chess history

hey guys, I just have a question for you, do we know who invented chess, where it cought on?

or will this just be a mystery for all of us?

Incented chess?

Of course India..

some people think Persia or China might have been first, eg: http://history.chess.free.fr/enigma.htm The only thing we can be sure about is chess didn't begin in India as a four player game with dice as you'll read in a lot of books, even ones published recently.

That's parchesi, which is perhaps the same age as chess, and perhaps from the same area.

Evidence points strongly to India with rapid spread to Persia. Muslims then took the game across north Africa and into southern Europe. Meanwhile it also spread through Caucasia into Russia.

But, none of this is settled without question, and there are some who argue for Chinese origins.

That seventh century Muslim legends offer India as the point of origin strikes me as good enough to doubt claims that Persia is the source.

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sissa_ibn_Dahir 

The site I linked is about the original of chess, not parchesi. I don't disagree about the rest. The site I linked gives some explanations for Persia despite the offers a theory about where the old texts got "India" from:

"As soon as the first text ever about Chess, Persians used to say that they had received Chess from an ambassy from 'Hind'. This word is merely and often taken as 'India'. Well, a mistake would be to superpose our frontiers and shapes of modern nations to old countries. At the time of the end of the Sassanian empire, Hind meant the lands of Indus, at the gates of India, more or less the modern Sind in Pakistan.

Later, after the Arab conquest, as Persians obtained a predominant cultural position in the new empire, that tradition of Chess coming from India was told, written, re-told and re-written in all Muslim manuscripts about the game. Murray's "History of Chess" can be consulted for details. Clearly, the tradition in Persian and then Muslim worlds is that Chess comes from India. There is no tradition saying that Chess would come from Persia.

Was that true or not? Of course, the basement of this affirmation was a legend, and legends are not always reporting the truth. However, it is difficult to reject it all and deny that there is maybe something true in this story. Some historians have tried to identify the King Dêwisharm of the Persian legend with variable success. The most convincing was rather recently the German Prof. Renate Syed who sees Deva Sharvavarman, an Indian King from the dynasty of Maukhari from Kannauj, as the King from Hind in the legend. Her theory is bright but, of course, it will always lack of a definitive proof.

Anyway, even if that Dêwisharm is identified with an historical person, does that mean that the Persian legend is true, from A to Z? Of course, it doesn't."

Although they could also have said they got it from India because they got it from India and that seems to be the more popular belief.

The other issue the site raises is about the differences in Chinese Chess vs International Chess and suggests it's more likely Chinese Chess was first.

Anyway I just wanted to point to the controvery as the prevous posts were conveying the idea of India without question. It might certainly have been India. I don't think we're disagreeing.

Yes, I'm familiar with the site.

Parchesi was/is the four player game with dice. It, too, is mentioned in some of the mss that Murray references to argue for an Indian origins of chess. While the website takes issue with Murray's conclusions, it does not offer the same depth of analysis, nor the same breadth of sources. Nonetheless, it does point in some important directions for reconsidering Murray's conclusions.

Oh, ok, sorry I misunderstood you. I was talking about this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaturaji which I have popular chess book published just a couple years ago that still says is the original form of chess. I don't know anything about Parchesi or if it originated from the 4 handed chess. Thanks.

I think that four handed chess is more recent than both chess and parchesi. Chess and parchesi both exist by the sixth or seventh century, while four handed chess first appears several centuries later.

BTW, I introduced chess to Spain in 822 after being forced to leave my native Baghdad.

(if that's a jab at people citing websites and wiki for credible information I will point both cite their sources in this case and the author of the website has published a few chess history texts himself.)

I provided a link to Wikipedia.

well thanks everyone who answered! I was really interested in its origins =)

Maybe.

From the beating i received last night, id say Mordechai had a hand in it! :)

There's a chess puzzle in Basic Chess Endgames with rook against knight that wins, and was composed by Al-Aldi.