The History of Chess. H. J. R. Murray
fixed upon the exile of Khusraw (II) Parwīz as the date which with ‘strong possibility’ saw the introduction of chess into Eastern Europe. That would place it in the first quarter of the 7th century.
Forbes, however, assumed that the influx of Arabic words and forms into Persian was an immediate result of the Islamic conquest, A.D. 638–51. Such was certainly not the case. Chatrang may have easily remained in use for another 200 years, the earliest evidence for its disappearance belongs to the 3rd century of Islam (A.D. 830–930). All we can assert is that the philological evidence points to the introduction of the word zatrikion not later than the 9th century A.D., while it does not at all necessarily follow that the practice of the game began so early: the knowledge of the existence of a thing may precede its use by a considerable interval of time. It is quite possible that the word zatrikion came into Greek first in accounts of travel in Persia, or in descriptions of Persian life.
Sound as these conclusions undoubtedly are, they cannot be substantiated by contemporary Greek records, and not one of the earlier uses of the word zatrikion can be dated with any approach to exactness. The earliest evidence exists only in Arabic works, and establishes a knowledge of chess and its technicalities at Byzantium by the year A.D. 800. In the K. akhbār ar-rusul wal-mulūk of the historian at-Tabarī (B. 224/838, D. 310/923)5 we read:
It is related that when Niqfūr (Gk. Nicephorus) was king, and the Byzantines had assembled in allegiance to him, he wrote to ar-Rashīd: ‘From Niqfūr, King of Byzantium, to Hārūn, King of the Arabs, now the Empress to whom I have succeeded estimated you as of the rank of the Rook, and estimated herself as of the rank of the Pawn, and paid a tribute to you, which you rightly should have paid to her. But this was because of a woman’s weakness and folly. When therefore you have read my letter, return the tribute that has been previously paid to you, and come yourself with what you have to repay. If not, the sword is between us and you.’ It is reported that when ar-Rashīd read this letter, his wrath was kindled … and he called for an ink-pot and wrote on the back of the letter: ‘In the name of God! the compassionate and merciful! From Hārūn, Commander of the Faithful, to Niqfūr the dog of Byzantium. I have read your letter, son of an infidel woman. The answer is what you will see, not what you will hear.’ And he struck his camp that day, and marched until he encamped at the gates of Hiraqla (Gk. Heracleia, 65 m. N.W. of Tarsus).
The ruthless conduct of this invasion soon compelled Nicephorus to consent to continue the tribute that his predecessor Irene had paid. The incident is told under the year A.H. 187 (= A.D. 802), in which Nicephorus became Emperor.
The rather later geographer and historian al-Maṣ‘ūdī (D. 345–6/956) refers to the Greeks in connexion with chess in two places in his Murūj adh-dhahab. At the close of his account of the invention of chess in India in the reign of the mythical King Balhait, he says:
The Greeks (al-Yūnānīyan) and Byzantines (ar-Rūm) and other peoples have special theories and methods about this game, as we may see in the works of chessplayers from the most ancient down to al-‘Adlī and aṣ-Ṣūlī
And much to the same effect at the conclusion of a digression on the modifications of chess (among which is ‘the round board attributed to the Byzantines’) he remarks:
The Indians and others, the Greeks, Persians, and Byzantines who play at chess have given accounts of the manner and fashion of the pieces in chess, its arrangements, its beginnings, the various motives underlying it, its peculiarities, and the classifications of the qawā’īm and mufridāt, and the classes of the noteworthy manṣūbāt.6
Greek literature and tradition are alike silent as to the existence or otherwise of these works and theories, and when we turn to the Arabic chess MSS. which are based upon the works of al-‘Adlī and aṣ-Ṣūlī, we find the only references to Greek chess relate to the philosophers Hippocrates and Galen, and to Aristotle. Hippocrates and Galen apparently found in chess a potent antidote to diarrhoea and erysipelas, and prescribed it with success, while Aristotle figures among the many hypothetical inventors of chess. Another story tells how Galen once met a friend whom he had not seen for some time, and learnt that he had been into the country to see a farm which he had purchased with the result of his gains at chess, whereupon the physician exclaimed with what sounds like a strong flavour of irony, ‘What a fine thing chess is, and how profitable!’ Pure fiction, the whole of it, of course.
Most of the MSS. agree with al-Maṣ‘ūdī in giving some account of round chess under the title of ash-shaṭranj ar-rūmīya, or Byzantine chess, while they lay stress upon the fact that it is only a modification of the ordinary or Indian chess,7 It is difficult to understand its designation unless there were some historic justification for it.
It would appear that the earliest use of the word zatrikion occurs in works treating of the interpretation of dreams. This is a Science which was apparently first exploited by the Greeks,8 but soon passed to Persian and Arabic writers. The Muhammadan tābι‘Muḥammad b. Sīrīn (B. 33/653–4, D. 110/729), of Persian parentage, was skilled in this lore, and became the first of a long line of Oriental writers on the subject. One of these Arabic works was retranslated into Greek, and thence into Latin by Leo Tuscus in 1160. A later Latin version is due to the German traveller John Leunclavius (B. 1533, D. 1593), who ascribed the Greek work to Apomazares, in whose name we may recognize the Arabic oneirocritic Abū Ma‘shar (D. 272/885). Nicholas Rigault (B. 1577, D. 1654) printed the Greek text in 1603 with Leunclavius’s translation, and ascribed it to Achmet fil. Seirem. This is generally understood to mean Muḥammad b. Sīrīn, though on the strength of the Greek version Achmes appears in some lists of Greek authors as flourishing, now as early as A.D. 750, now as late as A.D. 950! Since the work contains the interpretation of a dream that happened to al-Ma’mūn, who reigned A.D. 813–833, it cannot be b. Sīrīn’s work, and Bland has shown9 that there are grounds for believing that it is of Christian authorship. The Greek can hardly be earlier than the 10th century. Chapter 241 treats ‘Of zatrikion. From the Persians and Egyptians’.10
If any one dreams that he plays chess (zatrikizo, vb.) with a man he knows, they will quarrel over money affairs, &c.
If a king or grandee or general dreams that he plays chess, he will think of the place for joining battle with the enemy, &c.
If he dreams that he takes many pieces in the game,11 he will take many of the enemy, &c.
If a king or grandee or general dreams that he has lost or broken or been deprived of his zatrikion, he will lose his army, &c.
Besides this passage, Ducange quotes two other references in MSS. accessible in his time, one attributed—but certainly wrongly—to Astram-psychus, in which twice occur the words ‘chess and tables’,12 the other from an anonymous MS. on Persia, De arte Persica, ‘slaves and games of bolgon and chess and love of women.’ Neither of these passages can be dated, and the present location of the MSS. is unknown to me. The only point of importance about either appears to be that chess is associated with other notorious features of Persian luxury. It has probably never been in worse company.
A fourth instance occurs in a scholiast’s commentary on Theocritus, Idýll, vi. 18,13 where there is an allusion to the Greek game of petteia—‘he moves away the pebble from the line’ This, the commentator explains, ‘is a figurative expression borrowed from the phraseology of those who play at the game commonly called zatrikion’—an absurdity that provoked Dr. Hyde’s scornful comment, ‘quantum hallucinatus est Scholiastes!’ Here again we have no clue to the date of the writer.14
It is not until we come to the 12th century that we have an instance of zatrikion to which we can assign a definite date. In the twelfth book of the Alexiad of the Princess Anna Comnena (D. 1148), a laudatory biography of her father, the Emperor Alexis Comnena (D. 1118), we read in an account of the Emperor’s recreations:
He had certain familiar friends with whom he played chess, a game that was discovered in the luxury of the Assyrians, and was brought to us.15
Here again chess is associated with Oriental luxury. Assyria, of course, was no longer a kingdom in Anna Comnena’s day,