Origin of Chess & Silk Road
Horst Remus
Horst Remus, The Origin of Chess and the silk road. 에서 발췌
A possible forerunner of Chess is an Indian game, known as Ashtapada, which means in Sanskrit a square board of 64 squares, 8 rows of 8 squares. It was played with dice and pieces, a race game possibly going back to the fifth century BC. Chinese records mention its introduction from India to China as early as 220 BC to 65 AD, roughly durng the early Han Dynasty.
The likelihood fo a race-game being a forerunner of Chess is preserved in the promotion of a pawn to a piece when reaching the 8th row. Hinduism prohibits gambling. The revival of Hinduism during the Gupta Dynasty led to an enforcement of this antigambling policy in the 6th century AD. This is used as an argument by some scholars for supporting the idea of an Indian origin of Chess. It is stated that the suppression of dice forced the transformation of a race game into a strategic game.... the gambling inhibition was local and did not apply to total India.
The oldest clearly recognizable Chess pieces have been excavated in ancient Afrasiab, today's Samarkand, in Uzbekistan. These are seven ivory pieces from 762, with some of them possibly older, meaning that they stem from the 6th to 8th century AD.
... an elephant and a zebu bull kept in Tashkent. They were excavated in Dalverzin-Tepe, an ancient citadel of the Kushan Empire now in Southern Uzbekistan, and stem from the 2nd century.... from the 6th or 7th centrury, bought in Baghdad around 1930.... An ivory piece... form the 6th century, has been excavated recently at a Byzantine palace in the ancient city of Butrint in Albania...
The oldest known Chess books or parts thereof are in Arabic, written about 850 AD.... Chess or Chaturanga have not been mentioned in an otherwise very complete travel report by the Chinese Buddihist monk Fa Xian, who traveled through India at the beginning of the 5th century AD.
Ann C. Gunter [Gunter 1991] reports about one of the surviving texts in Middle Persian.... the great Sassanian ruler Khusraw I, who ruled from 531 until 579, and the Indian King Dewisharm....
Another thought would be that Chess emerged on the Silk Road, when merchants were idly waiting for better weather conditions for travel, and playing board games. A key place of this type was Kashgar in today's far western China, which also belonged for a time to the Kushan Empire.
Unfortunately, written references to Chess or its development have not been found yet from before the two Persian records of about 600 AD.
