The History of Chess. H. J. R. Murray
London, 1801, vii. 486–511) by claiming that this four-handed game was the rudimental game of chess, and that the two-handed game was a modification of it. In the hands of Prof. Duncan Forbes (B. 1798, D. 1868)49 this opinion was further developed into a complete theory of the development of chess. Briefly stated, the Cox-Forbes theory is this: A primitive four-handed dice-chess was practised in India about 5,000 years ago. As a result of the action of certain rules, or from the difficulty of always securing a full quota of players, the game gradually became a two-handed game. At a later time the civil and religious ordinances against the use of dice led to the abandonment of the dice-character of the game; and finally, by a rearrangement of the pieces, the game of chess as known to the Persians and Muslims came into existence.
In its inception this theory depended solely upon the supposed priority of the evidence for the existence of the four-handed game, and when Weber showed the unsatisfactory nature of the evidence in support of the statement that the Indian text was derived from a Purāṇa, scholars abandoned the theory altogether. In any case the 5,000 years of Forbes would have to be reduced greatly in view of the fact that modern scholarship does not place the Purāṇa earlier than 500–550 B.C.
We possess three texts of the passage in question,50 which, however, all appear to go back to the same source, the Tithyāditattvam (Tithitattva) of Raghunandana, a writer of the late 15th or early 16th century. All are written in the Bengali dialect of Sanskrit in which the remainder of this legal work is composed. Weber claimed that there was nothing to show that the account is not an integral part of Raghunandana’s own book. On the other hand, as will be evident from an examination of the translation which I give in Chapter III, the text of the passage is defective towards the close, and the verses appear to be disarranged. This looks as if Raghunandana had used an earlier source, though since the three existing texts all show the same lacuna and preserve the same order, we are probably right in regarding the Tithitattva as the immediate source of our knowledge of the passage. For the view that the ultimate source is a Purāṇa, we have only the bare word of the Brahman Rādhakant.
When Weber wrote his papers, the Bhavishya Purāṇa was not accessible to European scholars. Several MSS. are now known to exist in India, and the work has been printed at Bombay (2 vols., 1897), but this edition is of no value for purposes of exact scholarship, as the editors have made extensive additions on their own responsibility. More useful are two MSS. now in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, of which Aufrecht has given good analyses in his Catalogue of the Sanskrit MSS. in that library. He makes no mention of any chess passage, and there is no connexion in which it might conceivably occur. Weber had already stated that later works based upon the Bhavishya Purāṇa, as the Bhavishyottara Purāṇa, contain no chess passage. And the silence of all other Sanskrit works before 600 A.D. makes Rādhakant’s assertion improbable in the highest degree.
Another theory of the ancestry of chess has been put forward by Mr. Culin in his Chess and Playing Cards (Washington, 1898). He sees in our present games the survivals of magical processes adopted in order to classify according to the four directions objects and events which did not of themselves reveal their proper classification. Dice or some similar agent represent one of the implements of magic employed for the purpose. According to his theory, chess is a game derived from a game of the race type, and the steps of the ascent are (1) two-handed chess; (2) four-handed dice chess (chaturājī); (3) Pachīsī, a four-handed race-game; (4) a two-handed race-game. It is therefore a development of the Cox-Forbes theory, which aims at carrying the pedigree still farther back. Culin’s argument is thus stated (op. cit., 858):
The relation of the game of Chaturanga (i.e. the four-handed dice-chess) to the game of Pachisi is very evident. The board is the square of the arm of the Pachisi cross, and even the castles of the latter appear to be perpetuated in the camps, similarly marked with diagonals on the Chinese chessboard. The arrangement of the men at the corners of the board survives in the Burmese game of chess. The four-sided die is similar to that used in Chausar (i.e. Chaupur). The pieces or men are of the same colours as in Pachisi, and consist of the four sets of men or pawns of the Pachisi game, with the addition of the four distinctive chess pieces, the origin and significance of which remain to be accounted for. By analogy, it may be assumed that the board, if not indeed all boards upon which games are played, stands for the world and its four quarters (or the year and its four seasons), and that the game was itself divinatory.
After stating that students of the history of chess do not now generally accept the Cox-Forbes theory, Mr. Culin continues:
Apart from this discussion, the relation of chess to an earlier dice-game, such as Pachisi, appears to be evident. The comparative study of games leads to the belief that practically all games as Chess, played upon boards, were preceded by games in which the pieces were animated by dice, cowries or knuckle-bones, or by staves, as in the Korean Nyout, the Egyptian Tab, and many aboriginal American games.
All students of the history of games owe very much to Mr. Culin for his careful investigations into the nature, implements, and rules of existing games. His suggestion that race-games may have originated in magical processes deserves consideration,51 and there is much to be said for his view that dice-games preceded games of pure combination. But neither hypothesis has as yet been established as fact, and the further step in his argument which deals with the connexion of the war-game chess and the race-game pachīsī is a very weak one. It has yet to be established that pachīsī or chaupur is older than chess.52 Mr. Culin’s argument depends too much upon resemblances which are only superficial, or can be explained equally satisfactorily in other ways. It shows signs of insufficient acquaintance with the known facts of chess history.
The theory that chess is a development of an earlier race-game involves the hypothesis that some reformer changed the whole nomenclature in order to make it self-consistent as a war-game, and secured the agreement of all his contemporaries. I find this hypothesis incredible.
CHAPTER II
CHESS IN INDIA. I
The earliest references in Subandhu, Bāṇa, &c.—The chess-tours in Rudraṭa.—Position in India c. 1000.—Some Arabic references.—Later Indian references.—Nīlakaṇṭ·ha.
Allusions to chess begin to appear in Sanskrit literature with the seventh century of our era, and a number of passages from works of that period have been discovered which have been held by Sanskrit scholars to contain references to chess. They vary considerably in value, and only one or two are sufficiently definite to convey any information as to the character of the game mentioned. In others, the only foundation for the belief that chess is intended is the use of the term ashṭāpada. Since this may equally well mean the older dice-game on the ashṭāpada board, these allusions cannot be conclusively attributed to the younger game of chess.1
The earliest of these references occurs in Subandhu’s Vāsavadattā (ed. Hall, 284), a prose romance, written according to Macdonell (Skr. Lit., 232) ‘quite at the beginning of the seventh century’, which tells the popular story of Vāsavadattā, the Princess of Ujjayinī, and Udayana, King of Vatsa. In this work Subandhu thus describes the rainy season:
The time of the rains played its game with frogs for chessmen (nayadyūtair), which, yellow and green in colour, as if mottled with lac, leapt up on the black field (or garden-bed) squares (koshṭhikā).
The reference to chess in this passage appears to me to be quite satisfactory, although neither the name of the game nor the chessboard is mentioned. Had the race-game been intended, the men would almost certainly have been called sāri: the term nayadyūtair, which Thomas translates chessmen, is explained by the commentator as referring to chaturanga, and the comparison of the frogs hopping from plot to plot to the lac-stained chessmen moving from square to square is not inappropriate. From the mention of two colours only we may perhaps infer that Subandhu was thinking of a two-handed form of chess. Quite as interesting is the use of the word koshṭ·hikā, a cognate of koshṭ·hāgāra, for square. This word, meaning literally store-house or granary, is