A Visual History of Chessmen

Summary

By the 7th Century CE, people in India were playing chaturanga ("four divisions"). The name refers to four types of solider that made up the game—infantry, cavalry, elephants, and chariots, commanded by a raja—that were modeled on the armies of the time. It was the innovation of these different piece types, which each moved in different ways, that distinguished chaturanga from other war games. The different piece types are the ancestors of the pieces of the modern game, and one of the reasons why we can trace chess back to chaturanga. Chaturagna spread outwards from India and is thought to be the common ancestor of many similar games. When it reaches Persia in the 8th Century, the game becomes shatranj, which would later reach Europe and develop into modern chess. A map showing the spread of chaturanga and its influence on other games around the globe, including shatranj, chess, xiàngqí (China) and shogi (Japan). If you were transported to ancient India, you would not necessarily recognise the game they were playing as chess. One of the earliest descriptions we have of how chaturanga was played comes from the 11th Century Persian scholar Al-Biruni's text, . Like modern chesss, chaturanga was played on an eight by eight grid, which had been borrowed from an existing Indian game called ashtapada. In the chaturanga Al-Biruni describes, however, this board was the battleground for four players and four different armies at once. It was also a game of chance (!), where players rolled dice to decide which pieces to move. Both modern chess players and 11th Century Persian shatranj players would find the moves of this game to be different. Al-Biruni descirbes the elephant (the ancient bishop) as able to move only one square diagonally at a time, or one square forward instead. ("They say that these five squares (i.e. the one straight forward and the others at the corners) are the places occupied by the trunk and the four feet of the elephant.") If shatranj to the West and xià...