Talk:Origins of chess
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Discussion:
Considering that Xiàngqí (or Chinese chess or elephant chess) evolved from an ancient Chinese game called Liubo, invented around 1500 BC, Chaturanga would obviously be a variant of these older Chinese games. (See http://www.yutopian.com/chinesechess/history.html .) Each Xiàngqí player, as in Liubo, begins the game with one (1) General and five (5) Pawns, with victory defined by capture of the General. In the game of Liubo, however, the moves of the playing pieces are decided by a roll of dice. Accordingly, Xiàngqí predates the Indian game Chatrang and modern-day "Western" chess.
- I haven't seen this claim made in any mainstream source. I'll do some background checking on it later, but given other inaccurate material added by the same user I'm not inclined towards leaving it in the article. Some of the linked article seems to contradict the evidence presented in a paper about Liuno in the Journal of Board Game Studies (1999).
The main claim for the Egyptian origin is an ancient image found in the tomb of Egyptian Queen Nefertari (1295-1255 BC), which shows the queen reaching over what appears to be a game of 10 playing pieces on a 4 x 7 board design. The board depicted in this image includes, like Xiàngqí, a large block of blank space in its middle, between the two players (for a river or field or ...?). (See http://www.charlatanchess.com/eng8e.htm. ) If this is actually a "game," it would perhaps constitute an earlier version of Xiàngqí and would perhaps have also evolved from the ancient Chinese game Liubo (ca 1500 BC). And it would be our earliest indication of figurine-like figures being used for playing pieces rather than the flat discs that were used in the ancient Chinese games.
- This is a theory that hasn't been seriously suggested since the early 20th century. The game displayed in the image is far more like to be the Royal Game of Ur. --Imran 19:49, 31 Mar 2004 (UTC)
The Royal Game of Ur ( http://www.gamecabinet.com/history/Ur.html ) was a race game played with knucklebones or dice on a board design that was very much different from the one depicted in the image of Queen Nefertari mentioned above. Also, if this image is in fact an ancient semblance of the Royal Game of Ur, why would the artist in his painstakingly detailed image entirely overlook including images of the knucklebones/dice? Furthermore, some have suggested that the game is actually the ancient Egyptian race game, Senet ( http://www.gamecabinet.com/history/Senet.html ), a theory that can likewise be disputed along similar lines.
Note too that figurines which possibly were once ancient chess pieces have been excavated, dating to time periods centuries before Chatrang's supposed date of inception in the 6th century! For starters, the piece discovered in Albania - http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20020729/chess.html - is most likely an upside down rook with its bottom reshaped (explaining why it was found alone, apparently having been discarded! Perhaps an error was made in the initial fashioning process and the piece was subsequently reshaped in some vain attempt to search for an alternate use). Secondly, one cannot read Gerhard Josten's work - http://www.mynetcologne.de/~nc-jostenge/josten.pdf - without being struck by the pieces on pages 12 and 14, dating to the first/second century A.D.!
One must then conclude that chess-like games were likely played centuries before Chatrang was allegedly invented in India.
My revert of Roylee's addition
I have blanket-reverted Roylee's edits to this article. My reason is that he obviously tries to promote his extremely dubious, VfD'ed article Latin Alphabet: Circumstantial Evidence for Egyptian Origin by linking it here. I can't judge the merits of the rest of his additions, and decided to err on the side of caution (in knowing violation of the "When in doubt, don't delete" principle), but everybody please feel free to reinstate his contributions if you feel that is appropriate. Kosebamse 09:04, 28 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I'm tempted to rip out huge chunks from this article and NPOV them and stick them on a general board game history article as at the moment a large part of this page is just random speculation with no serious evidence to back it up. --22:44, 10 Feb 2005 (UTC)
as above removing the following,
The bulk of the controversy surrounding the origins of chess mainly springs from two competing historical theories. First, one historical theory assumes our historical record to be essentially accurate. Second, a competing theory suggests that ancient Roman conquerors (with help perhaps from ancient India or Kushans) plundered specialized knowledge from ancient Egypt and revised the historical record so as to claim ancient Egyptian advances as their own. For purposes of this article, this will be termed the "revisionist" theory. Proponents of this theory assert it to be the only logical conclusion remaining to explain some extraordinary ancient Egyptian feats, such as the Great Pyramid of Giza and all those historical/archaeological puzzles posed at Charlemagne's Elephant (http://www.historybookshop.com/articles/commentary/charlemagne-elephant-ht.asp).
Revisionists claim that this lack of physical evidence exposes Chaturanga as an apparent hoax, a game existing in idea only (as nothing more than a mere story) rather than physical fact. Compounding their claim are actual Chaturanga-looking pieces (elephant pieces) which have been discovered and date prior to the 6th century A.D. (See The first Persian, Arab and Russian chessmen (http://history.chess.free.fr/first-persian-russian.htm).) Chess-like games, so it seems, may have been played centuries before having allegedly been invented in India.
The main claim for an Egyptian origin of chess is the ancient image found in the tomb of Egyptian Queen Nefertari (1295-1255 BC) which shows her reaching over what appears to be a game of 10 playing pieces on a 4 x 7 board design. The board suggested in this image includes, like Xiàngqí, a large block of blank space in its middle between the two players. See About The History Of Chess (http://www.charlatanchess.com/eng8e.htm).
If Nefertari's image represents an original version of Xiàngqí, it would be our earliest indication of figurine-type playing pieces on a battle game played without dice. Nevertheless, both the ancient Board Game (http://www.gamesmuseum.uwaterloo.ca//Archive/Brumbaugh/index.html) of Knossos (the design of which includes a ditch) and ancient Chinese Liubo (or Liu po) predate Nefertari's "game" by a couple centuries, as both are circa 1500 BC (ref. Lin, Chinese Chess (https://www.schachversand.de/detail/buecher/5985.html), 1991). However, the Knossos board likely represents a race-like game rather than a battle game, and Liubo, though a battle game, was played with dice.
Interestingly, we have also evidence of two additional ancient Egyptian battle-like board games played without dice. Particularly, Plato attributes Egypt as the origin of petteia, played in the 5th to 4th centuries BC, but nothing more is known about the game. (See reference page 261 at Greek Board Games (http://www.gamesmuseum.uwaterloo.ca//Archive/Austin/index.html).) Another such ancient Egyptian game was seega (idem, pp. 270-271). Yet another described by Plato is the ancient Greek battle game poleis, a "fight between two cities" (idem, pp. 263-265). Note too that literary sources indicate Xiàngqí may have been played as early as the 4th century BC. See chess in early literature.
Other battle-like board games played in antiquity without dice include the ancient Chinese game of Go, still popular even today. Although the origins of Go may extend as far back as 2300 BC (ref. Encyclopædia Britannica (http://www.britannica.com/ebc/article?tocId=9365731&query=go%20board%20game&ct=)) substantial supporting evidence dates no earlier than the 3rd century BC. Finally, Varro (Marcus Terentius) is credited with having documented our earliest record (1st century BC) of the Roman battle game, latrunculi. His original Latin prose is posted at Varro: Lingua Latina X (http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/varro.ll10.html), II, par. 20.
Seemingly, many ancient chess sets were destroyed over the centuries, perhaps in an attempt to "refine" the historical record. Luckily however modern excavations conducted since the 1970s have turned up chess pieces dating as far back as the 2nd century CE. See timeline of chess.
I'm happy for some of the above content to be restore to the article but it needs to be sourced as the mainstream works on this topic (Murray, Eales, et al) all favour the india hypothesis. If you wanted to say xxx proposed theory yyy in journal zzz than that's fine. But currently I think giving the china/roman hypothesis equal weight with the india hypothesis fails to accurately represent mainstream historical/scientific though on the topic. --Imran