Tradition · board game tradition
Chaturaṅga / Chess
Also known as Chaturaṅga — the ancestor of chess
A four-armed battle game — infantry, cavalry, elephants, chariots, with a king and a counsellor — played in India by the sixth century and named after the four divisions of an army. It reached Sasanian Persia as chatrang, the Arab world as shatranj, and Europe as chess.
- Function
- Arts & performance
- Confidence
- Not assessed
Worth knowing
The elephant became the bishop in English and the fou or jester in French because nobody knew what the piece was; the counsellor beside the king became the queen in medieval Europe and acquired its sweeping modern move only around 1475 in Spain, probably with Isabella on the throne.
Connections (3)
- TransmissionCtesiphon
Chaturanga went to the Sasanian court as chatrang, is named in the Middle Persian Wizarishn i Chatrang, and passed from there to the Arabs as shatranj and into Europe with them. The same court and the same century that took the Panchatantra took the game, which is the pattern: Ctesiphon is the relay for almost everything Indian that reached the Mediterranean.
- TransmissionKhosrow I Anushirvan
Chaturanga — the four-arm Indian ancestor-game of chess — was brought from India to Khosrow I’s court in the mid-6th century and became Persian shatranj; the Arab conquest of Persia in 637 CE carried the game onwards into Baghdad and from there into Europe. The pieces (king, chariot/rook, horse, elephant/bishop, foot soldiers) survive from the Indian army model.
- AnaloguePachīsī / Ludo
The other Indian board game the world plays under a foreign name. Chaturanga left by way of the Sasanian court in the sixth century and was renamed at each stop — chatrang, shatranj, chess; pachisi left by way of British India in the nineteenth and became Ludo in England, Parcheesi in America and Mensch ärgere Dich nicht in Germany. One is a war game of capture and the other a race home round a cross, and both left India without their names.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Chaturanga”. H.J.R. Murray, A History of Chess (1913); the Middle Persian Wizārišn ī Chatrang.
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