History

Many countries claim to have invented the chess game in some incipient form. The most commonly held belief is that chess originated in India, where it was called Chaturanga, which appears to have been invented in the 6th century AD.

Another theory exists that chess arose from the similar game of Chinese chess, or at least a predecessor thereof, existing in China since the 2nd century BC. Joseph Needham and David Li are two of many scholars who have favoured this theory.

Chess eventually spread westward to Europe and eastward as far as Japan, spawning variants as it went. From India it migrated to Persia, where its terminology was translated into Persian, and its name changed to chatrang.

From Persia it entered the Islamic world, where the names of its pieces largely remained in their Persian forms in early Islamic times. Its name became shatranj, which continued in Spanish as ajedrez and in Greek as zatrikion, but in most of Europe was replaced by versions of the Persian word shah = "king".

There is a theory that this name replacement happened because, before the game of chess came to Europe, merchants coming to Europe brought ornamental chess kings as curiosities and with them their name shah, which Europeans mispronounced in various ways.

• Checkmate: This is the English rendition of shah mat, which is Persian for "the king is finished". In Arabic it means "the shah is dead", but shah is not a usual Arabic word for "king" (except sometimes in chess).
• Rook: This came via Arabic from the Persian rukh, which means "chariot", but also means "cheek" (part of the face), and the mythical bird of great power called the roc.
• Bishop: Arabic al-fil means "the elephant", but in Europe and the western part of the Islamic world people knew little or nothing about elephants, and the name of the chessman entered Western Europe as Latin alfinus. The English name "bishop" is a rename inspired by the conventional shape of the piece. In Russia, the piece is, however, known as slon = "elephant".
• Queen: Persian farzin = "vizier" became Arabic firzan, which entered western European languages as forms such as alfferza, but was later replaced by "queen".

The game spread throughout the Islamic world after the Muslim conquest of Persia. Chess eventually reached Russia via Mongolia, where it was played at the beginning of the 7th century. It was introduced into Spain by the Moors in the 10th century, and described in a famous 13th century manuscript covering chess, backgammon, and dice named the Libro de los juegos. Chess also found its way across Siberia into Alaska.