The History of Chess. H. J. R. Murray
Indian was overwhelmed at the discovery, and his admiration for the wisdom and penetration of Buzūrjmihr passed all bounds. He returned to India, and Buzūrjmihr was covered with honour by his grateful monarch.
But Buzūrjmihr was planning further triumphs for Persia. He withdrew himself and pondered deeply until by his unaided genius he invented nard. The game is thus described:
He made two dice of ivory, with figures the colour of ebony. He then arranged an army similar to that of chess, he placed the two sides in order of battle and distributed the troops, ready for battle and for the assault of the town, among eight houses. The field was black, the battle-field square, and there were two powerful kings of good disposition who should both move, without ever receiving injury. Each had at his side an army in its arrangements, collected at the head of the field, and ready for the fray. The two kings advanced upon the field of battle, their troops moved on all sides around them, each endeavouring to outgo the other, now they fought on the heights, now on the plains; when two on one side had surprised a man by himself, he was lost to his side, and the two armies remained thus face to face until it was seen who was beaten.
Nūshīrwān was of course delighted at this fresh proof of his minister’s wisdom and ingenuity, and he sent him on an embassy to India to confound the wise men at the Raja’s court with the game of nard. As in the older story the Indians fail ignominiously, and Buzūrjmihr returned in triumph to receive fresh honours at the hand of his grateful king.18
In giving Firdawsī’s story at this time, I have rather anticipated the history of chess in the East, although in a way the real connexion is better preserved thus. For Firdawsī voiced again the aspirations of the Persians, and the Shāhnāma is the first great work in which Persian again came to the front after a period of eclipse. The eclipse, however, was only apparent, and extended to little beyond the language. As has so often happened in history, the race that was vanquished on the battlefield became the victor in the years of peace that ensued. The view of those who consider that the two or three centuries which immediately succeeded the Muslim conquest of Persia were intellectually barren, is quite erroneous. On the contrary, it was ‘a period of immense and unique interest, of fusion between the old and the new, of transformation of forms and transmigration of ideas, but in no wise of stagnation or death’. Old ideas and philosophies had to be restated in terms better fitting the changed conditions, and in every branch of learning there was a process of moulding and fusion in full swing; even the faith of Islam took on a new spirit, ‘ce sont eux (les Persans) et non les Arabes, qui ont donné de la fermeté et de la force à l’islamisme,’ writes Dozy.19 And in the intellectual sphere the debt is still more remarkable; we should leave every branch of Arabic science poor indeed if we removed the work of Persian writers. The whole organization of the state was Persian, and, although at first it was the Arabs who composed the invincible armies that conquered Syria, Egypt, and Persia, by the end of the Umayyad period the Persians had regained the military supremacy, and it was Persian armies that placed the ‘Abbāsids on the throne. In so doing the Persians had a full revenge for their overthrow at the hands of the early Caliphs. Not without reason does al-Bērūnī20 boast that the ‘Abbasids were a Khurāsānī, an Eastern, dynasty, for at their court Persian influences and ideas were supreme, attaining their zenith under al-Ḥādī, Hārūn ar-Rashīd, and al-Ma’mūn. The history of Muslim chess will be largely a history of Persian players, the development, a history of Persian ideas.
The importance of the pre-Islamic existence of chess in Persia can hardly be over-estimated, for it has left an impress upon the game that has proved greater and more lasting than that of any other period of its history. In that time Persia gave the game a fixity of arrangement, a method of play, and a nomenclature that have attended the game everywhere in its Western career. By a singular freak of fate the very name of the game in every country of Western Europe, except Spain and Portugal, has become a witness for the passage of chess through Persia. When the chess-player cries ‘check’, and probably also when he cries ‘mate’, he bears his unconscious testimony to the same fact. It is not too much to say that European chess owes more to its Persian predecessor chatrang than to its more remote and shadowy ancestor, the Indian chaturanga.21
APPENDIX
SOME NOTES ON THE PERSIAN NOMENCLATURE
I have already above (p. 150) dealt with the older name of chess in Persia, and shown the importance of the two recorded uses of it. Chatrang is very close in form to the Sanskrit chaturanga, and its existence is a valuable link in the chain of chess history.
The names of the pieces are given in the Chatrang-nāmak and in the Shāhnāma. They are shāh (king), farzīn (wise man, counsellor), pīl (elephant), asp (horse), rukh (chariot), and piyādah (foot-soldier). In the Shāhnāma the word mubāriz (champion) is occasionally used to describe the rukh.
Shāh is the Middle and Modern Persian form of the Old Per. khsháyathiya, which is found on the cuneiform inscriptions on the rock-face of the cliffs at Behistūn. In Pahlawī writing the Huzvārish form malka was used in its place. It has always been the royal title of the Persian monarch. When the Shāh in chess was attacked by any other piece it was usual to call attention to the fact by saying Shāh, it being incumbent upon the player whose Shāh was attacked to move it or otherwise to remedy the check. This usage passed into Arabic, and was adopted in European chess, although with the change in name of the piece it ceased to have any obvious meaning. Indeed in Med. Lat. the word scac in this sense was simply treated as an interjection. When the Shāh was left in check without resource, māt or shāh māt was said. Māt is a Persian adjective meaning ‘at a loss’, ‘helpless’, ‘defeated’, and is a contracted form of the adjective mand, manad, manīd (RAS2 uses regularly shāh manad and manad for shāh māt and māt), which is derived from the verb mandan, manīdan, ‘to remain’.1
When a check ‘forked’ another piece, it was usual to name this second piece also, thus shāh rukh meant a check that also attacked a Rook. In Muslim chess this was a check that would generally decide the game, since the Rook excelled the other pieces so much in value.
Farzīn (later in Ar. as firzān, firz, and firza) is connected with the adjective farzāna, ‘wise’, ‘learned’, ‘and’, means literally ‘a wise man’, ‘a counsellor’. It has no connexion with wazīr, ‘vizier’, and a wise man is not necessarily a vizier. That the piece was at a later time associated with the vizier of the Persian kings and ‘Abbāsid caliphs was due to its position on the chessboard at the side of the king.
Pīl, later Arabicized as fīl, means elephant. It is not, however, a native Persian word, nor is it Skr. Gildemeister suggests that the Persians may have obtained the word from a language that was spoken by some tribe situated between Persia and India. The elephant was not a native Persian animal.
Asp is the ordinary Persian word for horse.
Rukh is less simple. The European dictionary statements that the word means ‘an elephant bearing a tower on its back’, or ‘a camel’, are based upon guesses suggested by the modern carved Parsi pieces, and have no Persian authority whatever behind them. The guess of Herbelot that rukh meant ‘hero’ in Middle Persian has been shown to depend upon the use of the word rukh in the chapter-heading of the legend of the Eleven Champions, which has been added by some later copyists of the Shāhnāma. It is true that Firdawsī does describe the Rukh as a champion or hero, reflecting the rôle that the chariot rider has always played in the Indian epics, just as in Homer. But it is necessary to show that Firdawsī or other early Persian writers used rukh where one would naturally expect mubāriz (hero), and this has not been done.
The word has two other well-established senses in Persian, (1) the cheek, and (2) the fabulous bird, familiar to readers of the Arabian Nights. Its derivation in both these senses is unknown.3
There can be no doubt that the chess-term Rukh meant simply chariot. The regular practice in the westward march of chess has been this: the term the meaning of which was well known to all who used it was translated into the new language and thus was replaced by a native and intelligible word; the term the meaning of which had ceased to be familiar