Chess Blog Day #38 - Chess and Its Family
Although there still remains some debate on whether chess originated in India or Persia, most historians believe chess to have originated in India.
The common ancestor of chess-like games would then be Chaturanga.
"Chaturanga" literally means "four divisions". The four divisions were infantry, cavalry, elephants and chariotry. These would later become the modern pawn, knight, bishop and rook.
Chaturanga was played on an 8x8 board but this board wasn't checkered like a chessboard.
Chaturanga was probably the earliest game to have two things that chess has that other board games like Go don't: Different pieces with different powers, and a single piece that the game centres around trapping (a "king").
Chaturanga was then introduced to Persia (modern Iran) and became Chatrang, which was eventually given the Arabic name Shatranj.
In Chaturanga the king could be captured. Persian players must have decided that this was no fun because at some point in the 700s the rules of Shatranj were changed so that you couldn't put yourself in check and had to move out of it.
Shatranj had the king, knight and rook equivalents move the way they do to this day; but the pawn, queen and bishop equivalents were much less powerful.
This didn't entirely solve the problem of instantly losing games via a silly mistake though, as any online blitz player will attest. Oh well.
Players also had to announce "shāh" (meaning "king", the origin of the modern "check") when they attacked their opponent's king. And of course they also had to declare "Shāh Māt!" ("the king is dead!"), the origin of the modern checkmate.
Later on they started to engrave half of the squares and the iconic checkerboard came into play.
Shatranj sets are typically more minimalist than Chaturanga sets, likely because of the Muslim ban on idolatry that we mentioned yesterday.
Here's a Chaturanga set (left) compared to a Shatranj set.
Before we continue down the descent of chess, we need to take a look at its cousins.
Chinese chess, xiangqi, is thought to be derived from Chaturanga. There are some niche historical theories that it was the other way around, but these aren't well supported. It has the two properties of a chess-like game that we mentioned before - a "king" and pieces with different moves. Xiangqi doesn't have squares though. Pieces are placed on intersections like in Go.
Shogi, or Japanese chess, is also thought to be derived from Chaturanga and may have been invented in India. Some historians even believe that it was originally played with 3D Chaturanga pieces and not the 2D set that it is today. Shogi has the interesting property of being able to use your opponent's pieces after you capture them, reflected in the western variant of bughouse chess.
One theory is that this rule was added at a time in Japanese history when there were a lot of mercenary fighters switching loyalties.
Makruk, or Thai chess, is another Chaturanga derivative. It's actually much more similar to Chaturanga than Chinese or Japanese chess, and is probably the closest thing to Chaturanga still played today aside from chess itself.
In fact Chaturanga derivatives spread so far east that they reached what is now the USA, as chess-like pieces have been found belonging to the Tlingit people of Alaska.
Back to chess.
Eventually Shatranj was introduced to Europe and became associated with violence, revelry and gambling (I know). The historical cultural impact of chess could be its own blog post.
Eventually chess became more prestigious and associated with knights and royalty, who played with ornate pieces. Christian cultures didn't have the same issues with idolatry at that point in history and began making the sort of elaborate sets we saw yesterday.
At this point the rules hadn't really changed from Shatranj.
There were a couple of early European rule changes though. Pawns were allowed to move two squares on their first move and en passant was added to balance this out. King and queens could jump on their first move (queens were still weak and king jumping eventually became castling).
People also experimented with the idea of setting up the pieces behind the pawns however they wanted, although this never caught on.
Then around 1500 AD the Spanish came along and decided that chess was just too slow. They decided that bishops and queens should have the move ability that they do today.
This was initially called "Mad Queen Chess" or "Chess with the madwoman".
This update spread like wildfire though because clearly everyone found it led to much more action.
Finally in the 1800s the modern rule around stalemate was added, castling was standardised, and all later rule changes like threefold repetition were more technical in nature.
We talked a little bit about the rule changes over history, but some of them are quite interesting so it's worth looking into them in more detail.
Tomorrow: The rules of chess's ancestors.
