Cambs April 2021

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History

By Catherine Rose

The History of Chess The game of chess is nearly 1,500 years old and is as popular today as it has ever been, with more than 600 million people around the world playing. Interest in the game has only increased during the past year’s lockdowns, thanks to us having a lot more time at home and the popular Netflix series The Queen’s Gambit. But what is the history behind this ancient game? It is believed that chess originated in India around 500AD, with a strategic military board game called chaturanga. Ivory and ebony pieces on an eight-by-eight board represented a king, an adviser (that later became the queen) and two armies of four soldier divisions: those on foot, on horse, on elephant and in chariots. All had different rules about how they could move across the board. From India the game was taken up in Persia (now Iran) where it was known as Shatranj, and from there it spread through the Muslim empire. It is

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thought that the Muslims changed the pieces from the animals and people depicted in the Indian game into more abstract pieces, as it is forbidden to represent images of animals and people in the Islamic religion. From the Arab world, the game travelled across North Africa and the Moors brought it to Spain and Europe in around the twelfth century. The oldest recorded game of this forerunner of chess is a tenth-century match played between a Baghdad historian and his pupil. There are also very old chess sets still in existence, such as the twelfth century glazed pottery fritware shatranj set in the New York Metropolitan Museum, and the Isle of Lewis set made from walrus ivory that can be found in the National Museum of Scotland, and is also from the twelfth century. With its move into the Christian world, chess pieces

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