The First Ever Chess Match
I started a forum thread a few days ago where we discussed the matter of chess in the Olympic Games. More to the point, we were arguing whether chess is indeed a sport and whether it deserves a place in the old Greek festival. It turns out many members argued against chess (unbelievable), and this in fact tends to be the favoured argument whenever this subject swoops in. But I wasn't ready to let chess fall away that easily - somebody has to fight for chess, right? - and so I grabbed my tools and dug some rocks and found at the bottom of my excavation the beginning of the Olympic Games and the beginning of Chess.
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The Game of War
That's the title chess has held since the early A.D. centuries, and it has been reigning undefeated ever since. The game apparently began in ancient India in the hands of traders who needed a pastime to ease the countless hours spent on the roads. It would eventually find its way to the curious citizens the traders dealt with, and would one day become a symbol of elegance and mental ability in the noble courts of kings and queens. That's quite the journey for a little square board game.
But chess isn't the first board game to incorporate the concept of battle and strategy, and it's certainly not the first game to exhibit the complexities that make chess so addictive to begin with. So how did chess come to earn its master badges of prestige?
The answer is nigh. First off, chess doesn't merely represent miniaturized war on a board, but it also represents a militaristic way of thought. Chess has long been enjoyed by war officials for that very reason. Interestingly enough, traders or 'caravaners' of the time also enjoyed chess for the very same reason, as they were just as concerned with war as the generals and commanders were.
In the ancient world, business and war have always been subject to spatial relations, and chess is all about spatial relativity. It's really simple: chess wasn't merely a game that the traders created to pass time on the roads. In truth, chess began out of necessity. It was the ability to spread out your map on a table, place a bunch of stones or wooden markers that represented certain threats and dangers on that map, and begin planning a safe/profitable route by moving those pieces around. Sound familiar?
This activity was commonplace in the ancient world where bandits, battle fields, wild animals, climate and markets had to be taken into account whenever travel was concerned. In fact, it was so common of those days, it makes absolute sense that someone would eventually begin a game from it, right?
It should be interesting to note that there are a number of board games that predate chess, board games that exhibit the same squaring or grid system, as well moving pieces, and all of these games revolved around strategy - they belong to the same family of games. In that light, it was only natural for chess to come along as a new addition to the family. Which is to say the inception of chess was a rather natural and progressive process, and not an invention that dropped from the sky (peace to ET, though).
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Life today isn't very foreign from what it was when chess first debuted, and it is no wonder that the game doesn't feel outdated or out of place. There is no reason to doubt that chess will continue to reign undefeated as the game of war even in the face of rivals such as the game Go, for they share a very different history and purpose.
