The ancient origins of the game of chess

HostWe have all seen those black and white squares sitting on a coffee table or tucked away in a library. It feels like chess has just always been there, this quiet, serious game for people who like to think ten moves ahead. But if we go back far enough, it wasn't always so quiet or so still.

HostWhen we look at where this all started, it feels less like a hobby and more like a map of a world that doesn't exist anymore. If you could go back fifteen hundred years to India, what would you see people playing?

GuestYou would see a game called Chaturanga. The name basically means four limbs, but it's not talking about a body. It's talking about the four parts of a real army from that time and place. You had your foot soldiers, your horses, your big war elephants, and your chariots. It wasn't just a fun way to pass the time. It was a way for kings and generals to practice for a real fight without actually losing any blood on a field. Each piece moved in a way that mimicked how those units actually fought. The foot soldiers were slow, the horses could jump over things, and the chariots were fast.

HostSo it was a training tool for war. But wait, I have read that they used dice back then. That feels wrong. Chess is supposed to be about being smart, not being lucky with a roll.

GuestThat's a sticking point for a lot of people. In some of those very early versions, you would roll a die to see which piece you were even allowed to touch. Some people think the dice were there to show the chaos of a real battle. You can have the best plan in the world, but if a horse trips or a wheel breaks, your plan falls apart. It was only later, as the game moved into Persia, that the dice were dropped. They wanted it to be a pure test of the mind. They wanted to show that a smart leader could win through skill alone. That's when it really started to become the game we know today.

HostI guess that makes sense if you want to prove who's the better leader. When it moved to Persia, did the pieces stay the same? I mean, I know we get the word checkmate from them, right?

GuestYou're spot on. They called the game Shatranj. The king was the Shah. When the king was trapped and had nowhere to go, they would say Shah Mat, which means the king is helpless. That's exactly where we get the word checkmate. But the pieces were still very different from the ones in your living room. For one thing, there was no queen. Instead, the piece sitting next to the king was a counselor or a vizier. He was actually quite weak. He could only move one square at a time, and only on the diagonals. He was there to protect the king, not to go out and win the game on his own.

HostThat's a huge shift. How do you go from a weak little counselor to the queen, who's basically the most dangerous thing on the board? It feels like the whole balance of the game would just break.

GuestIt did change everything, but it didn't happen for a long time. The game had to travel through the trade routes into Europe first. For hundreds of years, the game was slow. I mean, really slow. A single game could last for days because the pieces just couldn't move very far or very fast. But when it hit Europe in the late fourteen hundreds, the culture was changing. Everything was speeding up. They wanted the game to be over faster. So, they gave the counselor a makeover. They turned him into the queen and gave her all the powers of the other pieces combined. Some people actually called it Mad Queen Chess because it was so much more violent and fast than the old version.

HostI'm trying to wrap my head around the pieces changing names, too. Like the elephant. How does a giant war elephant turn into a bishop? Those two things have nothing in common.

GuestIt's a bit of a language mix up. In Arabic, the word for elephant is al-fil. When that word moved into Europe, it sounded like words for a fool or a jester. In France, they still call the bishop the fool. But in England, the shape of the piece looked a bit like a bishop’s hat, with those two little points on top that used to be the elephant's tusks. So, they just started calling it a bishop. The same thing happened with the chariot. In Persian, the word was rukh. In Europe, that sounded like the word for a fortress or a tower. So, the fast war chariot became a heavy stone castle.

HostIt's like a game of telephone that lasted a thousand years. But if the rules were changing so much, how did we ever settle on one version? I could imagine people in different towns having huge fights over whether a queen can move across the whole board or not.

GuestThey did. For a long time, if you traveled to a new city, you had to ask what the local rules were before you sat down to play. It was a mess. What finally fixed it was the printing press. Once people started printing books on how to play chess, one set of rules started to win out. People wanted to play the version they read about in the famous books. By the time we get to the eighteen hundreds, everyone was playing the same way. It stopped being a map of a specific army and became this abstract language that anyone in the world could speak.

HostThe board is still that same old map of a king and his four types of soldiers, even if we call them by different names now.

GuestThe game stays the same while the world around it changes, and we just keep renaming the pieces to fit our own stories.

HostThe war elephants might be gone, but we're still using that ancient army to test our wits against each other.