The greatest chess puzzle
By Aryan Argandewal
On a hot summer day of 2001 during my placement at Moscow State University
of International Relations – the MGIMO – I received a phone call
from an old friend who invited me to join her in a garden party that undergraduates
organized to celebrate the end of final exams at the Law faculty of Leningrad
(now St. Petersburg) State University.
The Moscow underground
I left my MGIMO dormitory at ‘Prospect Vernadskogo 74’ early in
a nice blue-skied Moscow morning, having passed the heavily guarded MGIMO entrance
(where they check your ID every time you go in and out!), walked to the nearest
Metro Station. I love overcrowded streets of Moscow. There’s something
very lively about them. You see people who are literally fighting for their
day-to-day survival but they do it with dignity and self-awareness. You see
human endurance at its best.
A Moscow metro station
I ‘dived’ into the overcrowded Prospect Vernadskogo Metro Station,
which, in itself is a reminder of the Russian love affair with art. You see,
Moscow Metro stations are built so beautifully they remind you of London museum
of Art! Seeing Russian men and women with huge multi-coloured bags (what do
they carry in them anyway?) amidst this architectural ingenuity that is called
Moscow Metro is a strange visual experience. From Prospect Vernadskogo it takes
about 40 minutes to get to ‘Severnyj Vokzal’ (North-bound Railway
Station). On the way I made a quick stop at Park Kultury (The Victory Park)
station to stuff myself with two large chilly Burritos at a Pepsi fast-food
kiosk.
The Komsomolskaya metro station
The Park Kultury metro
The Plshad revolutsii station
From the “Severnyj Vokzal” it takes between 8 and 12 hours to
travel from Moscow to St. Petersburg, depending on which class of trains you
are lucky to get on. As someone who very much knows his way round complicated
Russian reality, I managed to get on a fairly fast train.
A Russian train is not much different from any Western apart, perhaps, from
the fact they are all green-coloured (or maybe it seemed to me?), usually with
a huge red star stamped all over its forehead and there’s something else:
eye-contact is not followed by a social smile among Russians, hence you walk
through the corridors constantly reminding yourself of the possible misunderstandings.
Oh, and you have to walk “half a mile” down the car to get yourself
a cup of coffee as there’s no room service.
So here I am sitting across a little table from a rather imposingly built
middle-aged man possibly with a military past with his very attractive wife
sitting alongside. There are three of us in the car. I am desperately trying
to avoid any smile-related misapprehensions. As you can imagine it was not
an easy task to strike up a conversation in the circumstances. But I kept hoping.
Russian long-distance trains
Ten minutes passed, we are now well on our way to the city on the Neva River
that is St. Petersburg. I am not used to reading on a train or plane (unless
it is a fresh issue of F1 Racing or Top Gear or Auto Car for that matter).
I usually play against Fritz when I travel. But carrying a laptop on a Russian
train is to expose yourself to a possible long stay at a nearby hospital...
Anyway, so I am sitting there wishing Chess Base built a spy version of X3D
Fritz hidden in my glasses! But then something happened which is not terribly
uncommon in Russia: my imposingly looking travel mate asked me: do you play
chess? I almost froze from excitement and then almost cried: “Da
konechno!” – Yes of course! And immediately I forgot my recently
acquired manners and smiled! Bad habits hah? But so did he! And his good-looking
wife said: well, here we go again, and he said: “a chto tut delat’
esche?” – What else can you do on a train?
He ‘dug out’ his exotic wooden chess set from a huge plastic bag
of a sort and continued: "khorosho igraite?" – Do
you play well? Why do people always ask this anyway, I thought to myself. “Da
tak sebe, ne chego osobennogo” – average, nothing special,
I answered. Russians are very modest people, so saying what I said could’ve
stirred him up even more to beat me.
We played several games. I don’t think he expected to play so many games
considering his strong unusual Trompovsky line, but we played the whole way
to St. Petersburg. After the third or forth game I heard his voice as if in
a deep hypnotic state: by the way did you know that chess was originated in
your region? Really? – thinking to myself my opponent probably wants
to break my concentration. I know of a story, I said, that has been attributed
to every Asian nation there is – Afghanistan, China, India etc.
The story goes that a king assigned a mathematician to come up with a challenging
entertainment project. After a while the mathematician came up with the game
of Chaturanga. The game had two armies each led by a king who commanded the
army to defeat the other by capturing the enemy king. The king loved the game
so much he offered to give the man anything he wished for. “I would like
one grain of rice for the first square of the board", said the man, "two
grains for the second, four grains for the third etc." It turned that
all the rice in the kingdom would not have sufficed to fulfil the quest. And
so, the story goes, His Majesty decided to behead the man. Of course there
are a good million versions of this story.
But how do you prove the authenticity of something as imaginary as this? The
game has been around for so long that any nation can make an exclusive claim
about their special relationship with the Royal Game. But my opponent –
I nicknamed him Tovarisch Polkovnik (comrade colonel) – was
convinced that chess in actual fact originated in the Central Asian region
that covers Afghanistan and the former Southern Soviet Republics. "Well,
look," he continued, "wherever you go in Asia you’ll find a
bunch of guys like you and me sitting in a park or a Chai Khaneh (tea-house)
with a few boards trying to prove who’s got the strongest mind among
them. Isn’t that a fact?"
He was right. Chess truly represents something more than a game in that region.
In Afghanistan there is no other form of board game but chess. In the Central
Asian republics of the ex-USSR too, chess is very popular. But my personal
account is that another game called “Shashki” which is a different
sort of board game seems more popular among ordinary people in Tashkent, Dushanbe
etc. That is of course not to say that chess is less of a sport there –
it simply has a different and somewhat distant street audience.
Origin of chess
That was back in 2001 when I thought about the origins of chess for the first
time. Until recently, that is, when my editor decided that I should explore
the subject in detail.
When I began looking into the subject, at first sight it seemed a rather trivial
task: all I need to do is to read a number of professional research works and
cogitate on who sounds plausible and who’s trying to fish in the muddy
water. This is precisely what I do when I write a report on a criminal case
after a trial but here the circumstances are slightly different: if one tries
to explore a subject of this complexity relying only upon one’s general
knowledge of the game one may never succeed in finalizing one’s conclusions.
Why? Because I am not a professional historian!
While researching for the purposes of this article I found out that there’s
actually a generally accepted term: Chess Historian! Did you know
that? Well, I didn’t. My understanding of this term is that there are
full-time explorers of the origins of chess! This was my first shocking discovery.
Furthermore, I found out that as early as 1991 an initiative group called Königstein
(IGK) was founded, the sole purpose of which was to give Chess Historians the
opportunity of presenting their research. The classical research on the origins
of chess is essentially a study of archaeological evidence about Indian, Persian
or Chinese origin of the Royal Game.
Having read an enormous variety of professional opinions I couldn’t
help admitting to myself that I was most impressed with the ideas one of IGK
members Gerhard Josten. In his 14 page long thesis “Chess
– A Living Fossil” he presents probably the most convincing
argument from a scientific perspective. The term ‘scientific’,
however, is inevitably relative. The author, for quite obvious reasons, has
to rely on hypothesis and circumstantial evidence. Chess, after all, has been
around for a while! So any ‘scientific’ suggestion inevitably crosses
the threshold of what is known as one hundred percent laboratory conditions.
I was impressed with Josten’s opinion because he sounds more chess-like.
Okay, here’s what I mean by chess-like: whereas other chess historians
talk more about historical ‘facts’, geography, astronomy (someone
has actually come up with the idea that chess is a mathematical model of the
cosmos!), Josten’s work is primarily devoted to the specific structure
of chess as a game. Josten sites a number of chess historians:
-
Joseph Needham suggests that divination could be a common origin
of numerous games. He believes that the developments started from Chinese
divination techniques, which led to numerous variants of chess through
the integration of further elements.
-
Pavle Bidev deduces that it was the Chinese game of chess that
was at the beginning of all developments.
-
Yuri Averbakh shows how chess may have developed in India against
a certain historical background through mutations of its own games and
external cultural influences.
-
David H. Li thinks the Chinese Commander-in-Chief Hán
Xin developed the prototype of all chess games during a military winter
recess by combining the two old Chinese games of Liubo and Weiqi into a
new game, Xiangqi.
- Alex R. Kraaijeveld uses a biological approach. He investigates
40 variants of chess using phylogenetic methods and comes to the conclusion
that it was not the Chinese game of Xiangqi, but very probably the old Indian
game of Chaturanga which was the predecessor of all chess games.
Gerhard Josten concludes that these relatively modern approaches to the history
of the origins of chess, however controversial they may be, justify the thesis
that chess may have developed into a new game through the integration of elements
of various games.
Living and extinct chess variants
The Kushan Empire has a central place in Josten’s work. The Kushans
were particularly keen on merging elements of different cultures. It was the
‘liberal’ Kushan Empire where ideas could flourish, where all religions
were permissible and well respected.
Here I have to say that every single professional opinion on the origins of
chess that I’ve come across stresses, in one way or another the importance
of the Silk Road as an undisputable merging factor. And this furthermore, makes
Josten’s opinion sound plausible.
There is one thing I know for sure: we love chess whether it was invented
in China, Persia or India. Chess is probably the only sport today that knows
no boundaries: age, gender, race, nothing comes between chess and its followers.
So here’s to the Royal Game!
Links
About me:
Aryan Argandewal. I am of Afghan origin. About 200 years ago
Afghanistan was called Aryana. This is where my name comes from (Aryan-a, man
from Aryana) My family is based in North America and Australia. I study Law
at university of Surrey, England. I fluently speak: English, Russian and Persian,
am able to read and write Japanese, Arabic and Pashto. Member of Guildford
Chess Club, Surrey, UK.
