That’s virtually identical to rocca, the old Italian term for “fortress”, which association in turn gave rise to alternate names for the piece: torre (“tower”) and castello (“castle”).Īnother theory is that Persian war chariots were so heavily armored that they resembled small, mobile fortifications - hence the link between rukh and castles.Ī third idea is that the people carrier on the back of elephants in India, called a howdah and used in war to attack opponents, was often represented as a fortified castle tower in chess pieces from 16 th– and 17 th-century Europe. One theory is that the Arabs transmitted the Persian term rukh almost unchanged to Europe, where it turned into old Italian roc or rocco. Yet in many languages across Europe, this piece is known as a tower or a castle. In the earliest versions of the game, this was a “chariot” - ratha in Sanskrit, rukh in Persian. (See Strange Maps # 844 for an itinerary of the game and an overview of its various names across the world.) It first emerged in India in the early 7 th century as chaturanga, finally reaching Iceland as skák around 1600 AD. Chaturanga to skákĬhess took a millennium to conquer the known world. What you may call a bishop, somebody else knows as an elephant. But scratch the surface and the standardized game reveals a multitude of linguistic particularities. In the Chinese example, Mandarin and Cantonese speakers can read and understand the same text, even though they use different words for the same concepts.Ĭhess too is perfectly intelligible by participants who share no other communication skills. ( Credit: Foto Olimpik / NurPhoto via Getty Images)Ī game of chess is like a Chinese newspaper: a set of symbols that can be understood by people who speak different languages. Russia’s Vladislav Artemiev and Alina Bivol ( background) during the FIDE Chess World Rapid & Blitz Championship 2021 in Warsaw on December 29.
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