Chess variants and the origin of chess

If you've been following this blog, you will have seen references to several different chess variants: Xiangqi, Byzantine chess, Makruk, Chaturaji, Shogi, Janggi, Shatar, Klin Zha, Tridimensional chess, Courier chess, Chaturanga.

But these are only the tip of the iceberg: there are, literally, thousands and thousands of chess variants, and more are continuously being thought of by people around the world. If you want to get a feel for this wide range of chess variants, check out the Chess Variants web-site, or the Classified Encyclopedia of Chess Variants.

With so many chess variants, past and present, in existence, the ultimate question is obviously: where did it all start? Where and when did chess originate, and what did that ancestor of all chess variants look like?

The simple answer is: we don't know, at least not for sure. But what little evidence there is suggests it is most likely that India is the birthplace of chess, possibly in the 6th century. The oldest known form of chess is the Indian game of Chaturanga, which fits with an Indian origin. From India, the game is thought to have travelled west to Persia and then the Arab world, through which it entered Europe (via Spain and/or Italy) in the 10th century. Similarly, under the 'out of India' hypothesis, the game spread east to China, southeast Asia, and Japan. Mind you, there are competing theories, one of them being that chess originated in China, centuries before it arrived in India. Evidence for this 'out-of-China' hypothesis is mostly wishful thinking, though; hard evidence is essentially non-existent. For anyone interested to read deeper into the topic, here is a recent in-depth overview of the available literary and archaeological evidence.

Being an evolutionary biologist by training and profession, I came to see this whole group of chess variants as so many different 'species', all descending from a single ancestor. Just like biological species, chess variants mutate, evolve, and go extinct. To give just one example: the queen in modern chess evolved in the late 15th century from the medieval vizier, which was quite a weak piece. Very quickly, this new "mad woman's chess" spread through Europe, replacing the medieval form of chess, which basically went extinct.

There are sophisticated statistical tools available to try and reconstruct the evolution of a group of species, and I decided to apply some basic 'phylogenetic methods' to chess variants, hoping it would shed some new light on the identity of the ancestor of chess. If you're interested to read the article I published in Board Games Studies, you can download the entire text of volume 3 (which includes my article Origin of Chess - A Phylogenetic Perspective) here; alternatively, drop me a message, and I can email you a scan of the article as a pdf. The bottom line is that the phylogenetic analyses I did also support India as the most likely birthplace of chess, and Chaturanga the most likely ancestor.