We look at a chess set and see a medieval king, some thin-blooded English Henry sitting in state next to his wanton termagant sorceress wife. Flanking them are machiavel abbes43.1 with thin upper lips; masters of casuistry, elegant courtiers and confirmed atheists. To either side of the cathedral doors (in the checkered board we see first the elongated black and white cruciform of a cathedral's floor plan and then the meticulously delimited plantations of a feudal estate) knights stand guard with hands resting on the pommels of zweihanders,43.2 plate-mail gleaming. At the edges of the kingdom castellans stroll through winter and summer palaces, pulling white sheets from century old furniture and airing tower bedrooms in preparation for a royal visit. Originally built as fortifications (with arrow slits and battlements to prove it), the palaces are now country chateaux, their portcullises overgrown with the vines of grapes and tiny, aromatic roses. Hardly worth a mention are the serfs who tend their betters and their betters' gardens--brave fellows, always ready to drop teapots and shears to take up long pikes for a headlong charge at the enemy.43.3
If our discernment were keener, we would see an altogether more ancient and chaotic battlefield. Four-handed chatarang, the progenitor of modern chess, was created in India for the soldier castes two millennia before Christ with pieces that are, in some cases, hardly recognizable. The queen, now the terror of the board, was then a politic vizier who hovered by the king's side as though fearful of offending. The bishops were war elephants, tusked monsters trampling infantry while the mahouts atop their backs shot sling stones and spears. The knights were a cavalry of mounted archers (in the centuries before the stirrup was invented there were no lances), striking swiftly and galloping away. The rooks were not fortresses but war chariots, terrible weapons racing over the battlefield pell-mell, rattling over stones and corpses, wheel-mounted scythes slashing through the legs of men and horses.
The Katishya caste, who were the warriors and rulers of Indian society at the time, believed deeply in the innate elegance of rectilinear order. Their image of paradise was a perfectly level green field bisected north to south by one cold, blue river and east to west by another. Their gardens matched this ideal as closely as possible and, perversely, so did their maps. It was considered self-evident that the earth, an emanation of the mind of god, was arranged in arrays of adjacent, geometrically perfect squares--the failure of the observed geographical world to match this mathematical ideal was easily accounted for by the sinfulness of man and the decadence of the times. The Katishya's military science resembled their gardening and their cartography--a small repertoire of battlefield maneuvers was drilled into troops and petty officers until they could be executed with repeatable precision, and the mastery of this lexicon and its combinatorics was considered the essence of generalship. The Katishya's considered it the epitome of strategy to take the dust-shrouded confusion of the battlefield and reduce it to a set of symbols on a grid from which could be derived a concise sequence of moves leading inevitably to victory.
Chatarang radiated out from the subcontinent and begat many descendants--it is said that there are as many variations of chess as there are Indo-European languages. Not least among its issue was a game immensely popular in the Achaean societies of the Attic peninsula and the culturally similar islands of the Cyclades in the thirteenth century before Christ. The sum total of the source material for the Achaean variant consists of two complete and three partial game sets (all but one of which were excavated on Chios, known for producing the greatest chess masters), a reference in Hesiod, and a primer that was a sort of rarefied transcript of a particularly long and difficult game.
Unlike the ancient, mellow and caste-bound Indian culture in which chatarang originated, the Achaeans were, as a society, desperately concerned with the preeminence of the individual. This difference is reflected in their chess--in the original chatarang, the pieces represent types, interchangeable atoms of abstract ordnance, while in the Achaean game they are individual warriors with names, histories and idiosyncrasies.
The Achaean chess primer was the record of a single long game that was believed to embody all that could usefully be said on the subject of chess. On Chios, journeymen who sought their chess master's robes were required to recite the primer in its entirety before a panel of judges who would neither miss nor forgive the slightest error. In its earliest phase, the primer was a raw transcript of move, counter-move and counter's counter, with little or no analysis or exposition. Occasionally, fragments of other classic games were given as a kind of aside, presumably to illustrate some principle of play, though to modern readers their significance can be obscure.
The purity of the primer eroded over time--formulaic descriptions were added as aides memoire (pieces were called swift moving, versatile, valuable in the middle game, and so forth), and, most likely, to give the reciter a respite while he gathered his thoughts. Over the centuries, tactical commentary crept into what had once been a purely descriptive account.
By the eighth century B.C. the instructional character of the primer had largely atrophied and the recitation of the by then baroquely ornamented text had become an end in itself. From this time on the manual, known as the Iliad, assumed an essentially literary character, although its original nature was still sometimes discernable in, say, its fixation on the exchange of casualties--Alpha slew Beta with this spear and Gamma slew Alpha with that stone and so on, a meaningless list of deaths unless one knows how to read it as a nuanced sequence of middle-game exchanges. Similarly, the catalog of ships43.4 can be usefully read as a treatise on positional play in the opening.
Although the book became more complex over time, the pieces retained a characteristic geometric simplicity. Achilles is represented as a tall, spare warrior holding a shield and a spear, and carved, by preference, from white coral. Nestor is a stooped warrior with two parallel lines incised in the forehead of an otherwise featureless oval face. The stylistic exception is Odysseus, who is always depicted with a detailed, naturalistic countenance that suggests more self-awareness and humanity than the smooth, geometrically regular faces of his peers.
There is a second and most likely apocryphal manual of Achaean chess, the record of a long and bitter endgame played out on a board nearly stripped of pieces. It is even more difficult to associate this book with the practice of chess than the Iliad, probably due to the corruption of the text and many late interpolations. It has been speculated that the Odyssey is a sort of fantastic parody of a chess book, a treatise on tactics to be used after the game has ended and the board been abandoned by the players, the pieces left finally to their own devices and to entropy. One of the few surviving pieces is Odysseus, inching across the crumbling board toward his home square.