The Extraordinary Origins of Chess: Irving Finkel & Sushma Jansari, The Portico Library, 2021

thank you so much for inviting us um to do this i've learned quite a lot about chess over the last month or so um and i also just wanted to highlight the amazing exhibition fun and games playtime past and pleasant at present rather at the portico library in manchester which is online and also to point out that they've got loads of lovely um games related books in their online gift shop so do you have a look um as james mentioned my name is slishmijan sari and i'm here um and very excited to have here with me today dr irving finkel to talk about the extraordinary origins of chess now i can imagine like a lot of people uh during the endless lockdowns of this year we've rediscovered the joys of board games and chess has definitely been one of them in my household but i think it's quite incredible that chess is such a global phenomenon and you know grand masters like gary kasparov holds a really special place um in our imaginations and it's such a compelling subject that um as susie mentioned netflix created a an amazing new mini series called the queen's gambit and at this point i'd better do a quick shout out to my lovely friend matame um who's with us this evening actually in the audience because we decided to start watching it yesterday evening and it's absolutely brilliant but what's particularly interesting to me is the fact that um not only is it netflix um most watched mini series but also um sales of chess sets have actually gone through the roof so it's quite clear that chess has really conquered the world and its popularity shows absolutely no sign of abating i really liked one of the things that beth the main character said um you know as part of her script she called chess an entire world of 64 squares um and i think that's a really beautiful introduction to today's discussion actually because actually it is exactly that we're going to be talking about the global spread of chess the really um fascinating story about its origins and also the development of the current chess sets that we play with today so um i i i'm going to get going with my questions to irving now you know far more about the origins and development of chess than most people i mean i know it's one of a number of board games that originated uh in india such as snakes and ladders um and this actually most of the best games in the world came from india let's be straightforward i'm not going to do that that sounds good sounds fine to me um but with chess in particular i understand that actually it started approximately in the gupta period which is you know around the 56th century's a.d um and i also understand that it came about as a game called chaturanga um that aimed to teach satrias which are the warrior caste of india about warfare and tactics and i wondered could you tell me a little bit more about its origins and development please well the first thing is of course this is ancient stuff and we don't have a lot of archaeological evidence it's mostly literary so the first evidence comes from about the seventh century where a poet called bana wrote um an account of the court at canuj in north india where he refers to chess pieces on the board which shows at that time the game was in existence so that is about the first point in history where we can say that chess as a game existed but before that the general rule among the people who work on these things is that indeed it started out as you say because the chaturanga was a four-part game board which was earlier than chess and they used this eight this um 64 square chaturanga thing um which was a race game nothing to do with our sophisticated and non-gambling type game of chess they had the idea of imposing on the board the four branches of the indian army which were the um elephants chariots horses and foot soldiers and you had ins in miniature a way of teaching strategy in a military way to these young kashatrias whose job it was in fact to go to battle and win and so they taught them about tactics about timing about hiding all these sorts of things with the use of these miniature figures like you might do on a blackboard so to speak in a modern classroom and with the passage of time it occurred to somebody that goodness me in this apparatus you had scope for a fantastically interesting board game and it might have started off four-handed like the chaturanga but it's soon boiled down to two sides so the interesting thing is it's different from all other games in the world and you ask about why it survives and everything is the best game ever invented in my opinion but what it is is it's a battle it's a war and you have a king with his vizier next to him and the knights and the horseback elephant people and the foot soldiers in the front and you fight it out you have equal material there's no luck there's no dice there's no um nothing else other than how you use your tools and by the time it had developed into that game it more or less stayed like that ever since until the modern age there are a few historical points we can say this happened this change this change that once the conception had come into this two-part war game and people sit there and they decide they're going to kill the enemy and this whole business about sharp mart you know which which shah is the king piece mark is dead and the thing about chess was you were supposed to kill the enemy king that's why it's called the king is kid but in fact you don't because at the point when the king is trapped and finished the game is over you don't actually cut the king's throat no that would be possibly slightly too bloodthirsty for a game well i can tell you something i know about board games in india and i've seen people playing civilized elderly people who are supposed to be well behaved they play this game called parchisi on four arms of a cloth they throw the long dice it's like ludo in england that kind of game and they slam the pieces down the other one and when you see old men they're all cracked and bits have come off and everything is almost bloodshed because there's something about it and this is a really interesting matter with chess and with all other proper board games is that a they are totally absorbing to the players this is one important thing but the other thing is that hostility which is a real problem in the world hating the enemy hating this person all this kind of nonsense when you play chess with somebody it becomes sublimated into an abstract where you are determined to murder the enemy king to kill him whatever happens but it doesn't mean that you hate the person opposite so it's a rather interesting psychological activity like you go to war that no one actually bleeds it sounds like the perfect kind of warfare i mean in our in our household um it's monopoly that has taken the the place of that uh aggressive instinct i think because we're quite competitive so yeah slightly less chess but my daughter is learning at the moment so we shall see what happens um i was really keen to talk to you about the next phase of the game's development actually because that took place in persia now you know the histories of persia and india have been very closely intertwined for centuries if not millennia actually um and when the game did go to persia quite a lot of things seem to have changed especially in relation to what uh you know the chess pieces themselves and then you know some examples the elephant was transformed into a chariot in another you know one of the pieces was a giraffe which to me sounds fabulous i've never seen a giraffe in the chair but it's an interesting idea because you'd have to have bananas with it but you know once again we're stuck for archaeological stuff you don't have things in museum cases from this early period but there is a kind of story tradition like for example how chess was invented in india in the first place and then how it moved to persia because there was a you know you know this story that there's the eight the 64 square um board in the mythological narrative there was a king in india who was bored and fed up and he called his chief vizier or advisor and mate make up some game for you know make something up so the guy goes away and sits in his tent he makes up this game with the armies and two sides and comes in the next day and shows the kitten plays the king probably lets him win of course and yeah this is a great game well we'll have to have this what would you like in return and the says oh no it's okay no no no no anything in my kingdom what would you like he said okay i'll tell you what i would like we take the chess board and we put on the first square grain of a grain of corn and on the next square you put on two grains of corn and on the next square four grains of corn and you do that on the chess board and when you've done that i'll be happy and the king says you must be you kidding me you know are you kidding me this is crazy and then he catches the eye of the court mathematician across the room and the court mathematician is looking very worried anyway the king said right bring all the bar you bring all the body so they start and the thing is the number which is doubled each time exponentially grows so gigantic that in fact the whole of the british isles will be covered to a depth of about seven feet if you had all that barley it's absolutely impossible it's not trillions and trillions it's even other aliens you've never heard of so that what happened theoretically to answer your question is the indians sent this board and the pieces to persia to the court to see if they could work out how to play it we're the clever ones right but unfortunately they did and in return the persians invented backgammon and they sent that to india to see whether the indian brains could work out backgammon and these stories of rivalry and mathematics are the kind of dressing about the process that the game for sure started in india it seems to me absolutely certain that chess began in india and you should all be very proud of it and it went to persia and from persia it went into europe and then around the world and in the course of that movement various things happened one of the dramatic things of course was the evolution of the chess men themselves yes in fact this is a really good point i wondered if we could bring up one of the slides um in the powerpoint actually because i think it shows very clearly because you know we're all used to seeing a particular kind of chess oh this is perfect thank you so there's quite a spectacular sort of change in form and style of all the pieces here because the figurative chess pieces that you know were originally used in india have been changed to very much more stylized ones so am i right i'm thinking that this move to stylize rather than figuratively related somehow to the establishment of the islamic caliphate in persia was there other stuff going on as well well this is a complicated question do we have a picture of a normal indian chess set first um we're going to see one in a couple of moments actually because the thing is these are derived from the figurative pieces so the rajas maharajas of ancient india who played chess in their courts they undoubtedly had the most beautifully carved ivory pieces and we have from the 19th and the 18th century today chess sets of this kind which give you an idea of the original beauty of them and that was how chess was conceived it embodied the armies and gradually gradually there were changes one of them was that under the umbrella of islam which was centrally placed in the dispersal of chess into europe and the chess men which were originally not only figurative but unmistakably figurative they were elephants with with two riders and goads and and the soldiers had their weapons and they had their eyes staring and everything no question about that what it really was but in these kinds of pieces which are sometimes turned out of ivory or carved by by craftsmen the features which distinguish them are very very reduced and it is believed although i don't know whether this is theologically established that the taste for non-figurative pieces was a an aspect of islamic thinking that they they did not want to play with things which were representative of the world and nature and they preferred these abstract things for that reason i don't know myself what is the real explanation but you can see the pawns are small and foot soldiers and of no real significance but in this chess set and the two in the middle are the remnants of the king and queen and you can see you have a kind of shape with a high back that is the echo of the of the seat on the back of an elephant where the raja the king of the chest once sat it's kind of boiled down to its very essence so it's the lower part is the elephant's back and then the howder on top is reduced to a minimum so you can see that the knight has got one projection at the front the bishop has got two projections and the rook which sometimes is a chariot that looks like to me the front of an ancient chariot with the wheels on both sides where the um the charity is still behind with the reigns so what they do it's a rather interesting conception that you take the figurative thing which no one would mistake in all its details and you you boil it down you wiggle it down until the bare minimum is left so if you imagine playing a game of chess with this set with your friends you might find it at first very difficult to believe that you'd tell them apart you think how on earth in the complexity of playing trying to get into that film to play that beautiful chess champion herself how would you ever tell the pieces apart that it's interesting that the mind very quickly adjusts that the rooks are obvious and and before long you use them as if that's how you'd always play chess before so very often when out of the persian world through trade and the spread of ideas chess pieces came to europe you end up with this situation that some of them are figurative like the original indian ones and many of them are like these islamic as they call them from nishapur in iran this style of chess pieces and even in britain um pieces of this kind made from bone or ivory have been found in sites been excavated showing that people in britain who'd learnt chess from this exotic very far distant world bought their chess pieces had men like this even though they really came from a totally different culture it's very fascinating that is actually that that leads us very nicely on to the next point actually in fact also the next slide because as you oh sorry we've missed one there you go um so chess as you mentioned took a very different turn when it did arrive in europe and the lewis chessmen which you can see right in front of us right now and they're probably some of the most famous chess pieces in in the world actually um and they have as you mentioned let's really be straightforward about this they are the most wonderful chess pieces ever discovered that is a small point that needs to be clarified so here you have in in 3d ivory exactly what we've been talking about before the the the chess pieces which came from india have taken on a western figurative style so in india he didn't say that the raja who's on the biggest elephant the king in the industry has by his side not a queen but a vizier a male counselor so when they went into battle it was the king and his counselor and when you get chess in europe the councillor has been um changed into a queen and it's rather interesting too that in the original game the potential moves of this vizier piece was rather small it was like one in like one move of a bishop something like this very restricted and then with the passage of time when it transfigured into the western european christian world where people like eleanor of aquitaine and other such figures show that women were imported after all and not to be ignored so the vizier transposed into a queen because there were queens who were very powerful and you know they're supposed to be the power behind the throne sometimes they're the power next to the throne and sometimes they're in the front and these sorts of historical figures i think had their effect on the evolution so that you have by the time of this chess set from the 12th century the queen is the most powerful piece on the wall that's i mean before we move on to talking about the fact that the queen was the most powerful figure on the board from what i understand these chess pieces the lewis chess pieces were originally painted they weren't you know just this lovely sort of creamy colored ivory that we see now is that right that's correct you see they are carved out of ivory from the tusk of a walrus so it's not elephant ivory which is the most common kind they from walrus tusk because around norway and in the seas around the north of british isles walruses were hunted their tusks were used by carvers and this chess set there were more than one chess set actually there were 76 of the pieces they were carved out of walrus ivory and when they were finished they were all white now what happened was that being on the end of the imported idea from india they agreed that they had to have a differential differential color and we know from frederick madden who was the first scholar to see these chess men in that was responsible for making sure they arrived safely in a museum when he described them he said that a good number of them were a deep maroon color dark red beet root color he said beetroot color so clearly when they were first manufactured what we would call the black side was stained beetroot color and the white pieces were left white now the thing is and we called peop chess pieces black and white for quite separate reasons but with the knowledge of the indian game in in the background it is interesting that even to this day chess sets in india are very often white pieces against red or like this set was alternatively white against green um some some let's say they're very beautiful actually when the ivory is staying green it's a very beautiful effect so these things were buried um some underground thing on the beach in the isle of lewis at the very very far north of the british isles and they came to light in 1832 or whatever it was and when they were first seen as it were damp out of the ground this color was very dominant very unmistakable but with the passage of time in the museum where they were exposed to visitors because all the visitors in the world love these chess pieces the minute they appeared in the museum and crowds of people came to see them and gradually the red faded away probably from exposure to light um since 1832 to the point now you cannot see for love nor money with your eye which ones were the red ones but there's no doubt that that was the case that's so interesting because i've only ever seen them like this and it was only you know talking to you and doing some more research into it that i realized they were originally read and i think the nice part of the story is that some of these uh lewis chess pieces are actually now on display in the museum in stone away and that's the last place i saw them um when i went up there um which is absolutely incredible so it's just lovely to sort of learn more about the story behind them and actually you know if anyone gets a chance you can see all of them on the british museum's collection online and you can see just how intricately they they are carved but so they're so they're such interesting figures every single one of them has such personality don't forget they're also rather comic because the ponies for the knights they're supposed to be knights in armor on horseback but they're pony so their feet nearly touch the ground it's like a lambretta instead of a motion one is higher than the other and when you look at the waters they're supposed to be on duty right and they're supposed to look straight ahead on guard and some of them are looking over there you can see their eyes i've swiveled and others the they've got a shield under their mouths and they're biting the top of the shield in some kind of frenzy so there's no doubt about it they are very humorous and also they're brilliantly made because they're totally stable but i'll tell you one story about these i have to tell you because the british museum used to sell replicas of them for many years and one cyber's white and one black because people think of white against black with chess pieces they never were black in antiquities and i had a long battle with them for many years to try and persuade them to make them in red and they took no notice and then one day i persuaded the guy who did this kind of work to make me one set of red against white pieces so i had one so you could get an idea what they would look like of course the chess ball wouldn't have looked like this but anyway what happened was this you know that harry potter film i do know that very well yes well in harry potter film number one the children play in their study a game of chess and j r rowling um jk rowling i apologize and decided she didn't want the normal kind of chess pieces which we probably would talk about in a minute the staunton pieces she wanted something unusual so the wardrobe mistress came to the museum to buy a set of replicas from the british museum and they didn't have any in the shop so she knew me so she came up to my office and i lent her my white set against red and they were used in the film oh i did not know that that's incredible it's more because it means that my archaeological experiment to what they were really like was seen by all the children and no one had ever seen red against white before and all over the universe as people have seen them and i'll tell you something else if you watch that film that the white bishop at one point makes a move to attack the red queen and the red queen gets out of her throne and she picks up the phone and she smashes the white bishop in the face in the film and it's never done it with my own pieces when i got them back so i'm always very respectful to this queen because you never know what's going to happen i tell you those those chess pieces they are kind of magical exhibit because when people see them you know people in museums they get weary and they plod along when they get to this case and they gleam under the light and you see them you think that they're going to talk to you because when you look in their faces they're so responsive and you expect any minute they're going to say something cheeky or do something amusing they're very extraordinary pieces that is the best story i did not know that so thank you for sharing it and maybe you should um be getting a commission for the the red set this is the white set and we talked about um can we have the next slide please um james there we go so you know we talked a bit about the queen's gambit um tv uh the series at the beginning of this event and i just wanted to pick up a little bit more on the idea of this queen um chess piece because you mentioned it briefly before but i mean you also mentioned that it was you know connected with these very powerful queens and things like that but how does that change in the course of a game i mean how does you know a piece transform from a vizier or an advisor into a queen and into a queen that becomes such a powerful uh well i think yes a good question i think there are two factors which affect if you have a well-established game with clear rules clear definition of what the game is all about everybody knows what's what sometimes features change in order to improve the game and i think if you had a vizier or what became the queen very limited in her moves it made the game okay but it lacked a sort of excitement and after a while by about the 13th century a.d they had got the idea to give the queen um huge power she had all the power of a rook to go along horizontal and verticals and along the diagonal so it's like a rook and a bishop combined so she miles more miles more powerful than ever before so you have this um policy which i think you would say theoretically came out of the game itself in order to make it more changeable more exciting or to give the tools to the player of greater potency i think that was one thing but i also think and it's probably quite a serious point that the in europe where you had queens and women in power and abbesses and all sorts of women in authority and using their power that the um the the conception that the peace as becoming the queen next to the king and then becoming something possessive of its own dynamism when came from that it's a combination of intrinsic and extrinsic factors i have to say when i was a boy i was completely obsessed with sex i was the chess captain in my school and i played for middlesex against all these horrible kids from other places dreadful new nerd-type people who played chess and did nothing else nothing wrong with nerds and i can tell you i've never had a game of chess with a player who looks like that girl on the left that would have been much more fun it never happened to me but can i just ask you quickly then you know given that the um you know the most powerful piece on the board is a woman the the queen why weren't those attributes um ascribed to the the king because you know in in in that period in the medieval period isn't that wouldn't that have been more um i don't know almost normal if i can say that why would they all these players many of whom would have been men very powerful men um including powerful women why why would they that power on the board be ascribed to someone who didn't necessarily have as much military power i think the answer is that um although to some extent with the bishops and the and the soldiers and the king and the queen there's an echo or a reflex of society in the middle ages on the chess board it wasn't a reproduction of life at that time and um the point about chess from its inception was a to defend your own king and to conquer the other king and they never lost sight of that that was always the emphasis of the game and the king um as a piece is retiring shy likes to castle into the corner surrounded by other pieces and be on the safe side the king doesn't lead his troops into battle like alexander the great or those sorts of kings and i should think quite a lot of kings in their time were a little overweight a little sleepy and thought they'd be quite happy for their army to go out and do all the work and he'd sit there having a loot player soothing his troubled mind after lunch and never seen the sight of a sword in in his entire existence but i think that's it it's not that chess tries to reproduce the real world it has a different kind of dimension and the the the the king is the whole of the state to be protected by the professional soldiers and the foot soldiers and everybody around him to be preserved for the future and the queen gets bigger and bigger and harder and harder to control but she nevertheless is there to save the king so that that's how it works i think that's really interesting thank you very much for sharing that um i think we're going to move on to the next slide if we can james because i'd quite like to take the conversations right the conversation right back to india and talk about a chess set and a handful of individual chess pieces that are included um in the online exhibition actually now the one the one at the top that i'm going to mention first i mean this is magnificent um it's a large scale example made from painted and gilded ivory and it dates back to the 19th century and it's just like the one you you mentioned at the start of our conversation probably older even older and then i think so and it's only one side of course because the other side was red or white it could it could have been white but i think probably this kind of period red you know i'm because of me we have that chest i know but this is what i was going to ask you about because i mean i'll ask about the individual chess pieces next so please tell us a story about the the main set at the top because it's a brilliant one in that bleak time before you joined the british museum many many years ago but actually i was always on the lookout for a set like this because we have the other side because they're so exhibitable because when you put them in a case you know everybody looks the all these soldiers have their eyes made up with mascara and they've got their weapons and they're just marvelous to look at and you don't have to be you don't have to be a military person to get involved with these as a living um exponential demonstration of all this business of warfare in the history of the world anyway the thing was and these sorts of sets this is what probably many more or less what older indian chess pieces look like but this is made i think in the 18th century it might be early 19th but the thing is they're always very expensive because they're ivory and they're delicate and all this and i wanted to get one for the british museum and to cut a long story short it turned out there was one that was going to be auctioned in london so i went to see the auctioneer and said look we need one of these the national collection this is always a good argument when you want to acquire something for the national collections and do you think there's any possibility we could come to an arrangement with the seller in advance of the auction because we would not maybe they would be happy to do that so he contacted the lady who was extremely old indeed i mean i don't know whether she'd had a telegram from the queen she might even have had more than one telegram from the queen but she sent a message to me that she'd be delighted for this to be arranged and that's what we did but she confided one thing that when she was a child and 125 years earlier she and her brother they obviously lived in a really swiss country house and they were obviously very i don't know who she was but she was somebody pretty smart i suppose they used to play with these chess pieces in the garden you know i mean on the lawn and then put them in the flower beds and i don't know what and she said they were quite often left overnight oh my goodness no what were their parents thinking i don't know because they're very delic i mean they're not all that delicate they're pretty delicate and of course in the museum we put our gloves on and we put masks on again and then we didn't even breathe on them but actually that they just use them as toys and you see the one in front of the royal couple so to speak is a much paler green than the ones next to it and some of the design has come off that i think has been in the garden for quite a while so probably when the father wanted to play chess with the vicar or something and they set out the pieces on the board there's a pawn missing where's mine and so they ran out in the garden and she found it it might have been out there for weeks for all we know but that is the most extraordinary thing but at least it's safe today that's one important thing absolutely no it's an incredible thing and actually once again it's all online so if you want to go and have them you know zoom in and have a look at them in detail you absolutely can you've got all the reg numbers and stuff on the slide and the other set i wanted to talk to you about it's not really a set it's just a few individual pieces which i know i've added to some larger images of them as well but these are much older they're also made from painted bone or ivory and there is there is an even more incredible story behind their survival um and also the connection with han sloan the the the so-called father of the british museum yes well the thing about han sloan was um he did what other curators have done since is when people go away he takes them aside and says while you're there keep your eye open for interesting things and this chess board made of velvet with gold wire to mark out the squares you see it's quite faded in some way but it's gold wire and red velvet and it's a sumptuous thing it's you could imagine some some um raja sitting there playing that on cushions is absolutely part of that world and um with i i didn't know how many pictures one two one two three four five six nine pieces on the wood i think that might be all so you've got these beautiful close-ups of the pieces now the thing is um it says in the museum there's they're 16th century i think but they might even be older because um hansel and as i said it was this addicted curator looking for interesting things to make to tell the story of the world and what people did in the world and all that sort of thing and his nephew acquired this chess board with some chess pieces somewhere presumably in india on a trip himself and he purchased them for his uncle and gave them to him so the thing is this what as a curator myself and that's the same curatorial thing beats in your breasts the extraordinary thing about this even though it doesn't no one tells us this is we can be certain that the nephew was well trained by his uncle he's always looking for things in curio shops and he saw these chess men and he knew they were very old but when he bought them they weren't all there so that shows he didn't buy them off the peg like a suit he didn't go to a shop that sold contemporary chess pieces he looked around to find some which were then old in the 16th century so lord knows how old they really are but they're marvelous now look at that gunman down the bottom he looks like something out of um a chicago gang he's got this gut gut the sort of thing you fire it and 34 people fall over riddle with bullets with a really nasty look in his face look at him there and it's all steady and the color is beautiful the carving is marvelous and they are alive these chessmen and they are the complete antithesis of indian painted ivory chessmen which were made for tourists so what we've got here is a unique little group from this long long background of what they were really like and then we've got this one from the garden which about the best of the ones ever made for tourists and as time went by they got smaller and with less detail and with less careful painting so the two of them together are plumb um exhibits to bring alive this thing which don't forget is all to do with warfare so by the time but in this kind of thing you don't just fight with swords and you've got i mean that that that that whatever that is blunderbuss looks lethal to me i mean i probably when he fired it he fell over backwards i mean that is a serious piece of armament is it not i wonder if actually if you could identify that you could maybe um date the the particular pieces slightly more closely i mean i would i would think so i and you know something else that when you think about playing chess which i'm glad to see people are now doing again that when you have the pieces on the board if you're careless you can knock one over and that's a very disastrous thing to do you never want to do that so you want your chess pieces to be stable this is a crucial part of it and these green ones at the top you could imagine if they were dotted around the board and you wanted to move one of the bishops it would be quite easy with a knuckle to knock over two of the pawns so that you'd have to be very careful but these things are very they've got a low um structure they're very stable so this guy nothing could ever get get rid of him i mean he's there really solidly and they have such a power about them they are amazing to me so they can find it beautifully painted beautifully but also very functional at the same time that is what's so exciting i think it's just wonderful i mean i think that's what's so great because you know people generally want a beautiful full chess set on display they may not ever play with it or anything like that but when both of those things come together and you have the chess set at the bottom are you just those few individual pieces i mean i think that's very very special indeed it looks like they're the only ones left on the battlefield when the others are all dead they're all gone they're all gone something else from a museum point of view if you have chess pieces if you put them in a row they just look like there are things but if you put them in such a way that they seem to be conversing one to the other this changes their entire appearance so if you have these two elephants as it were the elephants talking while their um mahouts were trying to make them go in a different direction but the elephants wanted to have a conversation you see the whole thing in those little objects just like that yeah i think it just shows also the real importance of display not just being a standard symmetrical thing but something that's much more dynamic because it really sparks your imagination as well i think that's really important absolutely i i'm going to stick with the british museum a little bit more actually and james we can stop sharing the slides now um because i have a couple of props with me so i have you know a couple of these horses because actually i wanted to ask you about one harold staunton and basically all the kind of check you know i've pulled all of these out from our little chess that we have at home um because actually there's a link with the british museum when it comes to the design of the of the nights could you tell me a bit more about that because i have to say this was news to me i did not know this well this is actually quite an interesting thing because um they are what you might call the default chess men in the world so wherever you went um to play serious chess in a chess club or to play with people who played regularly they were chances i'll be using these kind of pieces and they are called the staunton pieces and they are named after a man called howard staunton in about 18 i wrote down the day 1849 yes that was it he was a shakespearean scholar and he was the first he was the best player in the world for a period of time it was before you had masters and grandmasters like you do today with rankings and computer estimates and all that like kasparov is 20 million and three or something like that it wasn't it wasn't like that but he beat everybody and and he was a clever man because once he beat them he wouldn't play them again in case they beat him back so i love it what happened was that there was man um whose name here nathaniel cook nathaniel cook was the editor of a newspaper and his brother-in-law ran a manufacturing company called jakes who made chest sets and things and they still do today and it is believed that nathaniel cook designed the pieces and that jake's his brother-in-law was the first to manufacture them and that is not in that sense contentious but they've always gone down in history under staunton's name because he endorsed them so if you think that the world is different now with endorsements and commerce bounding along behind any kind of change money is to be made they all decided that if how would staunton play with these pieces then everybody would buy them which of course they did and now everybody thinks staunton designed them but he actually didn't but from the british museum there is another um point because the pieces as you can see the bishops the knights the rooks um all the normal pieces apart from the knights you can turn on a lathe because you you have a piece of wood and you you do it in such a way you get a king and a queen you might have to carve the top but basically it's a simple wood piece but with a knife you have to carve the head there's no way around it at least there wasn't in those days so um nathaniel cook put a lot of effort into designing a very elegant horse his head so if you see a set from that period the carving is very beautiful and the horse looks half alive and the fact is that he took the model for this horse's head from the famous um stone um carving from the elgin marbles in the bm from the the the temple in athens there was a hawk that there was a goddess called cellini and she had a charioteer with horses i think there were four of them and of course it all got broken up but there is this marvelous head which hangs over the side you feel like giving it some carrots to eat or something it's a marvelous carving and he modeled this head on that sculpture so it has a kind of resonance with the british museum and in its in in that period especially of course in modern sets they're done very simply and very crudely but actually i i bought for the museum at the same time i was collecting this kind of stuff a very very early box from stoneton signed by staunton on the bottom with these knights in their first year of production and they were hand carved by somebody in the factory and they're marvelous with the nostrils and the eyes you know like that proper proper living carvings and but of course it you could never do that commercially but all over the world this chess set will hold its way and i doubt it will ever be supplanted as long as chess is played because also they're very stable they're well designed and in the old days they used to drill a hole in the bottom and put lead in and then seeded off so they were very stable and because old gentlemen in chess clubs if somebody knocked over their piece they get furious and they couldn't have all that so they all had to be rock-solid and things like that but it is a very interesting mid-19th century example of a need and a design and a very good design and an endorsement which blew out of the water any rivals because at that time there were several designs of established designs of british chess pieces turned on a lathe some red and white ivory of course and and some not very stable sound this on that but once the stalton pieces came out everybody wanted one and uh it's never stopped it's never stolen so is is that the same period when you got the white and the black pieces is that the same kind of period or when when did that transformation between white and red give over to to black and white um you know the kind of you know in alice through the looking glass with the chess pieces they're red and white chess pieces those are the sort of pieces and that existed in families before the staunton ones and they were often made of ivory and they were traditionally red against white like in india and i don't know exactly what happened but i think you see when stormtrooper made the pieces one half was ivory and the other half was ebony black wood that was the they they didn't make staunton pieces or they actually did make them at first in red yes actually that's a very i'm not quite sure of the actual historical change about that about when that happened that's fair enough i'm so curious to know now um but i have i've got finally to my final question here and i have to ask you you know chess is everywhere they are still making tv programs about it you know there are still international tournaments there are still school groups and this is global this is not just in the uk or anything this is very much going around the world and i recently discovered that even tesla cars one of the games that they have programmed into their cars is chess i mean what do you think accounts for this incredible popularity of this one game across millennia it's not centuries anymore it's it's well over a thousand years it's partly fashion and when i was um uh first in the museum um there was a perception i mean i learned chefs from my grandfather and that was the kind of rule in fact it's the kind of rule about board games in the world that grandparents teach grandchildren because parents are too busy that's a kind of fact but in fact um when i learned chess at school when i was doing that school everybody played chess so this is in you know i was born in 1951 you can work out the mathematics but in those days all even the girls i may put it that way play chess at school and then with the passage of time chess was regarded as difficult and intimidating and there was quite a long period of decline when chess was only played by people who were really keen on it or in families where it was or something like that generally speaking it was less popular for quite a long time and then it's gone up and down it's gone up and down but now it's at a fever pitch and it's interesting this is not the first time um an indian point of view because you know that there was this sultan khan do you know about this guy he was i don't know he he worked on an estate for his in india he was a magistrate his um boss said speak who brought him to he brought him to look he learned playing under a tree with his grandfather and he had this he didn't even know the beginning moves very well and he was brought to europe and he became a chess player like you can't imagine and he beat kappa blanca he beat almost all of the best players in the world in a short period of time in the top international things and he sat there and he played these moves and the jack grandmasters couldn't believe you know that this guy he didn't he didn't have any idea of the opening because when you were a top player you know all the openings by heart you know and then all this is a whole science i mean he just played every game and he beat almost everybody and if he'd stayed in britain he probably would have been the world chess champion and he he would be any anybody who comes from that country should be proud of him he's marvelous but there's a lot of um modern chess players there was a champion wasn't there a world champion from india who played jess so when you have something like that um anand his name was and when you when anand was champion i think there was a huge upswing in people stopping to play cricket for five minutes and play instead and there is a kind of sway like that and the fact that this is the rule is demonstrated by this remarkable film it is demonstrated by it because lots of people have told me um about the evidence for people going out and buying chess sets and playing at home and having watched this film and it is an uncanny thing see i have to say about one thing about it which is interesting that kasparov was brought in as i understand this to organize the actual games so they're not like rubbishy games with people pretending they're proper sophisticated matches and he was the consultant and that that is important because and also that the whole way it was conducted was ever so realistic it made me really nervous you know when she sat down at the board it's terrible you get so old it's quite remarkable so i think that will have a long a long effect but coupled with the pandemic then the two things are irresistible absolutely irresistible and you know bobby fischer that remarkable genius of chess who who was quite a lot of her mindset and her behavior is recalls something about bobby fischer so it's not like a pure invention but it's very convincing i thought and i'll tell you something funny that of course the computer plays a major role in chess now in ranking and in competitions and in people playing against the computer and all these kind of things and there are loads of commentators on um on the internet who take famous games sometimes 100 years old and they play them through on the computer and they say wow this was good why this was bad and so if you're interested there's a whole waste your entire life doing this and no no question about it and there's a guy called agad metal or i'd agad mate i don't know who he is but i've sometimes seen his program and he's done the match that she played against the russian grand master he's analyzed it on on his side it's absolutely fascinating isn't that i haven't got to that episode yet so don't tell me why i would i won't say that brilliant well thank you so much irving i've learned a huge amount and i hope everyone else has enjoyed this as well um but i'm going to hand over to james in case there are any questions or comments or anything else from the audience thanks so much lovely lovely yeah thanks so much uh sushma and irving i've been absolutely riveted and uh it does seem like the kind of subject where we could talk all night doesn't it and we did initially say it was an event until seven which is about five minutes but um both sushma and irving have kindly said that uh they will answer some questions and people have been popping some questions into the q a box um so i think it'd be really nice to hear hear about a few of those and a couple of them we have already touched on a little bit so um i wonder which one to start with we've got a simple one well a simple question but a very complicated answer probably what is the most important skill to win at chess that's definitely one for irving i'm going to pass on that one um well it might well be memory because the best players um grand masters and the top rank of grand masters have this capacity that you can put in front of them a position say halfway through a game and they will immediately know what what to do with it that somehow it will register straight away and they won't have to think if i do this what's going to they just read it this is the characteristic of the top rank of grand masters and um part of it is that when they play games through their own experience they kind of retain them they kind of retain them so that you have a i think this is part of it that if you have such a memory then um whichever game you have whether or not you've won it it doesn't really matter you have that resource as part of your of your apparatus i think that's right but i mean what you really want to do is get a proper grandmaster here and tie them down on the table then ask them because it might be you have to eat a certain breakfast cereal or something like that and that's all you have to do another endorsement is on its way absolutely thanks for that well that was that question was from apop so thanks for that question um there's there's another one which again you sort of did touch them already a little bit uh when you spoke about the king and you know how he's being protected but there was one question why can the king only move a few spaces um i think it's one isn't it in one direction um again do you think we've sort of covered that with you you mentioned that you know the game is all about protecting the king as a kind of proxy for the state or yes i think that's that basically answers it but the corollary of it is that there are some very famous and remarkable games and very bizarre games where the king who is supposed to be huddled in the corner and hiding from sight sometimes becomes a very offensive weapon in his own right and actually when you have a long game with a complex end game where both players are limited to a very small number of pieces then all of a sudden the placid dosy king becomes a lethal tank and trundles across the board and with a rook can trap the enemy king and all that kind of thing so in a way they're a time bomb and if you have a long game where all the bishops and knights are gone and there's only a bit left then boy do they suddenly become dangerous like finding his throne is being threatened he better spring into action that's right absolutely and another another one from uh pam is would ordinary people have played with such ornate pieces or were they used by people of higher social status you're talking about in india well and for sure and those things that we've been looking at are the top snobby artistic expensive craftsman type things and people all over the world play with improvised chess pieces and one of the things about the islamic pattern so-called is it's much much easier to make and i think um that probably is one of the factors which explains its popularity but um the thing is this when people play chess they don't only play it once so even if they're not well off and not in any way in that sort of position if you have a chess set um you have it for years so um i think on the whole most people had what would obviously be a chess set there are places like in in the islands of malaya where it's recorded that people play chess with small pieces of bamboo and when you take one of your enemies pieces you eat it that's a rather short-term chess set yeah this is also the case that you know when you have a beautiful chess set it's something like you say you know you you might learn chess from your grandfather or something but you'd also inherit um beautiful chess sets as well it's not something that you yes exactly and it's something that has value because it used to belong to your grandad or your great-grandad or something so it's not just i agree with that that is often the case it's often the case and usually when you have a box like that there's one piece always always yes that's why we now have this really rubbish plastic kind of stuff at the moment yes especially with the little travel sets you know those tiny little pieces like that you always lost one of those we um of course there is a chest set in the portico library and there are other games at the portugal library and uh we're soon going to be publishing an article by one of our artists hope strickland on the history of dominoes in the caribbean so that's going to be really interesting but um our previous like librarian emma in fact also um she did offer for this exhibition to lend us uh one of the replica lewis chess sets that you were talking about earlier that um which she owns she's got a collection of different sets and we've ended up showing lots and lots of her playing cards and tarot cards and various games like that but we couldn't fit in her whole enormous collection so wow that sounds brilliant well normally speaking we'd be on the next train to manchester to have a look but yeah we'll have to we'll have to see when your person is doing the history of dominoes and which is quite interesting ask them whether they've ever thought that a domino the relationship between dominoes and dice because um it's quite interesting that that they're they're related in some way yeah anybody's ever worked out how they are related but they are really yeah um so let's see we've got we i mean there are some more questions i don't know whether we'll have time for every single one there are quite a lot but let's see whether we've got one or two more um do you come across any old design sketches of early chess pieces so i'm guessing that question might be meaning from within the collection at the british museum maybe or in your research um design well the jake's company i mentioned they used to have a pattern book and um they have the original drawings of the staunton designs in this pattern book but rather unfortunately they were bombed during the blitz and this pattern book partly survived with half of it singed in the most romantic and dramatic fashion i think they did it on purpose just to make it look expensive so that did exist and there are um the best thing i can think of is there was a man called thomas hyde who was court interpreter and professor of arabic and hebrew in oxford and he wrote a book on the history of chess and when he was a worked in the court as an interpreter he always interviewed visiting um ambassadors and what have you at the court of james or whoever it was about their games and he made drawings sometimes on their say so i think often sets they had of different styles of pieces current then so in this book there are drawings of perhaps 10 or 15 chess sets from egypt and from india and other places and which are the sort of thing you're asking about and that that's from 16 something or other that's incredible because that's also the very earliest moment when you know the east india company um had a presence in india as well so it you know and there were ambassadors going back and forth to those courts so that's fascinating actually has asked the question we missed the start apologies can you say in one line where chess came from yes definitely and unquestionably came from india perfect here we go you've done it that's great probably in around the seventh century or a bit earlier a.d yeah and then also can you discuss how we this is from scott can you discuss what we know about the rule changes and timing of the diversion from western chess and chinese chess right well and rule changes we've talked about a bit because in india for example you couldn't move your pawn two squares for this first move you couldn't do that they didn't have castling in india really so these things i think came out of the to make the game more fast developing more fast-moving and more interesting so they are intrinsic to the game i think those sorts of changes and the thing about chinese chess and of course japanese chess is that many people would like china to be the place where chess was invented just because they invented gunpowder but in fact they didn't and there's a lot written to try and prove that chinese chess preceded it but i don't think there's any chance of it at all it's derivative but they have a river across the middle and two fortresses and cannon that can fire over the battlements and so they are if you look at it detachedly it seems to me certain that the peculiarities of chinese chess are an extension of and a growth out of the original indian game but the time when that happened i don't know when that happened i don't know whether anybody knows and then japanese in the same way japanese has the extra thing that when you take a person's piece you take it turn it over you don't eat it you turn it over and you have it on your side now that's really bizarre that's it i remember watching um a youtube video by someone called uh i think shooks um that james actually sent to me and apparently there are some versions of chess in japan which are incredibly complicated with literally hundreds of pieces on the ball oh there are super things like that actually one of the one of the interesting things about chess is it's been going for so long you know you talk about why it survives and periodically you get these things like emperor chess and exploded chess and three-dimensional chess dimensional chess chess you can play in the bath and all these kind of things they come along because people think oh well we played the game out and computers are supposed to have solved the game and you know that's not true you've heard it here folks that's far off i don't know what the latest is but they set him up against that computer he didn't win every game but he didn't win one of them so he showed that thing and the computer will never in my opinion and if it does it should be blown up and really interfere with the human mastery of the chess board because there's something about chess and the human brain which means they are ideally matched and the computer is an unpleasant adherence and an intrusion and should never be taken any notice of that's my that's great there are some really fascinating questions here sandy has asked um why is what people in britain call the bishop the fool in french the fool and the runner or messenger or alpha in german okay well and the elephant bishop was called the fill in arabic i feel which is the old semitic word for elephant and when the piece moved into europe it was understood as the fool so you have a word which is then re-jigged according to your understanding of it locally so you have a gesture with a cap or something like that and i think that the whole web of of how the chess pieces um evolved in incorporates those sorts of ideas that it either rings a bell with something or it's understood or something which in fact um it's i mean for example the bishop sometimes um was a boat because there was an argument about what the word meant and so in bengal for example bishops are boats and things like that and actually it's a very fascinating thing but that is the basic answer to that question says the words themselves sometimes as much as the meaning it can be just mishearing or will be interpreted oh yes laughter as a messenger um right at this moment i can't think right at this moment but um i i dare say it would be easy to find out i can't remember we've got a couple more huma says can you recommend any good reads about the fantastic world of chess oh goodness oh goodness i think um well this yes um do you see this this is called the history of chess by h.j.r murray it was written in 1913 and it's um this thick that's a good start and his father was the man who wrote the oxford english dictionary the great oxford in murray's dictionary in oxford and h.j.r murray was his oldest son and he wrote this history of chelsea never been surpassed it is absolutely encyclopedic so if someone has a genuine interest to dip into something interesting have a go at this book when you're through with it i don't know how many pages it's i'll just just check while we're talking here um including the index it's um 899 pages when you're through with the 899 pages and at a loss for what to read next just drop us a note we'll find something else h.j.r murray is the most amazing book it's worth dipping into that's great we referred in the exhibition in one or two spots to marilyn yellen's and the birth of the chess queen so there's a couple of interesting ideas in that and then as such mentioned at the start on the exhibition page on the website there's uh there's a number of other books about games that we've recommended so do have a look at that as well imagine if that book is out of copyright you might be able to read it online um if you can't get hold of a physical copy especially because it's it's tricky to get to libraries and things right now so do do google it and see if you can find it good idea yeah um helen dalton asks are there places in the world where chess has never really taken off um i think this is one for sushma actually as a matter of fact i i just like to defer here to my colleague um thank you very much and i actually i was just thinking i can't think of anywhere it's one of those games that throughout history because it's not just you know immediately right now um especially at the upper echelons of society i imagine it's something that's almost a courtly um fixture it's something that's an important part of becoming um look it was it was eventually it like it became democratized and everybody made it so first it was lords and ladies and people who wrote poetry and had religious ideas about it and it was part of what you did if you were a knight in britain but eventually the process meant that people all over the world of all shapes and sizes and affluence and belief and everything can all play chess wherever you go and you see this but i i couldn't say where it's not i don't think it's played on the moon if that's any hill yet or mars yet however isn't there like am a tesla car sort of um currently in orbit and it's got the game chess in it so actually you know we can even say it's reached space um one of the nice things about these kinds of board games is that you do not need to speak the same language in order to play it once you've grasped the rules you can play this particular game with anyone anywhere on earth that is why it spreads so effectively because you sit and watch you get the hang of it and you go home and you do it yourself and that that's how board games are disseminated not by rules or by people saying we're in charge now you have to learn backgammon they just exist on a under the radar thing and people with no language in common and you sometimes feel in different parts of the world people playing chess when they have no language in common it's true and i suppose actually the more the more rules the less likely it is that a game is going to survive actually i think the simpler often the better you know chess is like go where you can learn the rules in an afternoon and then you spend the rest of your life trying to get good at it remember my brother was obsessed by chess when he was younger and um at one particular tournament or something oh no a special dinner he got to go to he actually met gary kasparov and he got someone to take a photo um so it's quite a you know he doesn't play anymore because he just doesn't have time unfortunately but he doesn't need to i think if he's done that he doesn't really need that you've met gary kasparov got the photo job done next time if you sit down at the board and you just happen to let slip to the opponent that you know gary has they'll just give up you know it's like yeah i'm going home now absolutely so just one one person has asked are the pieces you've shown available to view in person in manchester after lockdown the pieces that we've shown tonight most of them are not because they're from the british museums collection of course but i imagine that uh well certainly the lewis pieces and others will will be on show um in the british museum but in the portugal library we do have an exhibition set up a physical exhibition with lots of other games and all the other things that are on the online exhibition and some more things as well and i can just add that the um all of the pieces that i've shown from the british museum they're all on the british museum collection online as if you just google those four words and if you type in the registration numbers that are included on every slide you'll find them and the only set that wasn't from the bm is the one from the metropolitan museum of art in new york and i included a register number there so if you want to go and have a look at that just check out their their collection online as well and you can get really good images and zoom in and all the rest of it to get a closer look that's great yeah if anybody wants any more of those details then please feel free to email us the library we'll pass on any of those numbers or anything if you didn't manage to get get a note that's fine there's another question here anonymous question what is the origin of the knights move again i'm not sure whether that's lost in the mists of time or if there's any way of recovering that oh i have no idea but this is an unusual move isn't it because it's like an l shape rather than a diagonal or just forwards and backwards or anything like that so well um well it's wrapped up in the fact that it's the horse which jumps isn't it oh the prancing horse okay but exactly how that came about i don't know we can't end this by just saying we don't know like sorry it's a horrible question notice it was anonymous that's very suggest is there a nicer question james you've been sabotaged yeah um let's have a look there are a couple more um well one of one of them is what's the earliest illustration or painting you've seen of of chess so that might be an easy one to remember gosh the earliest one i've seen is the one um the chess set from um i suppose the lewis chessmen and the one at the met they're the earliest ones i have seen personally as one of the reasons i was painting those painting did you say of chess the question was a painting or illustration oh gosh well we have um we have uh um shiva and pirate sometimes shown in indian painting playing chess on a chess board of an indian type with pieces but um how early i doubt them i mean there may be some from the 16th century i don't know if there are earlier ones but um oh my goodness me hmm good very good question that very very interesting question i'm very glad you brought that up yes very very interesting question about the paintings there um um well i have to say the only ones i can think of are also indian miniature paintings but then i've never looked at the frescoes and things like that so um i mean in terms of i don't know i'm just thinking the earliest period like you talk about the 7th century and stuff in india in terms of wall paintings and things um junker caves and things and i don't ever recall seeing any any um chess games that so as far as i'm aware they're certainly not that old um but i would imagine that the indian miniature paintings um or perhaps even persian miniature paintings are possibly the earliest ones because that's where the game really took hold um and found its way you know into courtney culture and art as well so i would guess possibly i'd just like to say that um you know this fat book with 999 pages i turned to the index under p and the word paintings doesn't appear all i can say is if hjr murray didn't know an example when he was writing that i don't feel quite so bad that i can't come up with one myself but if anyone wants to write the additional missing chapter this is your opportunity yes but seriously i i think that probably indian painting is the earliest resource for that and but i don't know off the top of my head how early they are there's an interesting comment that's just coming on the chat from um one of our participants called ewin who says palatine chapel in the norman palace in palermo you can admire the first painting of a chess game that is known from 1143 wow that is incredibly early artists the artists who created the muslim players were chosen by the norman king of sicily roger ii of oakville directed the church thanks gosh thank you thank you for that so i think there's just one more question that we'll ask there are more but i don't think we'll get through i think they're going to go forever so we'll we'll there's one good question which is modern updates to uh the game like on paso have changed the game massively this is from mark and this question what change would you make if you could that's a good question hmm apart from four dimensions giraffes and three thousand pieces i mean one of the reasons i don't play chess so much is i just don't have the patience anymore to sit and have a full game so for me i prefer things like backgammon actually i really enjoy playing backgammon um but chess i don't know i i i suppose when you have young children and stuff is it's the the idea of being able to sit somewhere and actually think about something never mind think about in long term with a game of chess so for me i'd love a super speedy version that i could play in these you know young child years that would be lovely but i i don't imagine most actual chess players would like that at all suppose it's like the difference between a proper test quick test match and the one day internationals and stuff um i i think that in the history of chess over the last say two centuries and perhaps longer people have come up with lots of innovations with a more powerful piece or more one extra rank one extra file or something like that in order to make chess more exciting and they've all dwindled and and atrophied that no invention or suggestion of this kind has ever really been adopted by chess players other than out of curiosity so that suggests that um as the game is its balance and its intrinsic qualities that there is a kind of perfection about it because so to speak it works it is fair and there's no injustice in it and um there's an infinitesimal amount of knowledge to be gathered but the space of it is not already filled up it's not an over issue so i i i can't really see i mean even emmanuel alaska for example he was the world chess champion for 30 years or something he was a really mathematician he ended up inventing something an extroversion there are many such things but they only lived in the minds of the people who really liked him and the game itself for a very long time has been resolutely unchanged without any deleterious effect so the only thing i could imagine is if i do become king of the world in due course that everybody would have to play with replicas of the lewis chess pieces the staunton chess pieces i think that would be a great move forward myself that's a fabulous answer i like that that's great well i think we're going to leave it on that recommendation and maybe prediction we'll see how things pan out thank you so much again for joining us um sushma and irving and everybody who's listened and to kezra and maxfest again and please do visit the exhibition online and keep in touch with us and yeah keep in touch with the library lovely thank you very much thanks very much for inviting us i really enjoyed this evening thank you for joining us bye

Channel: The Portico Library

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Length: 76min 43sec (4603 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 25 2021