The History of Chess. H. J. R. Murray
have been unintelligible in Sanskrit chess circles, and the analogy of the rule followed in the case of every other of the chessmen requires that the Persians translated rat·ha also by some Persian word meaning chariot. Although rukh has never been the ordinary word in use for chariot in Persian, there is some evidence to show that it did bear that meaning both in Persian and Arabic. In Vullers’ Persian Lexicon, Bonn, 1855–64, s.v. shaṭranj (chess), p. 410, a native Persian dictionary is quoted as giving ‘araba as an alternative name for the rukh. ‘Araba is the ordinary Arabic word for chariot, which, like so many other Arabic words, has been adopted as Persian. This makes the authority somewhat late, and accordingly evidences the persistence of this knowledge of the real meaning of rukh in Persia. The knowledge was, of course, by no means general. For Arabic we have two valuable entries in early Arabic-Latin glossaries, the knowledge of which we owe to Dozy. The earlier of these is the Leyden Glossarium MS. 231 from the Leg. Scaliger, the MS. of which is dated 12th c. by palaeographists. Here we have currus, rukhkh;2 quadriga rukhkh dhū arba‘a’aflāk (rook of four wheels); and auriga, rukhkh, thumma sāni‘ar-rukhkh (rook, then chariot-maker). In the other glossary, the Vocabulista, a Florence MS. of which has been edited by Schiaparelli (Florence, 1871) we have, p. 106, rukhkh, currus; and, p. 329, currus, ‘ajala,—rukhkh, to which a marginal gloss adds roc de scas. It seems quite clear from these two entries in Spanish glossaries that the word rukhkh was in common use among the Moors in Spain in the sense of chariot. There is also the evidence of the chess-pieces in the Bibl. Nat. at Paris, which are popularly known as Charlemagne’s chessmen, in which the Rook is carved as a two-wheeled chariot with a single man in it. Also a 15–16c. Hebrew MS. (Vatican, 171, f2), which contains a poem on chess (v. d. Linde, i. 180, text, 189), substitutes the chariot for the rook. There is a possible reference in a Latin poem on chess (MS. Einsidlen-sis, 365) which is probably older than 1100 (11. 141–2):
Extremos retinet fines inuectus uterque
Bigis seu rochus, marchio siue magis.
Piyādah, older payādah, which was Arabicized as baidaq, is a derivative of the Persian pai, ‘a foot’, and means a foot-soldier.
CHAPTER IX
CHESS IN THE EASTERN EMPIRE
Chess not a classical game.—The name zatrikion.—First references in Arabic works.—References in late Greek literature.—Ecclesiastical censures.—Chess in the Turkish rule, and in modern Greece.
It was a common belief among mediaeval writers that chess was a game, if not of Trojan, at least of Greek invention, and that various references to the practice of games among the Greeks and Romans in classical times related to chess. In the light of the facts of the history of the spread of chess which have been narrated in the preceding chapters, this view can no longer be seriously maintained. Quite apart from the fatal anachronisms involved in the claim, it can be shown to be improbable, if not impossible, on a priori grounds, from an examination of the character of the references and allusions to board-games in classical Greek. When these references are carefully examined, it is found that they reveal not the slightest trace of any allusion to any characteristic at all similar to the essential characteristics of chess—pregnant in possibilities of allusion, simile, or metaphor as these have proved in every chess-playing country. It is inconceivable that such a silence could have existed throughout Greek and Latin literature had any of the classical games shown those peculiarities of piece, form, and move which are the special property of chess. Nor, again, would it have been necessary, as v. d. Lasa has acutely pointed out, for the Byzantines to have introduced a new name for chess if the petteia, or the game of the sacred way, or any other of the classical games had been chess. Slight and conjectural as is our knowledge of these games, whether requiring the agency of dice or not, this much at least is certain: none of them was chess and none of them was like chess.1 Games of skill some of them certainly were, but all lacked the vitality that chess has always shown, and it is clear that they had dropped into desuetude by the sixth century of our era, for long before that date commentators were revealing, by their curious and inconclusive attempts to explain the classical allusions to the petteia and other games, their complete ignorance on the subject.
With the games of the Byzantine period (A.D. 365–1450) we are not much better off for information. Our knowledge is small and goes but little beyond the names of a few of the games that were current. Our want of knowledge may, it is true, be due in part to the uninviting nature of the later Greek literature. The number of scholars who have ventured upon that dreary and unprofitable field is very small, and we are practically indebted for what little we know of the Byzantine games to the first zeal of the scholars of the Renascence; no later writer has added anything of material value to the information first arranged by the four scholars of the 17th c., Jules-César Boulenger, Johannes Meursius, Daniel Souterus, and Andrew Senftleben, the salient facts of which may be seen most conveniently in the pages of Gronovius or the lexicons of Ducange.2
That chess should be found among the games of the later half of the Byzantine period is not surprising. On the contrary, when the political intercourse which subsisted between the Eastern Empire and the later Sāsānian monarchy and the ‘Abbāsid caliphate is remembered, together with the general adoption of Persian customs and luxuries at the court of Constantinople, it would be strange indeed if a knowledge of chess had not penetrated to the Imperial court.
The earliest references to Eastern games in Byzantine Greek are probably those relating to tabla, in later Gk. taula, which was probably identical with the Persian and Arabic nard or nardshīr. Etymologically the word tabla is merely an adaptation of the L. tabula, table, which was already used by Juvenal in the sense of gaming-table, and at a later time appears to have become the ordinary name for the ludus duodecim scriptorum of the classical period.3 If this game was ever played in the Eastern Empire, it was soon supplanted by the Persian nard, a game of the same class, and the name of tabla was transferred to this latter game.4 It is this game tabla which is mentioned in some epigrams of Agathias the scholastic of Myrine in Asia, who flourished A.D. 527–67; the longest of these (Anthol Pal., IX. 482) describes an extraordinary position in the game which had occurred to the Emperor Zeno (A.D. 475–81). The position has been recovered independently by M. Becq de Fouquières and by Prof. Jackson of Cambridge, and their reconstruction shows that the game was identical with the Persian nard. Hyde (ii. 255–6) quotes notes on the Gk. tabla from Cedrenus, Suidas, and Isaac Porphyrogenitus which contain the germ of the astronomical explanation of nard which we have met already in the Chatrang-nāmak. It is noteworthy that this Greek name for nard has replaced the older name in Syria, Turkey, and generally along the S. coast of Asia, where the game on the backgammon board is now commonly called tawūla.
Chess makes its appearance in Byzantine Greek under the name ζατρíκιον, zatrikion. This word is unknown in classical Greek, and is incapable of explanation from native roots. As Hyde and Forbes have shown, the word is ‘simply a barbaric or foreign word with a Hellenic termination’. It can be shown that this form answers exactly to the Middle Persian chatrang, when allowance is made for the different range of the Greek and Persian alphabets. ‘The Greek alphabet’, writes Forbes, ‘had no letter or combination of letters capable of expressing the sound of the Persian ch-, and as the nearest approximation they employed for that purpose the letter ζ, z.’ For similar reasons they had to transliterate the Semitic sh-, by σ, s, or by σι, si-. The nearest Greek approximation to Per. chatrang would be ζατρáγκ or ζατρέγκ, and this, on Greek analogies, gave ζατρíκιον, the form actually found. (An n sound in such a position was often transposed or altogether suppressed.) Shaṭranj, the Arabic and modern Persian name of chess, would have given satrantz. Ducas has σαντράτζ (with n transposed).
The form zatrikion accordingly becomes of importance in connexion with the date of the introduction of chess into the Byzantine Empire. The presumption is that the knowledge of the game was obtained at a time when the Persians still used the older form chatrang, and not from the later Persians, the Arabs, or the Syrians, all of whom had substituted the form shaṭranj for