The History of Chess. H. J. R. Murray
Ch. XIV. The extensive contents of this MS. make it one of our best authorities for Muslim chess.
3. BM = MS. British Museum, Arab. Add 7515 (Rich).
This is a quarto MS. on vellum of 132 leaves, which was completed 16 Jumādā II, 655/1257. It formed part of the library that Claudius J. Rich (B. 1787, D. 1820) collected while Resident at Baghdād in the service of the East India Company, and was bought by the Museum Trustees from his widow.
Forbes (74) represented this MS. as a copy of a work written between 1150 and 1250. The arrangement of the MS. does not bear out this view. It has all the appearance of a work planned upon a larger scale than was carried out, the gaps in which the writer filled in later without regard to their surroundings. There are leaves missing between ff. 7 and 8, 16 and 17, 27 and 28, 34 and 35.
There is nothing in the MS. to show the name of its author, but he has made liberal use of al-‘Adlī’s work, and quotes from al-Lajlāj with approval. Aṣ-Ṣūlī is on the whole ignored; the few extracts from his work, e.g. from his preface on f. 8b, are unacknowledged. The text to fourteen of the problems is identical with that in AH, and it is possible that the as-Sulī extracts may have been taken at second hand from a compilation like AH. The MS. is dedicated to a Prince whose name has been erased. Forbes identified him from the special titles and epithets used with one of the Ayyūbid dynasty who ruled over Egypt, A.D. 1193–1250, but I cannot reconcile what is left of the name of the Prince in the MS. with the name of any member of this house, and Cureton (Cat. Arab. MSS. in the Brit. Mus., ii. 351, No. 784) does not pretend to identify either the Prince or his dynasty. From the compiler’s knowledge of al-Lajlāj’s work, I should be inclined to believe that the MS. was compiled farther East than Egypt, and possibly in Persia.
The most noteworthy feature of the contents is the brief chapter on the Openings of the writer’s time, f. 11 a. I quote this original contribution to the history of the ta‘bīyāt in Chapter XIV.
The front page, f. 1 a, contains a number of entries in later hands. These consist of (a) a title, Kitāb ash-shaṭranj al-Baṣrī, ‘al-Baṣrī’s chess book’, which is a manifest error due to the fact that a quotation from al-Ḥasan al-Baṣrī (D. 110/728) stands at the top of f. 2b: (b) a title Kitāb fī’sh-shaṭranj wa mausūbāt-hi wa mulaḥ-hi, ‘Book of chess, its problems and subtleties’: (c) a note in an 18th-century hand giving the differences of move between the chess of the MS. and the chess of the writer’s day, which I quote below, p. 354: (d) a note in a 15th-century hand giving the sum of the doubling of the squares of the chessboard: and (e) a calculation of the same total in Turkish.
4. L = MS. As‘ad Efendī, Constantinople, No. 1858.
A MS. of 81 worm-eaten leaves, which was discovered by Schroeder (Qst., No. XVII, pp. 382–9). The binding bears the title Risāla al-Lajlāj fī bayān la‘b ash-shaṭranj (‘Al-Lajlāj’s treatise on the demonstration of the game of chess’), and the title-page that of Kitāb ash-shaṭranj ta‘alif Abī’ l-Muẓaffar b. Sa‘īd ‘urifa bi’l-Lajlāj, ‘Book of the chess, composed by Abū’l-Muẓaffar b. Sa‘īd who is known as al-Lajlāj’ (i.e. the stammerer). The MS. is undated, but may be as much as three centuries older than an entry on the title-page chronicling the fact that the Sultan Bāyazīd Khān gave the book to his chief butler, Yūsuf b. ‘Abdallāh, the first day of Shawwāl, 893/1487.
The MS. is a treatise on the practical game, and contains a full analysis of certain of the more popular openings, with the view of establishing the superiority of the Mujannah Opening. It is in consequence a work of prime importance for the history of the practical game: it is the only work on the subject prior to those of the first analysts of the modern European game, and, being the work of a master of the first rank, who expresses his own indebtedness to his own master, aṣ-Ṣūlī, the greatest of all the Muhammadan masters, we may safely regard it as recording the highest point of development reached in the whole history of the older chess. The MS. is incomplete at the end, where it breaks off to give a problem which al-Lajlāj had mentioned—though not in the present work—under the name ad-dūlābīya (the water-wheel). Leaf 9 is out of place, it should come between ff. 37 and 38.
5. AE = MS. As‘ad Efendī, Constantinople, No. 2866.
An undated, anonymous Persian MS. of 609 pages, with the title Kitāb ash-shaṭranj, which is No. XXI of v. d. Linde’s list (Qst., 333). V. d. Linde gives no account of the MS., but merely quotes the opinion of Aḥmad Ḥamdī Efendī, a Turkish scholar who examined it for Schroeder, that it was a work of ‘no value’. This hasty judgement cannot be accepted. The MS. proves on examination to be a compilation treating of all branches of chess. The writer, however, has carefully excluded all reference to his sources, and only names ‘Adlī and Lajlāj Shaṭranjī as supporting certain verdicts in the Endgame. After a lengthy preface on the creation, of which the noblest work was man, and on man’s glory, to wit his intellect, of which chess and nard are the most striking fruits, the work continues with a close and complete translation of al-Lajlāj’s Arabic work which we possess in L. The leaves are in some confusion, but the text affords a valuable means of testing the accuracy of L, especially as AE contains 60 diagrams showing the position at various points of the analysis. It also supplies the conclusion which is missing in L.
The second section of the MS. consists of a long list of decisions on the Endings. The third section is an extremely valuable collection of 194 problems, with which I deal in Chapter XV.
6. V = MS. Vefa (‘Atīq Efendī), Eyyub, No. 2234.
A paper MS. of 77 leaves, 24 cm. by 19, one of those discovered by Dr. Schroeder, and No. XIX of v. d. Linde’s list (Qst., 390–6). Schroeder, gave as its title Manṣūbāt li Abī Zakarīyā Yahyā b. Ibrāhim al-Ḥakīm, but the official catalogue gives no author’s name, and I think that Schroeder has in transcribing his notes confused this MS. with MS. Abd-al-Ḥamīd, No. 561 (see below). The opening leaves of the MS. are lost, and the MS. itself as a result throws no light upon the question of authorship. It was copied 21 Ramadān 618/1221 by Muḥammad b. Hawā b. ‘Othmān, the mueddib, as appears from the conclusion on f. 77 b.
In addition to the loss of leaves at the commencement of the MS., there is a gap between ff. 14 and 15 (f. 14 ends with the chapter-heading, ‘Chapter of the’ibdīyāt which the different classes of chess-players have chosen,’ and 15 begins in the middle of a problem solution). The text of this MS. is in the main identical with that of AH, without retaining the order of that MS., and the seven pages of poems (ff. 60–62 a) all occur in AH.6
7. H = MS. John Rylands Library, Manchester, Arab. 59.
8. Z = MS. Abd-al-Ḥamīd I, Constantinople, No. 561.
These are two MSS. of the same Arabic work, the Nuzhat al-arbāb al-‘aqūl fī’sh-shaṭranj al-manqūl (‘The delight of the intelligent, a description of chess’), by Abū Zakarīyā Yaḥyā b. Ibrāhīm al-Hakīm. The author flourished in the middle of the fourteenth century. He quotes from the great dictionary of his contemporary al-Fīrūzābādī (I). 817/1414, aged 85), the al-Qāmūs (H, f. 4 a), and there is a quotation from al-Ḥakīm’s book in b. Abī Ḥajala’s work, which will be described next. Neither MS. is dated, but H is ascribed to the latter half of the fifteenth century. Z is a modern MS., written perhaps towards the end of the eighteenth century.
H consists of 57 paper leaves, 175 mm. by 130. This MS. and the companion chess MS. in the Rylands Library (Man., see below) were brought to England from Damascus in the eighteenth century, and formed part of the collection of J. G. Richards, until in 1806 they passed into the possession of John Fiott, of St. John’s College, Cambridge, who subsequently took the name of Lee on inheriting property from his mother’s family.7 Nathaniel Bland borrowed them from Dr. Lee for use in the preparation of his paper on Persian Chess (London, 1850), but failed to return them, and subsequently efforts to recover them which were made at the instance of Prof. Duncan Forbes between 1855 and 1860 proved fruitless. Bland’s Oriental library was sold en bloc in 1866 to the Earl of Crawford and Balcarres, and the ‘Lee MSS.’ passed into the Haigh Hall Library, and were duly entered in the printed Hand-list to the Oriental MSS. of that library. In