The inventor as some authors declare, and among them Jacobus
de Cessolus, a Friar and Master of the Dominican Order, is Xerxes,
a philosopher and minister of Ammolius, King of Babylon whose
object was to admonish his monarch of the errors that had been
committed in the government of the realm. This opinion is
followed by many, of whom the author of the Historia del Mondo
is one. St. Gregory of Nazianzen in his third oration, Cassiodorus
the Great in his thirty-first epistle and eighth book, Allesandri
Allesandro in the third book and twenty first chapter of his Dies
Geniales, Torquato Tasso in his Romeo del Gioco, Thomas Actius
in his Tractatus de Ludo Scaccherum, and other legal authors who
have treated of play, say that chess owes its origin to Palamedes
who at the siege of Troy, employed it in order that his soldiers
should not remain inactive, and not being able to practice actual
warfare, they might amuse themselves with mimic conflicts. For
which reason Palamedes played it with Thersites, as Homer tells
us in the second book of the Iliad, so also did the other heroes
of the Grecian armies, as is related by Euripides in his tragedies.
Carrera 1617, published a large volume concerning the origin
of chess, in which he attempts to prove from Herodotus,
Euripides, Sophocles, Philostratus, Homer, Virgil, Aristotle,
Seneca, Plato, Ovid, Horace, Quintilian, and Martial Vida, that
Palamedes invented chess at the siege of Troy.
The Encyclopaedia or Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences,
dedicated to the King in 1727, contains an account of chess, but
it is neither a well informed nor useful article beyond the
statement that Schach is originally Persian, and that Schachmat in
that language, signifies the king is dead, it vouchsafes neither
reasonable nor useful information.
The traditionary names mentioned in the article are Schatrinscha
a Persian philosopher, Palamedes, Diogenes and Pyrrhus, its
authorities, Nicod, Bochart, Scriverius, Fabricius, and Donates,
and it concludes with a sample of the stereotyped character, with
which we are so familiar of the trace of chess origin, being lost
in the remote ages of antiquity. Chess is thus described in it:
"An ingenious game, played or performed with little round
pieces of wood, on a board divided into 64 squares, where art and
address are so indispensably requisite, that chance seems to have
no place, and a person never loses but by his own fault. On
each side are eight noblemen and as many pawns, which are to be
moved and shifted, according to certain rules and laws of the
game."
The same work specifies the various ancient opinions upon the
origin of the game, inclining to those of Nicod and Bochart,
supported by Scriverius, who state that Schach is originally
Persian, and Schachmat in that language signifies the king dead.
Another opinion is that of all the theories enunciated, the most
probable is that of Fabricius, who avers that a celebrated Persian
astronomer, one Schatrinscha, invented the game, and gave it his
own name, which it still bears in that country. It adds, Donatus
observes, that Pyrrhus the most knowing and expert prince of his
age, ranging a battle, made use of the men at chess, to form his
designs, and to shew the secrets thereof to other. The common
opinion was that it was invented by Palamedes at the siege of
Troy, others attributed it to Diomedes, who lived in the time of
Alexander, but the text concludes by remarking, "The truth
appears to be that the game is so very ancient, there is no tracing
its author."
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