The game of chess has long reigned over the various board games available for play. Where other games might be more specifically located in individual countries, ethnic groups or cultures, chess has enjoyed an unusually diverse and widespread dissemination, being accorded respect in various places which are otherwise hugely different from each other. One can study the cultural effect which playing the game of chess has exercised on cultures throughout the world from a variety of perspectives, but one aspect of this subject that may prove particularly interesting for students and players of chess is the subject of how it underwent a gradual evolution from very early forms of the game to modern day styles. In the course of this process, different versions of the game of chess have moved across parts of the world over long periods of history, where it has served various purposes and been interpreted in various ways by the cultures at hand.
It has not been clearly agreed as to where chess can be reliably considered to have begun, but it is most common among historians concerned with the question to ascribe the earliest identifiable method for playing the game of chess in the sixth century CE. The geographical location for this emergence of chess into the world’s repertoire of games is ascribed to Northwestern India, which at that time was under the control of the authority of the Gupta people. The name given to the early game of chess is “caturanga,” in Sanskrit, which is closely related to the languages of Europe, which are classed together with it as “Indo-European” languages. By people who know how to speak Sanskrit, it is recognized that “caturanga” carries with it the meaning of “four units,” the units in question in this case being those of an army. This form of chess was thus directly inspired by the advanced and successful military tactics through which the Guptas had attained a dominant position in India at that time, and were accordingly played with pieces which represented infantry, cavalry, elephants with riders, and chariots, which find their equivalents in the modern-day form of chess in the figures of the pawn, knight, bishop and rook.
At this very early point in the history of chess, the game of chess was already displaying an atypically pronounced tendency to be transmitted to the cultures of other parts of the world and there find a place in their social practices and institutions. The earliest physical artifacts to survive of a game of chess survive in the area which at that point in time was identified as Sassanid Persia, and is close to the Northwestern India area ruled by the Gupta empire. Here the game of chess came to be known by the related name “chatrang,” which is described being played in romantic epic poems written in Pahlavi. This species of chess was renamed “shatranj” in the period when Persia was conquered by the rising Muslin faith, which spread it through its domain and to its rival of Christian Europe.
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