Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 5.djvu/610

Rh 598 CHESS amuse his soldiers when in winter quarters so that they might no longer clamour to return home. According to the narrative, this invasion of the Shensi country by Hansing took place about 174 B.C. Captain Hiram Cox, in a com mentary upon the above letter, states that the game is called by the Chinese choke-choo-hong ki, literally, &quot; the play of the science of war.&quot; (See also a paper published by the Hon. Daines Harrington in the 9th vol. of the Archceologia.) Mr N. Bland, M.E.A.S., in his Persian Chess (London, 1850), endeavours to prove that the Persians were the inventors of chess, and he maintains that the game, after being born in Persia, found a home in India, whence, after a series of ages, it was brought back to its original birth-place. The view, however, which has been most seriously put forward, and which has obtained the most credence, is that which attributes the origin of chess to the Hindus. Dr Hyde of Oxford, writing in 1694 (De Ludis Orientalibus), seems to have been the first to propound this theory. He, however, laboured under two somewhat serious disadvantages ; he appears to have been ignorant of the game itself, and the treasures of ancient Hindu knowledge contained in Sanskrit records were not accessible in his time. About 1783-89 Sir William Jones took up the mantle of Hyde, and in an essay published in the 2d vol. of Asiatic Researches, argued that Hindustan was the cradle of chess, the game having been known there from time immemorial by the name of chaturanga, that is, the four &quot; angas,&quot; or members of an army which are said in the Amarakosha to be elephants, horses, chariots, and foot soldiers. As applicable to real armies, the term chaturanga is frequently used by the epic poets of India. Sir William Jones was resident in Bengal, and was president of the Asiatic Society of that province; he commenced the study of Sanskrit to assist him in his judicial functions, and was the first who possessed real and profound knowledge of that language ; he was, besides, well acquainted with and fond of chess, so that altogether he was more advantageously situated than Hyde for forming an opinion upon the matter. His essay is substantially a translation of and a commentary upon the Bhawishya Purana, in which is given a description of a four-handed game of chess played with dice. A pundit named Rhadhakant informed him that this was mentioned in the oldest law books, as also that it was invented by the wife of Ravan, king of Lanka (Ceylon), in the second age of the world, in order to amuse that monarch while Rama was besieging his metropolis. This account claims for chess an existence of 4000 or 5000 years. Sir William, however, grounds his opinions as to the Hindu origin of chess upon the testimony of the Persians, and not upon the above manuscript ; while he considers the game described therein to be more modern than the Persian game. Though sure that the latter came from and was invented in India, he yet, with commendable candour, admits that he could not find any account of it in the classical writings of the Brahmans. He lays it down that chess under the Sanskrit name chaturanga was exported from India into Persia in the 6th century of our era ; that by a natural corruption the old Persians changed the name into chatrang, but their country was soon afterwards taken possession of by the Arabs, who had neither the initial nor final letter of the word in their alphabet, wherefore, they altered it farther into Shatranj, which name found its way presently into the modern Persian, arid ultimately into the dialects of India. So far Sir William Jones ; but Captain Hiram Cox, in a letter upon Burmese chess, written in 1799, and published in the 7th vol. of Asiatic Researches, refers to the above essay, and considers the four-handed game described in the above-mentioned Sanskrit manuscript to be the most ancient form of chess. the Burmese and Persian games coming successively second and third in order of precedence. Later on, viz., in the 1 1th and 24th vols. of the Archceologia, Mr Francis Douce and Sir Frederick Madden expressed themselves in favour of the views held by Hyde and his followers. This brings us to the issue of Professor Duncan Forbes s History of Chess, in 1860, in which Captain Cox s views, as founded upon Sir William Jones s Sanskrit manuscript are upheld and developed into an elaborate theory. Professor Forbes holds that the four-handed game of chaturanga described in the Bhawishya Purana was the primeval form of chess ; that it was invented by a people whose language was Sanskrit (i.e., the Hindus) ; and that it was known and practised in India from a time lost in the depths of a remote antiquity, but, as he considers, for a period the duration of which may have been from 3000 to 4000 years before the 6th century of the Christian era. He endeavours to show, though certainly quite specula- tively, for he adduces no proof, how the four armies commanded by four kings in Sir William Jones s manuscript became converted into two opposing armies, on which conversion he says that two of the kings were reduced to a subordinate position, and became &quot; monitors &quot; or &quot; counsellors,&quot; one standing by the side of the white and the other of the black king, these counsellors being the farzins from which we derive our queens. Among other points he argues, apparently with justice, that chaturanga was evidently the root of shatranj, for the latter word he states is a mere exotic in the language of the inhabitants of Persia, defying all the ingenuity of their grammarians to make it their own. Van der Linde, in his exhaustive work, Geschichte und Litteratur des Schachspiels (Berlin, 1874), has much to say of the origin theories, nearly all of which he treats as so many myths. He agrees with those who consider that the Persians received the game from the Hindus; but the elaborate chaturanga theories of Forbes receive but scant mercy at the hands of the learned Dutch author. Van der Linde argues that chaturanga is always used of an army, and never of a game, by the old Indian poets ; that all Sanskrit scholars are agreed that chess is mentioned in none of the really ancient Hindu records ; that the Puranas generally, though formerly considered to be extremely old, are held in the light of modern researches to reach no further back in reality than the 10th century, while, moreover, the copies of the Bhawishya Purana which are in the British Museum and Berlin Library do not contain the extract relied upon by Forbes, though it is to be found in the Kaghuno.ndana, which was translated by Weber in 1872, and is stated by Biihler to date from the 10th century. The ultimate outcome of Van der Linde s studies appears to be that chess certainly existed in Hindustan in the 8th century, and that probably that country is the land of its birth. While putting forth nothing as positive which cannot be proved, he inclines to the idea that the game originated among the Buddhists, w r hose religion was prevalent in India from the 3d to the 9th century. According to their ideas, war and the slaying of one s fellow- man, for any purpose whatever, is criminal, and the punishment of the warrior in the next world will be much worse than that of the simple murderer ; but they ministered to the combative propensities of human nature by inventing the bloodless warfare of chess as a harmless imitation of and a substitution for the carnage of the battle-field. In opposition to Forbes, therefore, and agreeing with Sir William Jones, Van der Linde takes the view that the four-handed game of the above-mentioned manuscript is a comparatively modern adaptation of the primal Hindu chess, and he altogether denies that there is any proof of the game in whatever form having the antiquity