which, in a certain sense, contributes to channeling aggressive
impulses); 4) the possibility of distraction (pure social entertainment); 5)
the idea of intellectual combat (contributing to mental training); 6)
allegory as a moral lesson (by appealing to the axiological field it provides
a framework of references of desired behaviors); 7) the myth of the
Sorrowful Mother (suffering woman who sees in the game a possibility of
consolation in the face of irreparable losses).
We have already seen that, although the origin of chess in India and China
had underlying elements corresponding to the cosmogonic and religious
fields, it was basically conceived as an image of a more earthly situation,
one of a warlike nature. On the other hand, in the context of myths,
legends and contributions that correspond to the fictional world, the
game was nourished by stories from other registers, which enriched it
powerfully, beyond its veracity or verisimilitude, since they linked it with
events cultural relevant of various geographies and times, showing that
chess was always present in the consideration of peoples.
There are entirely varied hypotheses in this sense. If Plato, as we saw,
came to claim that the Egyptian god Thoth was the inventor of the game,
he too speculated that it could have been the wise Solomon, the son of
King David, in Hebrew culture. In this same direction, the German
historian Egbert Meissenburg poses as a possible source to the men of

56
Elam, from whom the Semites descend. The British James Cristie in 1801
argued that they could have been the Scythians despite (or just thanks
to?) of being a nomadic people. In Ancient Greece it was also awarded to
Palamedes104 (the inventor of the alphabet and dice), primal event that
would have happened on the island of Crete during the siege of Troy
(13th century BC); He was also credited the Achaean hero Diomede as the
creator in the framework of Greek mythology. Of those territories, it was
maintained that it was its inventor Alexander the Great and, even, the
philosopher Aristotle. It was put it at the head of Hermes, the herald of
the gods who, among other qualities, was the patron of the athletes (and
who, in another coincidence that has chess as a backdrop, was correlated
with the Egyptian god Thoth). And a Winchester monk, Alexander
(Alexandri) Neckam, a man who attributes himself to the first written
reference on the soil of England, an 1180 text called De scaccis written in
Latin, imagines, in addition to a variant of the game in which the pawns
occupied the first row while the major pieces did in the second, which
was Ulysses the inventor of chess.

For all these theses, which, being so diverse, converge in the same
geographic space, the possibility of an alleged origin of chess in the
beautiful Hélade has been raised. On that point, it is clear that the
references correspond to the quintessential table game of ancient Greece,
which was the petteia, the same that is believed that Alexander the Great
should have taken to the East on his trip that conducted him to India in
the century III BC. Let's say that, because of its simplicity, although it
could have been a civilizing contribution to the creation of a new hobby,
this game should in no way be considered a previous prototype of chess.

When we talk about petteia, sometimes not only is a reference to a game

but also a board where it is possible to play different practices, such as
the so-called poleis (pollux for the Romans). Fragments of them and some
pieces were found in excavations of Troy. Although petteia´s rules are not
known exactly, it is believed that black and white stones (these were the
ones that started) were used on an 8x8 board. The objective was to
capture or immobilize the opposing pieces, which were sixteen per side,
not having one that had greater value. They moved orthogonally and were

104
Source: An Enquiry into the ancient Greek game supposed to have been invented by Palamedes, at
https://books.google.com.ar/books?id=jftdAAAACAAJ&printsec=frontcover&hl=es&source=gbs_ge_summar
y_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false.

57
captured in being surrounded by rival stones, located in both directions in
direct continuity. The somewhat more complex game Roman ludus
latrunculorum, in addition to the pawns, presented a figure of Dux or
leader, is nevertheless his heir. Many ancient writings refer to both
games, from Plato to Oviedo. When they were made in the Middle Ages
translations from the original languages to the romances, both the petteia
and the ludus latrunculorum were translated by chess (given its then
growing diffusion and reputation). This generated ambiguities as the idea
of the link between modern chess and an unlikely Greco-Roman
antecedent was reinforced.
The petteia, by its characteristics, is usually correlated with the Greek
political model. Of pieces without diversity the ideal of absence of
hierarchies in the Athenian society is derived (with the women who in
that egalitarian scheme did not count). From the need to capture in acting
together, is inferred the possibility to build a democracy in which
everyone contributes to a common goal. Note in this sense that Aristotle,
in his great work Political, by assuring that man was born to live in a city,
compares those who have no family, laws and home with: "an isolated
piece of the game of ..."; and the phrase, according to the different
translations, can be completed with "chequers", "backgammon" or even
"chess" when, it is known, the original reference alluded to the petteia (in
the original Greek the author mentions "pettoi"). In any case, in the Greek
game, each element makes sense in its relation to the rest. And the worst
thing that could happen to an individual was to be alienated from the
whole. This is in life; this is in the game itself; a pastime that perfectly
reflects the society in which it is practiced.

In the Middle Ages varied speculations were made on this subject: the
influential Lombard monk Jacobo de Cessolis, for example, conceived that
the Chaldean philosopher Xerxes was the inventor of the game, assuring
that he did it in the 6th century BC in the context of trying to calm down
with him the fierce Babylonian king Evil-Merodach. Following that
philological trail, as an alternative is also given to the namesake Persian
King Xerxes who ruled in those same times. The very cultured Byzantine
princess Ana Comneno, for her part, attributed it to the Assyrians105

105
Comneno told a story about the assassination of the Emperor was planned that would occur at the time
when: "... he occasionally played chess with one of his relatives (this game was invented by the luxurious
Assyrians, and brought from there to we), so these men, with the conspiratorial weapons in their hands, tried

58
(Queen Zenobia of Palmyra who ruled in the third century of the Christian
era?). For his part, the great English poet Geoffrey Chaucer presented the
alternative of Attalus III who was king of Pergamum in the second century
BC.

From the same era comes an Arabic manuscript entitled Nuzhat al-arbab
al-'aqulfi'sh-shatranj al-manqul (The delight of intelligence, a description of
chess) of Abu Zakariya Yahya ben Ibrahim al-Hakim, where other
hypotheses are provided about eventual creators of the game: Shem or
Jafet, children of Noah, in his Ark; King Lud of Lydia (son of Shem), and
even Adam (the pastime would serve as consolation to Abel's death). A
variation, always going back to Biblical and Quran traditions, is that it
would have arisen in the time of the prophet Idris (Enoch, son of Cain, for
Christians), to whom the science of numbers was also revealed. In a
similar line Rabbi Abraham ibn Ezra in the twelfth century attributed it to
Moses.

Murray, the quintessential chess historian, while listing many of the

available hypotheses, mentions a Burmese chess legend in which it is
expressed that it was invented by a queen of that country. From much
earlier times, was assured that the birthplace of the game was the island
of Sri Lanka, ascribing it to the myth that portrays the confrontation
between the god Rama and Rāvana, that we already talked about at the
beginning of this work; one of the first to say it, it was his compatriot,
Captain Hiram Cox
Another British researcher, in this contemporary case, Ken Whyld
affirms,106 with reasonable criteria, that since the borders of the Indian
subcontinent have always been quite mobile, the territories usually
considered as those in which occurred the appearance of the chaturanga,
could correspond to regions of Khuzestan (in present-day Iran) or of
Baluchistan (in Pakistan). In that sense, within the framework of the
theory that is based on a cultural syncretism already sketched out, which
it will be discussed punctually in the next chapter, when considering the
places of the Silk Road where the games could have converged
contributing to the first proto-chess, it is interesting to note that they are
geographically located in territories of those other countries or, even,

to pass through the royal room and reach the Emperor in his longing for murder ... ". A version of his book
can be seen at http://www.yorku.ca/inpar/alexiad_dawes.pdf.
106
Information on this author can be found at http://www.kwabc.org/.

59
Uzbekistan or Afghanistan, all very close to the domains of ancient Indian
kings.
In the line of Persian paternity, Fabricius indicated that the inventor of
the game, to which he gave his name, was the Persian astronomer
Schatrenschar, the same one who could count the stars one by one.107
Harry Bird, the British player and scholar, picks up on this idea, although
he also maintains that it could have been the Saracens, confusing the role
of diffuser with that of creator; in its exhaustiveness it will give other
possibilities: that of the brothers Lido and Tirreno in the kingdom of
Lydia (the one that lasted until the 6th century BC); that the Scythians
bequeathed it to Palamedes, the ingenious hero of Greek mythology, the
same one who is said to have invented it during the siege of Troy, and
raises the case of Semiramis (Sammuramat) who, according to the myth,
was Queen of Assyria in the XXII century BC, to which is owed the
foundation or, at least, the glory and embellishment of Babylon.
Many of these hypotheses, although in their formulation are usually based
on historical facts that can be located in given time and space, due to their
essential characteristics, they are obviously far from all truth, so they are
not real and only end up by watering in the field of the mythical or
legendary. Some may even be considered unsound because they are not
anchored in episodes that have a certain degree of historical plausibility,
as is the case with theories that assume a Celtic or Amerindian origin.
A Celtic origin is fundamentally associated with the existence of boards
and sets of pieces that were bequeathed by King Cathair (Cahir) Mor "The
Great" when he died in the year 153 of the Christian era; but, strictly
speaking, they correspond to a game called fidchell (gwyddbwyll). Bird,
who contemplates this possibility, deepens his enthusiasm and raises the
possible paternity of the Araucanians, surely confusing in this case the
chess with the taptana, a very simple game practiced by the American
Indians.

There is space even for the bizarre: some authors explained that the
atlantes or civilizations of outer space were inventors of chess. Following
the occultist tradition of Hermes Trismegisto, which is identified with the
Egyptian god Thoth, an esoteric line was drawn that links play with

107
Source: Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860, at
http://www.dominiopublico.gov.br/download/texto/gu009486.pdf.

60
Freemasonry108 (the floors of their headquarters adopt checkered
drawings that represent, in the colors black and white, the connection
that exists between the spiritual realm and the physical world) and with
the lost continent of Atlantis; in fact, the Spanish theosophist Roso de
Luna, in the book De gentes del otro mundo (“Of otherworldly people”),
imagines that chess is an invention of the Atlanteans. Even more curious
is the affirmation of the Mexican poet Eduardo Elizalde who, in De Buda to
Fischer and Spassky (“From Buda to Fischer and Spassky”), arrives to raise
the hypothesis that places its origin in outer space. In his words: "Other
higher gods, non-earth gods, gods of other galaxies and systems taught the
Chinese, Hindu and Western divinities to play chess."

The most classic of the stories about the origin of chess, one that still has
a lot of popularity today, can be considered a fiction story. It is alluded to
which attributes his conception to a sage, who may be the Indian Sissa,
the Persian Bozorgmehr or the Arab Bourzin, according to the claimed
paternity of each culture. In this context it is said that it was submitted to
the consideration of the respective sovereign who, very happy about the
novelty, promises its author the reward he desires. This will ask for
"nothing more" than a cereal grain (wheat or rice, according to the
different versions) for the first square, two for the second, four for the
third and so on, until the grid of sixty-four squares is completed. The
mathematicians of the kingdom will verify that this "modest" request
could not be pleased, given its magnitude. There are several possible
endings of the story, with their respective morals, ranging from the
mention that the king orders the execution of the creator of chess, feeling
mocked; until the renunciation of the reward on the part of the sage, who
states that his only purpose was to serve his lord so, in proof of
recognition, he will be anointed as the main royal adviser.
The Argentine writer Abelardo Castillo, passionate about the game,
enunciates many of the possible cases of the origin of chess: Indian;
Egyptian; Chinese; Etruscan; Assyrian or Chaldean; Trojan; Persian ... He
mentions the crazy theory of an extraterrestrial source and also the
myths of the painful mother and of Lanka, as well as the conception that
was attributed to the goddess Caissa. Culminates his story by associating
the discovery (for Europeans) of America and chess, by reproducing the

108
On the connection of chess with Masonry, it is possible to consult the work of Fanthorpe et al. cited at
the bibliography.

61
legend that places Isabel the Catholic indicating the way to win a chess-
game to his consort, King Ferdinand, in order to get a special recognition
that will give her the opportunity to propose him the travel plan of
Columbus to the Indies, which, in this context, will be approved.

First under the name of Scacchis, the goddess Caissa appears as a creation
of the Italian Marco Girolamo Vida that includes her in Scacchia Ludus,
poem published in 1527.109 The English philologist, writer and historian
William Jones takes up the subject in 1763, in another poetry, also written
in Latin, to which he specifically names Caissa, where goddess, or muse of
chess, be courted by the Greek god of war Ares (Mars in Roman
mythology) who, when rejected, seeks the help of the god of sport Hermes
(Mercury), who invents chess so that being offered by the gallant as a gift,
so that the lady can be conveniently seduced.

Jones' work begins like this: “Of armies on the chequer'd field array'd,/And
guiltless war in pleasing form display'd;/When two bold kings contend with
vain alarms,/In ivory this, and that in ebon arms;/Sing, sportive maids, that
haunt the sacred hill/Of Pindus, and the fam'd Pierian rill…”,110 where one
of the mentioned "sportive maids" was precisely the beautiful Caissa.
Later it is indicated that the god of sport designs a board with squares of
gold and silver, that he conceives a game which baptizes as "Cassa"
designed in honor of the cherished nymph. Mars returns with that
discovery to the forest, he presents it to his beloved who, from that
moment, sees his courtier with better eyes; in fact she postulates that "he
was less hateful than before". The inevitable game is developed. On almost
its end, checkmate appears, in perfect rhyming verses: "No place remains:
he sees the certain fate, / And yields his throne to ruin, and Checkmate "("
No place is left to him: he can see his determined destiny, / He gives his
throne to ruin, and Checkmate")”. Caissa, so, irremediably falls into the
arms of her suitor. Chess had made it possible.

109
The poetry of Vida, in Latin and in English, can be consulted at
http://www.edochess.ca/batgirl/Ludus.html.
110
At http://www.chessdryad.com/caissa/caissa.htm.

62
Image of Caissa by the Italian painter Domenico Maria Fratto (1669-1763). Source:
http://www.trattoriacaissa.it/la-storia-di-caissa/dea-caissa/.

Based on this work, several stories will be generated later that assign the
nymph the deity character that would assume definitively. The one that is
most commonly known, states that it was a young and attractive goddess
who made predictions. Concerned about how the wars of the future
would be, he decided to create a game, a less cruel context, in which, to
win, intelligence and courage were necessary. After doing so, he decided
to hide it, so that it could not be eventually destroyed, and since he did
not know what would be a good place to hide it, he decided to choose any
of them on Earth. He threw it into the air, going to fall in India, from
where it would later spread to the whole world. As always, the English
sources, where the story comes from, in this case from the field of
mythology, strengthen the thesis of the Indian origin of chess.

63
Let's finish this chapter by remembering the Austrian writer Stefan
Zweig111 to whom we owe the extraordinary The Royal Game (Chess
Story). This prolific author, after ensuring to us that we are in the
presence of the "the only game that belongs to all nations and all eras",
asks a suggestive question: "no one knows what god brought it down to
vanquish boredom, sharpen the senses and stretch the mind? …" Another
man of letters, the Argentine Ernesto Sabato, told "man did not invent
chess, but discovered it",112 doing a very interesting distinction that speaks
of the perennial depth of the game. Whether it is an invention or a
discovery, there will always be a starting point. There was a time when
chess was invented, by the action of a person or deity, according to the
various hypotheses analyze in this chapter, whose traces can be followed
from the review of myths, legends and fiction stories that, corresponding
to different cultures and circumstances, were formulated at different
times. And if Sabato was right in the end, in the sense that we should
admit that is the product of a discovery of man, there would be also a
specific temporal and spatial environment in which, some of our
congeners had had the privilege of having been amazed, for the first time,
by the magnitude of the beauty of a game that was offered to them, a
game which was as subtle as powerfully metaphorical.

111
On the extensive literary work of this author, analyzed from a chess perspective, it´s possible to consult a
work that belongs to me: “Stefan Zweig, una vida de novela, una novela de ajedrez” (“Stefan Zweig, a life of
novel, a novel of chess”), at http://ajedrez12.com/2016/11/28/stefan-zweig-una-vida-de-novela-una-novela-
de-ajedrez/.
112
When Sabato, taking chess as a point of reference, distinguishes the actions of invention and discovery,
he assures: "It could be said that when chess was invented, all the games were potentially given: over the
centuries, players would discover pre-existing games, such as in a jungle. But taking a step back, it could be
said that the man did not invent chess, but discovered it. Considering the Universe as given, all creations and
inventions of man would be like matches in this Great Chess, discoveries in a Great Jungle. But taking
another step back, it could be said that perhaps the Universe has not been created but discovered in a Jungle
of Possible Universes, a difficult, dark, sublime jungle where only a God can venture”.

64
ORIGIN OF CHESS BY CULTURAL SYNCRETISM: A MODERN AND
CONVINCING PERSPECTIVE

So far have been analyzed, if not all assumptions (you can always fall into
omissions considering its vastness), at least a large part of those that have
been sketched about the invention of chess, in all of which the original act
is placed in the head of a single entity, whether person or deity. It is
notable that, in none of them, the existence of a shared effort of different
beings is proposed, so plural contributions are not verified and even less
the participation of expressions corresponding to different cultures or
civilizations.

The criterion of uniqueness, which is the one that has prevailed over time,
was very expressively argued by William Jones for whom chess, because
of its "beautiful simplicity and extreme perfection", could only have been
invented “by one of some great genius”:113 in that order maintained that,
from a more rudimentary version of the game, was created by a single
entity, there was subsequently a process of successive changes until the
appearance of an expression, the current one, which resulted more
sophisticated. On the contrary, his compatriot Hiram Cox said that
complexity first occurred and only then simplification; from this he
inferred that, within the framework of a gradual process that was
subsequently verified, chess was the result of a cooperative phenomenon.

In line with this last position, which for a good part of history was
forgotten, in recent times it has begun to support itself the theory that
chess is a civilizing product from diverse and complementary sources. It
is believed that comes from the previous contribution of a plurality of
games that derived in a unique and new proto-chess, which served as the
basis in the Eastern world to other modalities or versions of a game that,
after its successive mutations, in particular those that he experienced in
the Middle Ages in the Western Europe, it derived in the known format,
the same with which he arrived to this day.

The temporal interval in which that magical synthesis could have

happened can be located between the II century BC and III AD and the
space environment, on the other hand, it is understood that with high
probability it should correspond to some vague Asian point of the silk

113
At https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=coo.31924029681115;view=1up;seq=9.

65
route, that went from China to Persia and Arabia, and beyond, and that
passed through, among others nations, by India, constituting a dynamic
meeting point of cultures characterized by the richness of its extreme
interconnectivity.
The aforementioned practices, which would have made their respective
contribution to the achievement of a different and evolved one, that was
entirely idiosyncratic, would have been the petteia, ashtāpada and liubo,
respectively corresponding to the Greek, Indian and Chinese cultures.
From their symbiosis there will be a single proto-chess that, for those
who defend Indian precedence, is none other than chaturanga (or
eventually chaturaji114), and for those who ascribe to sinological paternity
is the xiang-qi. Although, of course, it should not be ruled out that the
chaturanga and the xiang-qi, instead of being mutually considered one the
antecedent of the other, would have appeared independently with some
degree of synchrony.
When trying to determine the geographical point where this powerful
encounter took place, it is conceived that it is located in a wide area to the
northwest of the present India where the kingdom of Bactria (Bactria)
and the Kushán Empire (Kuṣāṇ)115 settled, both characterized by a great
cultural openness, that are contemporary with respect to the temporal
environment in which the proto-chess would have arisen. It is a space
that included, in addition to part of India, extensive territories, with axis
in the Indus River valley, which correspond today to Afghanistan,
Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, which were under Greek influence (legacy of
Alexander the Great), and with commercial bridges with the Chinese, in

114
There is no agreement about the sequence that was given regarding the order of precedence of these
Indian games. For Cox the chaturaji was first, while for Jones that place was occupied by chaturanga. From
Murray onwards this last theory has been imposed. Forbes even speculated that the chaturaji, rather than a
game, could only be a chaturanga position, in its four-person mode, which is verified when one of the
participants captures two of the three rival kings. In Theory of the Games it is usually discussed, without
conclusive answer, which sequence should be more probable: if the evolution goes from simplification or
instead if goes in the search of a greater complexity. In the first case the chaturaji should be prior; on the
contrary it would be chaturanga. An analysis of this kind has been made about the order in which
conventional chess and Tamerlane´s chess (or big chess) appeared. In the search for the correct explanation,
we should not forget the existence of a four-handed chess, aided by two dice, with the known pieces
(chariot, horse, elephant, king and pawns) on a 64-square board which is mentioned by the Arabic sage al-
Bīrūnī in Ta'rikh al-Hind (Chronicles of India), a classic book dated in the year 1030, at
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/digital/collections/cul/texts/ldpd_5949073_001/ldpd_5949073_001.pdf
115
The Kushan Empire was based ethnically on a tribe that came from China which, in a test of the prevailing
syncretism, took for itself the Hellenistic cultural legacy and also incorporated concepts of Indian Shivaism.

66
the context of the silk route that began to operate from about the 1st
century BC.
In this context, it is entirely conceivable that a proto-chess with
contributions from different sources would be able to emerge in a
territory of such a degree of cultural openness, in this analysis of the
Indian, Chinese and Greek peoples, a hypothesis that can be strengthened
given that The main archaeological finds of the oldest pieces of the game
belong to this same territorial space so that, beyond the difficulties of
factual verification, at least in an analytical plane everything seems to
converge.

This line of research, being so convincing, is nevertheless relatively new,

having been fundamentally supported by the German researcher Gerhard
Josten116 who, in a way, revolutionized the study of the origin of chess, by
applying an approach based on the study of the internal structure of the
game and no longer in repairing the extrinsic contributions that can be
derived from the field of history, literature and, even, archeology.

Yuri Averbakh, in partial harmony with the idea of confluence of

contributions, esteems that it was only through the petteia and ashtāpada,
which in his opinion gave way to the chaturanga, implying an evolution
from two career games to a third party, which is one of strategy, process
in which would have occurred the elimination of the use of the dice117 and
the participation of four contestants was changed to two. This symbiosis,
always under his perspective, would be able to have been favored by a
remarkable cultural fact: the most rigid Hinduism had lost, momentarily,
relevance in Indian society against the most open Buddhism. In short,
while admitting a possible inheritance of diverse cultures, which is not
usual, the erudite and historical Great Russian chess player in his way
strengthens the predominant theory, the Indian, without assessing any
contribution proceeding from China.

116
This author's position can be appreciated in Chess – A living fossil, Colonia, 2001, at
http://history.chess.free.fr/papers/Josten%202001.pdf.
117
It has also been said that this elimination of the dice occurred in India itself when Hinduism (which had a
more rigid view of the bets associated with dice) takes back cultural control, with the Gupta Empire, who
ruled the Indian subcontinent between the fourth and sixth centuries of the Christian era.

67
The scholar Myron Samsin,118 meanwhile, endorses this possibility that
chess is a hybrid game of Greco-Indian origin, being made up of two
presences: that of the pawns, which would be the Greek contribution, and
that of the main pieces as Indian legacy This symbiosis is locatable, in his
understanding, just after the time in which the invasion excursion of
Alexander the Great towards the East was verified.

Josten gives the issue greater complexity by abandoning bilateralism and

considering the presence of a third actor in the foundational scene. In his
view, we must not fail to highlight the contribution made by Chinese
culture. In his very original work, which is based on the discernment of
the internal logic of the game, he identifies three types of pieces: those
that are an essential objective, since his capture (hunting) is wanted,
represented by the king or general; others that have long movements in
different directions, which are the main pieces; third ones that only
advance, represented by the pawns. From this distinction is derived the
possibility that chess has been nurtured by three different games. In his
look, the central piece comes from the Chinese, probably from the wei-ki
and, perhaps more precisely, from the most ancient liubo; the mobiles
would have a Mesopotamian origin, more specifically they come from an
astrolabe119 of the Sumerians; the rest ones, typical race pieces (usually
mobilized when the dice are thrown), come from India, from the pachisi /
gyan chauper.120

The first proto-chess, always for Josten, product of this civilizational

confluence, would have had a circular board (in the style of Byzantine
chess), which would later be reappropriated in another grid format, also

118
Source: Pawns And Pieces: Towards the Prehistory of Chess, 2002, at
http://history.chess.free.fr/papers/Samsin%202002.pdf.
119
Because of this astrological connection, it is believed that many board games, including old versions of
chess, were used as oracles.
120
We have already seen that for Samsin the race pieces, i.e. the pawns, are a Greek contribution,
specifically of the petteia. In his opinion the gyan chauper (chaupur), which would proceed from the Sacred
Game of Ur, is the one that contributes with the main pieces. But there is a problem in this regard: the
pachisi would not be a game too old since it is usually located only starting from the fourth century of the
Christian era, so that the margin to be possible to be considered antecedent of the game that born on the
silk route, although it exists, is too narrow . This is not the case of the gyan chauper that, according to some
research, could date from prehistoric times.

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contributed by the Indians, the ashtāpada. In that initial time, a game in
India could have emerged for four participants (with the use of the dice),
that is, the chaturanga; and also the xiang-qi in China, with its special
characteristics (among them the river that inherits from the liubo). This is
also assured by Petzold121 who, in addition to ascribing to this hypothesis
of collective contributions, maintains that these appearances, those of the
Indian and Chinese games, were given independently and simultaneously.

In short, it is explained the theory that places the origin of chess based on
an action of cultural syncretism, locating the foundational event
somewhere in Central Asia between 50 BC and 200 AD, for what would
have occurred in the context of the boom of the Kushán Empire.122
Deepening the geographical point of view, for Cazaux: "There is no doubt
that chess is ... an Asian game. Three regions may claim to be their
birthplace: northern India; Central Asia, from Iran to Turkestan, and
eastern China. No one can object that there is a "genetic" linkage of all
forms of chess that come from those areas”.
By way of conclusion we can say that the theory that points to a cultural
confluence in regard to the invention of chess, having been so recently
conceived, is highly persuasive. However, it should be admitted that it has
a great difficulty of verification, at least from a factual point of view. This
is for various reasons. First, by its own characteristics: being a process,
and not a specific event, it is more difficult to "catch" it, and consequently
"explain" it at a given moment in time; the same with respect to its
eventual location in a specific place. Second, due to the impossibility of
resorting to literary sources that could have recorded a collective
construction: it is known that in general the stories have a strong
nationalist bias; in this context, from no literature it would be possible to
find claims of an invention that was not of own and exclusive
patrimony.123

121
Source: Das königliche Spie, Leipzig edition, 1987, p. 19, quote taken from Josten's work.
122
Always within the path of the silk route, it has been claimed that it may have been the meeting point of
the games an oasis in the current Chinese location of Kashgar (where the Kushán people once established a
Kingdom); as Horst Remus speculates. Source: The origin of chess and the silk road, at
http://silkroadfoundation.org/newsletter/volumeonenumberone/origin.html.
123
There is a classical exception to this assertion: Persians recognizing the Indian paternity of chess. But it
actually this occurred in the context of proving their intellectual primacy and in the understanding that nard
was superior to the game entered from India.

69
However, we could trust the possibility that archeological findings, chess
pieces or boards will be recorded, which are concordant with the
syncretic theory, as long as they coincide in space with the places of the
silk route in those that should have converged the games, provided that
their retrospective dating is located within the span of the life of the
Kingdom of Bactria or the Kushán Empire.

So, as symmetrically happens with regard to the findings that eventually

would be able to support the other hypotheses that are plausible about
the origin of chess, not everything is said yet in the subject. There is a
wide field that we have left to explore. With what the historical search
necessarily continues. We could believe, then, that we are traveling a path
whose goal, being some closer, cannot still be seen in all its dimension
and clarity.
WHAT WE KNOW, WHAT WE SUPPOSE, WHAT WE IGNORE

At this point of the investigations on the origin of chess there are issues
that we know, some that we only suppose and others that we still ignore.
Let's list them as a final recapitulation:

We know that the game arose in the Orient.

We know that there are only three theories that support the original
source of the game: the one that locates the origin in India; the one that
does the same putting the focus in China, and that of cultural syncretism.

We know that a proto-chess entered Persia in the sixth century AD

coming from a region of India.

We suppose that the chaturanga was this game, in its two-player

modality, that was carried to Baghdad, the capital of the Persian Empire.

We know that the first precise mentions to some kind of proto-chess,

coming from diverse literary sources, begin from the IV century AD being
the first to the Chinese xiang-qi and the following to the chaturanga.

We know that both the xiang-qi and the chaturanga had their respective
transformation processes.

70
We know that there are two previous games corresponding to these
cultures, which had been recorded literarily since ancient times: the
Chinese liubo and the Indian ashtāpada, with the peculiarity that this
game was preferentially alluded as a board.

We suppose that the xiang-qi, if it were an exclusive derivative of the

Chinese culture, could have been conceived from the liubo.

We suppose that chaturanga, if it were an exclusive derivative of Indian

culture, could have been derived from the ashtāpada or the chaturaji.

We ignore the sequence in which the chaturaji and the chaturanga were
given (although the predominant theory is that the last was earlier), or
even if the chaturaji is a mere position of the other game.

We know that a version of the xiang-qi has survived to the present day (it
is currently played in China and, at least, also in Vietnam) while
chaturanga disappeared as a practice at some distant moment in time.

We ignore under what precise circumstances in the chaturanga the use

of the dice was abandoned.

We ignore if the evolution process of the chaturanga occurred from the

four-player version to the two-player one or if, instead, the reverse
sequence was given.

We suppose that in the silk route a synthesis of several games of

previous existence was generated, appearing a new prototype that
derived later in the chess.

We ignore if, at the end of that process, only one game arose or, if on the
contrary, both the chaturanga and the xiang-qi could have appeared
simultaneously.

We suppose that the games that participated in this action of cultural

syncretism were the liubo, the ashtāpada and the Greek petteia and,
possibly, also under the influence of an old astrolabe of Babylonian origin.

We suppose that this symbiosis occurred in a period of time that can be

located from the second century BC to the third century AD.

71
We suppose that this was verified in the geographical space of a vast
region occupied successively by the Kingdom of Bactria and the Kushán
Empire.

We know that the oldest archeological finds of pieces of some proto-

chess, which correlate perfectly with the geographical zones linked to the
silk route, are dated approximately in the 6th century AD.

We suppose that in the future other important archaeological elements

will be discovered that, according to their spatial location, characteristics
and antiquity will strengthen the field of knowledge that exists in this
matter.

We know that it is necessary to deepen the analysis with regard to the

theory of games, establishing greater precision and causal relationships
between the various proto-chess and linked practices, namely: ashtāpada;
chaturanga; chaturaji; liubo; xiang-qi; petteia, and others that are linked.

We know that there is much to investigate yet on the origin of chess.

We suppose that one day we will find an answer that, without becoming
an absolute certainty, at least allows us to arrive at a very majority
consensus establishing a uniform explanatory paradigm on the origin of
chess.

EPILOGUE
Whether it would have been product of a civilization effort, and it we
would prefer this, in order to show a Humanity that only appears virtuous
at times (although it is known that it tends to favor the often bloody
quarrels among people who seem to forget that they all come from a
common core), whether it was an invention / creation / discovery of a
particular culture, there is only one thing that is entirely secure: as Borges
correctly pointed out, chess comes from the East.

In this sense, in the course of this work we have presented the different
versions of proto-chess that can be located in that geographical space (in
India, China, Persia and other less identified points on the Silk Road), with

72
physical or literary records that refer to a few centuries before and after
the arrival of Christ.

Of many specific episodes, there are fairly accurate records, such as when
to Baghdad entered one of the versions of the game that came from India,
fact which happened exactly in the sixth century A.D. From that moment
forward, everything is quite clear, in terms of the diffusion and
generalization of chess; from that moment to behind, however, everything
falls into a mist that at times appears thick.

In this context of retrospective uncertainty is that there are found diverse

thesis about the origin of chess, some of which have empirical support
while others can only be recognized as myths or legends. All of them, with
the inevitable omissions product of an analytical field that being so vast at
times is very difficult to apprehend in its integrality, tried to be compiled
in the present work.

After all, in the center of the stage are only three possibilities that show a
high degree of truth and credibility: two of them correspond to a cultural
singularity, that the Indian chaturanga or that the Chinese xiang-qi are
alternately the pioneer games; a third, on the other hand, recognizes the
existence of a syncretic civilizing effort since it postulates a confluence of
previous existence practices that come from different civilizations.

Beyond the validity of this trio of hypotheses, which are usually seen as
independent, we believe that an effort can be made to integrate the
perspectives.

Is that all of them present aspects that can be related, in their

complementarily, leaving aside or, perhaps, reinterpreting in any case the
divergences that may be observed. The fact that the various proto-chess
arose in a geographical space that, being wide, was properly
interconnected, and that this happened in time synchrony, give strong
clues about an event that we believe is incontrovertible: we are in the
presence of a single family of games, with processes of interconnected

73
evolution, that still have to be discerned in all their dimension and
intensity.

In the extreme of the analysis, would be able to be traced not only the
interrelation of the various proto-chess but also their respective origins in
even more ancient pastimes. We could even go back to the Egyptian senet
to reconstruct all the sequence from there, to arrive at chess, like it was
redefined much later in medieval Europe.

Under these conditions, it could be better to work, no longer from

fragmented univocal perspectives, but by proposing a holistic theory,
integrating the evidences of each singular hypothesis, in order to build an
explanatory building that is unique and common.

In that order, instead of assigning pre-eminence to chaturanga or xiang-qi

as initial prototype, it could be believed that in the silk route appeared at
least one game from which both were derived, either concomitantly or
sequentially. So, in that case, the former would not derive from the
ashtāpada and the latter from the liubo. Although these same previous
games, probably together with the Greek petteia, and perhaps with the
contribution of an ancient Babylonian astrolabe, contribute to appear a
proto-chess that is the product of cultural syncretism, that which, from
then on, would expand in different ways, to East and West.

With which there are very interesting exploratory lines yet to be

developed. In this regard, although the possibility of testimonies of
ancient manuscripts that would be able to appear on the subject is
increasingly remote (although not entirely impossible), on the other
hand, it is possible that new archaeological will be found that provide
interesting elements, particularly as regards to the dating of the vestiges
of games and, with it, the possibility of establishing better degrees of
interrelation and eventually of precedence between the different
practices.

It is also possible, and certainly necessary, to continue to deepen the

structural analysis, based on the intrinsic characteristics and the etiology

74
of the various games, to determine more precisely the correlation of the
same, appealing to the historical, geographical and cultural variables. This
question is central to designing the commented common evolutionary
tree.

In any case, it is necessary to delve into the profile of the practices that
would have served as inputs for proto-chess: the petteia, liubo, ashtāpada,
with which it will be possible to evaluate with greater certainty, based on
the study of its particularities, the degree of correspondence that could
have had with the ulterior modalities: the xiang-qi and the chaturanga.

In short, where did chess originate and under what circumstances?

We could go to the simple singsong of reproducing the legendary stories,

such as the well-known ones that attribute it to the wise Sissa or the
Queen of Lanka; or refer us to the episode of the battle in which another
sovereign lost one of her children in confrontation with her brother.

We could make appeals to the divinity, to the esoteric plane or to fiction

literature.

We could, without analyzing the whole, but observing only the parts,
award paternity to Indians, Chinese or whoever.

We could say, not to be mistaken, although falling into an obvious

vagueness, that we can only admit it to the poet that chess appeared in a
distant moment of time somewhere in the East.

What was said at the beginning. The restless Humanity, everything wants
to know. We will never settle for simple and insufficient explanations; and
less inaccurate.

A holistic theory about the origin of chess may perhaps help us explain
the steps that were taken for the emergence of the most influential and
metaphorical game that ever knew any conceived.

In any case, we believe we are closer to discovering the vault key that will
allow us to determine the initiation moment in which the game appeared.

75
And, from this, determine with much greater certainty how the entire
subsequent dissemination sequence was given.

For the moment, maybe better that we still do not know everything.

It is that, in that way, there is a powerful incentive to deepen the

investigation.

Is that, in this way, it continues to feed itself, a suggestive and primordial

mystery: the moment when the magical and millennial chess appeared on
Earth.

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BIO OF THE AUTHOR

Sergio Ernesto Negri was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He is Master

FIDE. Developed studies on the relationship of chess with culture and
history. Coauthor of the books Historia del Ajedrez Olimpico Argentino and
author of La era de la mujer edited by Senado de la Nacion Argentina.
Researcher on the Exposition on Chess and Culture, Biblioteca Nacional
(2017-8). Lectured at the Borges International Foundation about Borges
and Chess and published works in Europa Press, the journal Pagina 12,
Ajedrez12 and ChessBase. In his professional activity he is Governmental
Administrator with performance in the areas of education and culture.

Photo of Sergio Negri (taken by Hugo Orlando Lopez)

81