Hobbies and Pastimes
Chess
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The sixty-four square strategy game played at kitchen tables, in parks and clubs, and by hundreds of millions online. Descended from the Indian game chaturanga through the Persian and Arab shatranj, it took its modern queen and bishop in fifteenth-century Europe, and it remains the deepest game a household commonly owns.
Facts
Established When (Circa)Chaturanga is attested in northern India by circa the sixth to seventh century CE; the modern rules settled in Europe circa 1475 to 1500 1 Cross-Tradition Connections
In the Other Atlases
- Also in Sport and Games Atlas: Chess, the same subject.
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Open Questions (1 open question)
Where and when did chess actually originate?
The conventional account derives chess from chaturanga in Gupta-era northern India around the sixth to seventh century CE, but the earliest physical pieces, the earliest unambiguous textual references and the relationships among chaturanga, the Chinese game xiangqi and Central Asian play are all thin enough that scholars have seriously proposed Indian, Chinese and Central Asian origins, and the debate has run for more than a century without a decisive find.
What would resolve this Securely dated early game pieces or texts that tie a recognizable ancestor of chess to one region and period, or philological work that settles the direction of borrowing among the early chess-family games.
Archaeology, Philology, Board game historyChess (Wikipedia)
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