The origin and the legend of the chess game.
Could the "king of games" be the oldest intellectual game in the world?
This seductive idea has given rise to many hypotheses, as numerous as they are fanciful, as to the origin of the game, which has never been established with certainty. Thus, we find its beginnings in Vedic India, 2000 years before Jesus Christ. The Buddha himself would have preached against the practice of gambling on Sundays, 500 years before Christ! Today, it is admitted that chess made its first appearance in India, but around the 6th century of our era.
A wise man named Sissa
According to the legend, the presumed inventor of Indian chess is a Brahmin named Sissa. He would have invented chaturanga to distract his prince from boredom, while showing him the weakness of the king without entourage. Wishing to thank him, the monarch proposed to the wise man to choose his own reward. Sissa asks only for a little wheat. He invites the ruler to place one grain of wheat on the first square of a chessboard, then two on the second square, four grains on the third, eight on the fourth, and so on until the sixty-fourth square, doubling the number of grains each time. This request seemed quite modest to the sovereign, who was surprised and amused by the exercise. But the king was never able to reward Sissa: all things considered, he should have been offered not one bag, but 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 grains... that is, the entire harvest of the Earth for about five thousand years!
Medieval legends
From the 13th century, the practice of chess became common in the West. Enlightened players wanted to give the "king of games" the prestige and legitimacy of high antiquity. Many fables and legends circulated then. Knowing that the game came from the East, some imagined king Solomon playing chess to dazzle the queen of Sheba. Others, the philosopher Xerxes offering to the king of Babylon Evilmodorach this war game to appease his murderous madness. More wise, noticing that the Bible does not mention chess, have found an "inventor" in the Greek world by associating two illustrious characters who were already dreaming a lot : Aristotle would have thus instructed the young Alexander the Great...
Palamedes, myth of the courtly society
A last legend goes back to mythology: Palamedes, hero of the Iliad and great rival of Ulysses, would have invented chess to entertain the Greek army while the siege of Troy was dragging on. Famous for his intelligence, the Greek Palamedes remains the one to whom many inventions are attributed: the alphabet, numbers, money, dice or even the game of checkers... then replaced by that of chess.
Palamède is also the name of a knight of the Round Table who occupies an important place in the courtly literature of the 13th century. Playing on the homonymy with the Greek hero, the legend of King Arthur makes this knight Palamedes, son of the Sultan of Babylon but converted to Christianity, the instructor of his comrades-in-arms with this game that he brought back from the East. This Palamedes becomes the "ideal" inventor of the chess game for the medieval society : he reconciles fable with real oriental origins and thinks the game as an initiatory course which is part of the Graal quest.
Knight with the merit to have delivered the "noblest of games", Palamède is represented with a coat of arms "chequered of silver and sable", that is to say in black and white checkerboard. By appropriating the game, the medieval society creates its own myth : for many players, Palamedes will remain "the inventor of chess" until... XIXth century !
