Single Comment

There are literary references to chaturanga in India apparently of about the same age as the Persian references to chatrang, but there is no description of the rules, so chaturanga, chatrang, and shatranj must all be treated as the same game. Anything before this is conjecture (and conjecture is active). There is no physical (by which I understand 'archeological') evidence of chess in India at that time, nor for centuries afterward, and I think the same is true of Iran; the earliest definite chessmen are from Uzbekistan, and the eighth Christian century. <p>Greg Strong's remark about the required opening leaps implying that the counsellors faced each other in one file is valid for the seventeenth-century(?) rules. The cross-wise arrangement is specified for Hindustani chess in the nineteenth century. Cross-wise arrangements were formerly quite widespread. <p>After scrapping this page (sorry, Hans and all), we will probably want to put up others for these other historical variants.