The History of Chess. H. J. R. Murray
the game the Sultan removed one of his men. The blind man quickly detected the fact, remarking that if the Sultan had done it there was nothing to be done but to play his best, but if any one else had done it he would appeal to the Sultan. In 967–8/1559 one of the best players in Damascus was a certain az-Zain al-Mathaka‘a. Once when he was on the point of mating an Egyptian, to whom he had given the odds of the firzān, a ragged Persian who was watching the game interposed and showed the Egyptian the move to thwart the attack. Az-Zain was naturally angry, and his anger was not appeased by the Persian telling him not to lose his temper because he did not know how to play. However, he agreed to play the beggar, who began by deliberately sacrificing faras, fīl, and three baidaqs without any equivalent. Then he asked az-Zain to name the piece with which he would choose to be mated. Az-Zain chose a baidaq, and the Persian gave him mate with a baidaq. Az-Zain, recognizing the Persian’s skill, took him into his service. The Persian would never play except at the odds of the ‘marked piece’. In 970/1562 he saw a Greek, Yūsuf Chelebī, at Trablis (Tripoli in Syria). This man used men of a larger pattern, and played blindfolded by touch. Finally he saw a blindfold player in Constantinople in 975/1567, who played often in his presence with uniform success. Like an-Niẓām al-‘Ajamī, he could at any time describe the position of every man on the board. The MS. Y narrates that there have been players who could play four or five games simultaneously blindfold, and goes on to say:
I have seen it written in a book, that a certain person played in this manner at ten boards at once, and gained all the games, and even corrected his adversaries when a mistake was made (Bland, 24).
CHAPTER XII
THE INVENTION OF CHESS IN MUSLIM LEGEND.
A variety of stories.—The oldest versions associated with India.—The connexion with nard.—The earlier legends from the chess MSS., al-Ya‘qūbī, al-Maṣ‘ūdī and Firdawsī.—The dramatis personae.—The story of the reward for the invention.—The Geometrical progression in literature.—Later stories introducing Adam, the sons of Noah, &c., and Aristotle.
The main facts of the earlier history of chess were well recognized by the older Muslim historians and chess-writers. They admit without reservation that the ordinary chess on the board of 64 squares was originally an Indian game which had reached them through the medium of Persia. But they were not content to leave the history in so bare a dress, and they endeavoured to take it farther back, to find a motive for the invention of the game, and to explain the manner of its discovery. Only in all this they had no historical foundations upon which to build other than the obvious relationship in arrangement, plan, and nomenclature that existed between the game of chess and the army and the tactics of war. This left an excellent opportunity for the literary artist, and he did not hesitate to adorn the story with details derived from his own imagination. Thus there appeared in quite early Muslim times a number of stories, more or less plausible, to account for the invention of chess, and the compilers of works on chess, from al-‘Adlī down, were diligent in collecting these from the sources at their service. Even writers of repute like al-Ya‘qūbī (c. 297/907) and al-Maṣ‘ūdī found a place for them in the pages of their historical works, while Firdawsī gave literary shape to one of the most widely known in the Shāhnāma. We find single legends repeatedly also in MSS. of miscellaneous contents in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish.
When we survey the material1 at our disposal we find that the legends fall into three groups: those which are connected with India, those which associate the game with characters drawn from Scripture history, and those which bring in noted names from Greek philosophy. These two last groups are of later date, and have none of the detail that accompanies the stories of the first group, and it is not difficult to see a motive for the departure from the earlier association with India.
The legends of the earlier group are all, openly or tacitly, concerned with an Indian king or with the wise men of India. The connexion, however, is quite general, in that a special kingdom or district of India is seldom specified. The earlier Muslim writers appear to have formed their conception of a country on the model of the Eastern Roman Empire, or of the Sāsānian Empire which their forefathers had overturned.2 India was to them a single kingdom, and it was long before they discovered that India was a geographical, not a political entity. Only a few of the legends give names to the king or sage of whom they treat, and still fewer attempt to fix the date at which the events they are recording took place. The ordinary story is quite indeterminate as to locality, dramatis personae, and date.
Several legends, however, connect the invention of chess in some way or other with the game of nard (tables, backgammon). We have already met with one instance of this association of games in the story of the introduction of chess into Persia in the time of Nūshīrwān. This linking of two games that to us seem so dissimilar—chess, a game in which chance plays the smallest of parts, and nard, a game in which chance plays the dominant part—appears somewhat singular, yet no association of games has been so persistent or has endured so long. It was not only prominent in Muslim lands, where it runs all through the legal discussion, the literature, and the traditions, but even in Christian Europe chess and tables appear in constant juxtaposition. The player of chess appears almost everywhere in the literature of the Middle Ages as a player of tables also, and the larger European problem MSS. treat of chess, tables, and merels. In these collections, however, the essential distinction between chess and tables is minimized, since in most of the problems on tables the constraint of the dice has been replaced by the liberty to select the throw desired, but this is, so far as the evidence goes, a purely European innovation. In Muslim literature it is upon the essential difference between chess as the game of skill and nard as the game of chance that stress is everywhere laid. The player’s complete liberty to select the move he wished to make in chess is contrasted with the player’s subjugation to the dominion of blind chance in nard. Throughout the legends with which I am about to deal, nard appears as the older and chess as the younger game; this is the reverse of what we find in the Nūshīrwān story as told in the Chatrang-nāmak and in the Shāhnāma. There, it will be remembered, the invention of nard is Buzūrjmihr’s reply to the Indian challenge to discover the nature of chess.
One of the older legends which occurs in AH (f. 1 b), C (f. 1 b), and V (f. 2 a), with the omission of all proper names, as an extract from the work of al-‘Adlī, and in almost identical words, with the addition of the proper names, in the Ta’rīkh of al-Ya‘qūbī (ed. Houtsma, Lugd. Bat., 1883, i. 99–102), brings the two games together. In this legend, an Indian monarch named Hashrān is represented as appealing to an Indian sage, Qaflān by name, to devise a game that should symbolize man’s dependence upon destiny and fate, and depict the way in which these forces work by means of man’s environment. The philosopher accordingly invented the game of nard, and explained to the king that the board stood for the year. It had 24 points (‘houses’) in all, because there are 24 hours to the day. It was arranged in two halves, each with 12 points to symbolize the 12 months of the year, or the 12 signs of the Zodiac. The number of men (‘dogs’) was 30, because there are 30 days to the month. The two dice3 stood for day and night. The faces were arranged with the 6 opposite to the 1, the 5 opposite to the 2, and the 4 opposite to the 3, so that the total of the dots on each pair of opposite faces should be 7, to bring in the number of days of the week and the 7 luminaries of the heavens.4 The players threw one of the dice in order to determine the order of play, and the one who secured the higher throw commenced, and moved his men in obedience to the throws given by the two dice. In this way man’s dependence upon fate for good or evil fortune was made evident. Hashrān was delighted with the game and introduced it in India, where it became extremely popular.
At a later date there arose a king, Balhait by name, who was advised by a Brahman that this game was contrary to the precepts of his religion. The king accordingly planned to replace nard by a new game, that should demonstrate the value of such qualities as prudence, diligence, thrift, and knowledge, and in this way oppose the fatalist teaching of nard. His Brahman friend undertook the task, and invented chess, explaining its name of shaṭranj by the Persian hashat-ranj, in which hashat means eight and