Board Games
About 1,350 years ago the game under the name Chatrang, adapted for
two persons with sixteen piece on each side, and the same square board
of 64 squares, became regularly practiced, but when the dice became
dispensed with is quite unknown.
It may not be possible to trace the game of chess with absolute
certainty, back to its precise source amidst the dark periods of
antiquity, but it is easy to shew that the claim of the Hindus as the
inventors, is supported by better evidence both inferential and positive
than that of any other people, and unless we are to assume the Sanskrit
accounts of it to be unreliable or spurious, or the translations of Dr.
Hyde, Sir William Jones and Professor Duncan Forbes to be disingenuous
and untrustworthy concoctions (as Linde the German writer seems to
insinuate) we are justified in dismissing from our minds all reasonable
doubts as to the validity of the claims of the Hindu Chaturanga as the
foundation of the Persian, Arabian, Medieval and Modern Chess, which it
so essentially resembled in its main principles, in fact the ancient
Hindu Chaturanga is the oldest game not only of chess but of anything
ever shown to be at all like it, and we have the frank admissions of the
Persians as well as the Chinese that they both received the game from
India.
The Saracens put the origin of chess at 226, says the "Westminster
Papers," (although the Indians claim we think with justice to have
invented it about 108 B.C. Artaxerxes a Persian King is said to have
been the inventor of a game which the Germans call Bret- Spiel and chess
was invented as a rival game.
Excerpted from H.E. Bird's Chess History and Reminiscences.
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