Who invented Chess?

Do you know who invented chess and when. I do know that chess is the oldest board game that is still played but where did chess start. 

I wonder if it was made by a king in the olden days. What do you think?

i heard it was invented by persians

As it is now, it's from in the Middle-Ages.

The actual origins of Chess are mostly lost in antiquity.  All we know for certain is that it originated in the Indian sub-continent about 1500 years ago and spread quickly across Asia and Europe.

There are books on this subject. AND websites. All of the proto-chesses came together somewhere in Europe and we are playing the European version today. There is no way to tell exactly who or where or when the first chess set was invented.

That's my understanding.

We don't know that for certain. It may have entered the Indian sub-continent from China. We are fairly certain that it originated in Asia.

Nor is chess the oldest board game. Parcheesi may be as old. Go is older.

Here is a quote from wikipedia:

"The history of chess, specifically that of Western Chess, spans some 1500 years. The earliest predecessors of the game originated in India in the 6th century AD and spread to Persia from there. When the Arabs conquered Persia chess was taken up by the Muslim world, from where it reached Southern Europe. In Europe, the game evolved into its current form in the 15th century. In the second half of the 19th century, modern tournament play began, and the first world chess championship was held in 1886. The 20th century saw great leaps forward in chess theory and the establishment of the World Chess Federation (FIDE). Developments in the 21st century include the employment of computers for analysis, team consultations, and online gaming."

It's been attributed to the Chinese, Indians (Punjab district), Persians, Arabs, Egyptians, Mongolians, Tibet monks, Russians, aliens, etc.

Backgammon and mancala and similar games are supposedly incredibly old too. Maybe older than anything else.

Chuck Norris.

senet from 3500bc egypt is pretty old too.

*chuck norris* ????

The spread of chess into Europe can be seen in linguistics. Chess is schach, schaak, echecs, and scacchi in German, Dutch, French, and Italian respectively. All of which are rooted in the Persian "shah," the term for the king. These European cognates are also the root for the chess term "check."

It is interesting that these words are cognates across the four languages despite two being Germanic and two being Romance.

In Spain and Portugal the words for chess are ajedrex and xadrez. Maybe chess reached the Iberian through the Arabs coming across the Strait of Gibraltar rather than overland through Europe. 

How about in the European languages that use other alphabets like Greek and Russian? Anyone know about them?

I Invented it 

I believe it originated in East Asia.  Genghis Kahn made it famous in Mongolia.  The game was played diffrently from European chess, which we play today.

 Welsh calls it Gwyddbwyll (woodwisdom) and it is Fidchell in Old Irish, Modern Irish Ficheall. These all derive from a common Celtic root. They originally refered to a different game, though. Apparently the rules were lost in antiquity, but some people have tried to revive it from what little survived.

 It is шахматы (shachmatai) in Russian, which is derived from the same root as our word "checkmate." Most of the Eropean names for the game derive from this root, which means roughly "King's Death" "Shah Mat-" and derive from Persian. Chaturanga is the Sanskrit name and if memory servers means "four members."  Refering to the pieces/pawns other than the king and his advisor (our queen): knight, archer, elephant (rook) and foot soldier. The old Persian word for chess was derived from the same root as the Sanskrit word, not surprising as they are linguistically closely related.

The cut on the bishops stems from their origin as elephant tusks representing elephants. The rook is a tower, at various times and places once represented as the little fort carried on an elephant's back or the tower on a fortified ship.

erik did

I believe it was more developed than invented, from an earlier game called shatranj, which has similar rules, but the major difference is in the bishop, which was then an aflil, which could move only two squares but could jump, and the queen, which was then a vizier and could only move one square

The popular belief is that it originated in India; however, there are a few problems regarding this.

The earliest solid evidence of a possible predecessor of chess was found in India (from sometime in the 600s). Strangely, references to similar games in writing were found in China and Persia dating to within two decades of the earliest evidence in India. It is highly unlikely that the game could have 'travelled' this distance so quickly.

So it is all still debatable.

Not much is known
Of early days of chess beyond a fairly vague report
That fifteen hundred years ago two princes fought,
Though brothers, for a Hindu throne.

Their mother cried
For no one really likes their offspring fighting to the death
She begged them stop the slaughter with her every breath
But sure enough one brother died
Sad beyond belief
She told her winning son
"You have caused such grief --
I can't forgive this evil thing you've done."

He tried to explain
How things had really been
But he tried in vain
No words of his would satisfy the queen.

And so he asked the wisest men he knew
The way to lessen her distress
They told him he'd be pretty certain to impress
By using model soldiers on
A chequered board to show it was his brother's fault
They thus invented chess.