history

Keen On Chess
The History of Chess
By Robert Keen

     Chess in its various manifestations can rightly be regarded as the king of board games. Millions of people are fascinated by it, or follow the exploits of its leading practitioners. The World Chess Federation, wit over 150 member states, is the largest mind sports organization in the world. Chess is capable of making multi-millionaires of its top champions. The prize, for example, in the 1992 Ficher-Spassky match was a staggering five million dollars. And that contest was not even for the World Championship!
     Chess is said to have originated in India around 600 AD under the name Chaturanga. This was a word describing the four traditional army units of Indian military forces, namely foot soldiers (pawns), cavalry (knights), chariots (rooks), and elephants (which have come down as bishops in contemporary chess).
     The name "chess" is derived from the Persian word "Shah", meaning king or ruler. The word is also related to "check" and may even be a cognate with the words Caesar, Kaiser and Czar, respectively denoting rulers in the Roman Empire, the German Empire and the Russian Empire.
The earliest written reference is from an ancient Persian poem from the late 6th century AD, the Chatrang Namak. Chess, in its original (rather slow) form flourished during the Baghdad Caliphate in the 10th century AD.
     Baghdad was the world capitol of chess. In the ninth and tenth centuries AD, Baghdad was to shatranj (the old Arabic form of chess) as Moscow is to the modern game. It was a cultured flourishing center, packed with chess grandmasters and theoreticians who wrote volume after volume on critical positions and opening theory.
     Two of the key differences between shatranj and chess as we know it are that a win could be achieved by taking all your opponents pieces (apart from his king) and some of the pieces move differently. For example, pawns could only move one square, the bishop could only move two squares, jumping the intermediate square and any piece that was in its path, and the queen moved only one square diagonally. Rook, knight, and king movements were identical to modern chess.
Chess was actually fortunate to have survived at all under Islam, since the game tended to violate two of the central prohibitions, that against the making of images and that against gambling. The first objection was ingeniously circumvented by the making of more abstract designs by he Arabs for their chess pieces. The problem of gambling, which was rife, was more serious. The solution was a diversionary counter gambit. Various chess loving Caliphs announced that chess was a preparation for was and thus permissible.
     The problems concerning Islamic Law are still very real. Only recently has the Rafsanjani regime in Iran revoked the Ayatollah Kohmeini's prohibition against playing chess, while Western chess masters traveling to Saudi Arabia are advised against bringing in Western chess sets. The Christian cross surmounting the kings might cause offence to devout customs officials.
      The most renowned chess grandmaster in Baghdad was As-Sul (880-946 AD). Just like Kasparov, he came from an area bordering the Caspian Sea, and he traveled to the capital from his far-flung outpost of the empire to become the chess favorite of the Saddam Hussein of his day, the Caliph Al-Muktafi. In 940 AD, according to the Oxford Companion to Chess, as As-Sul made indiscrete political commitment and had to flee from Baghdad. He died in poverty in Basra.