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Babylonian Chess?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 August 2014

C. J. Gadd
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We have not, as yet, found them in Nineveh or Babylon, though we are convinced they were played there. E. Falkener, Games Ancient and Oriental, Introd., p. 2.

For one who had the privilege of displaying to the first readers of Iraq some specimens of a game long favoured in many parts of the ancient East, it may not be inappropriate to celebrate this journal's recommencement with a less substantial allusion to a like subject. This is a reference in a Babylonian augural text to something which, as I shall try to make plausible, may perhaps be a game with some likeness to Chess. A reinforcement of this will then be sought from the observation of a single detail in the archaeology of Chess, which seems to point back to a Babylonian prototype of unique character.

In A. T. Clay's Babylonian Records in the Library of J. Pierpont Morgan, part IV, is published as No. 13 a tablet from Erech of the Seleucid period, inscribed with a chapter of ‘omens, derived from inspection of the entrails of a sacrificed victim. The tablet in question is the seventh of the augural work called as a whole barûtu, i.e. ‘seership?’ and at the same time is the third tablet of the section called šumma tiranu, i.e. ‘if the guts (&c.)’. Though this copy was written in the year 213 B.C. that is, of course, no reason for supposing that its contents were composed at that time. A fragment of the same compilation was in the Assyrian royal library at Nineveh, and this takes it back to the seventh century B.C. at least. No doubt most of its contents are older still.

Type
Research Article
Information
IRAQ , Volume 8 , January 1946 , pp. 66 - 72
Copyright
Copyright © The British Institute for the Study of Iraq 1946

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References

page 66 note 1 K. 3805, see Boissier, A., Choix de textes relatifs à la divination assyro-babylonienne, I, p. 91 Google Scholar.

page 66 note 2 Clay, op. cit., p. 37.

page 66 note 3 Le caractère religieux de la royauté assyro-baby-lonienne, p. 325, n, 5.

page 67 note 1 The first is implied by the formulae used in the Assyrian ‘questions to the Sun-god’ (see Klauber, , Politisch-religiöse Texte, introd., p. xiii)Google Scholar: some specimens of the second are given in Ebeling, K.A.R., no. 452. Sometimes the omens indicate that the adannu is not long enough, e.g. C.T. XX. 47, ll. 32f.

page 67 note 2 Xenophon, , Anab. 1. 7, § 18 Google Scholar. The number is prominent in another Assyrian tablet concerned with timing an event by hepatoscopy, see O.L.Z. 1917, 257 ff.Google Scholar It may be supposed that Silanus was acquainted with these speculations.

page 67 note 3 See the article of Krückmann, O. in the Reallexikon der Assyriologie, 1. 449 f.Google Scholar

page 67 note 4 The ordinary references may be found in the dictionaries, that concerning the ‘lower line’ of sculptures is in Streck, M., Assurbanipal, 11. 324 f.Google Scholar with another example (l. 12) in the usual sense. The signs read as sid-ru have, of course, other possible values, but, as in the case of a-KAL above, none which apply here. However, a mere substitution of consonants written with the same sign would produce šiṭ-ru, ‘a writing, a line drawn upon a surface’. This is an entirely different word, but by an odd coincidence it expresses the suggested meaning equally well. We are told that in Chinese Chess the pieces stand upon the crossings of the lines, not in the squares.

page 68 note 1 Observe the theft committed in the absence of the ‘palace-guard’. There is a close parallelism in this with the various persons, including women, who ‘seize and run away with’ or ‘cause to go out’ the AD. ḪAL of their masters. Some references to this are given in Jastrow, , Religion Bab. und Assyr. 11. 358, n. 3, and 379, n. 16Google Scholar, and there are others, with interesting variants, yet the allusion remains obscure. An amusing modern parallel may be found in Evelyn's Diary for May 10th, 1671, when he dined in company with (one Blood, that impudent bold fellow who had not long before attempted to steal the imperial crown’.

page 68 note 2 ina du-bu-ub suḫ-si-e-šu is of interest apart from the use of the rare word. The phrase seems to be the exact opposite of šudbubu ša sinništi, lit. ‘to make a woman talk’, which has the implication ‘to seduce a woman’. This has been discussed by Meissner, , Beiträge zum assyr. Wörterbuch, 1. 32 Google Scholar, who quotes a late commentary ( Clay, , B.R.M., IV, no. 20, l. 60 Google Scholar) explaining the phrase by sinnšta sunnuqa, lit. ‘to bring a woman up (close to a thing)’—this hardly enlightens the matter. But Meissner has unaccountably omitted any notice of the following lines, which thus elaborate the explanation, 61. sinništu ša e-tul(?)-la TU-ma 62. mimma ma-la ta-šal-lu-šu 63. i-qab-bak-ka, ‘a woman who……….,? whatsoever thou askest her she will tell thee’. This in fact subverts his explanation, for whatever the words imply, they mean what they say, ‘to make talk’, for in certain circumstances she will tell you what you ask, reply to questions. It appears, therefore, that dababu has a peculiar connexion with the sexual affairs of women, for (a) it can be used in the opposite senses of defending and abandoning their honour, and (b) in the latter case it also conveys its literal sense of ‘talking’. (A discussion of this passage of the commentary by Ungnad, in A.f.O. XIV, p. 264, proposes aroitrary changes of reading but remains inconclusive).

page 68 note 3 Culin, Stewart, Chess and Playing-Cards (Washington, Government Printing Office, 1898)Google Scholar; the quotation is from p. 863. This book, having first directed my attention to the Chinese game in question, led on to Murray's, H. J. R. comprehensive History of Chess (1913)Google Scholar which adduces a multitude of medieval texts both Eastern and Western, as well as the material antiquities.

page 69 note 1 After Z.D.M.G. XXIV. 172 Google Scholar.

page 69 note 2 Murray, H. J. R., History of Chess, 122 ff.Google Scholar He notes that the Chinese name may actually mean ‘the astronomical game’.

page 69 note 3 Ibid. 214, cf. 120, n. 8.

page 69 note 4 There is nevertheless an allusion to the need for a boat to cross the River in the Chinese encyclopaedia quoted by Murray, p. 123. His suggested explanation (p. 71) of the name Boat from a misunderstanding of rukh is admittedly a conjecture.

page 69 note 5 The word šatam has no connexion with the modern or historical names of any of the chessmen. But it might be observed that one of them, the Elephant (now the Bishop), is named by a word al-fīl which first appears in Assyrian, as pîru.

page 69 note 6 An exception is the Hittite or Hurrian story of Kumarpi, in which the divine minister of a superior god is called his šatam: see Güterbock, H. G. in Orientalia, 1943, p. 348 fGoogle Scholar.

page 70 note 1 See Pl. VII, Fig. 2, after De Sarzec, Découvertes en Chaldée, pl. 4 bis.

page 70 note 2 Tylor, E. B., Primitive Culture, 1. 70 ff.Google Scholar, and see also the theory propounded by S. Culin, op. cit. 858.

page 70 note 3 C. L. Woolley, Ur Excavations. The Royal Cemetery, pl. 95.

page 70 note 4 Iraq, 1, pl. VII. In connexion with these and the Ur board (and also the ivory box from Enkomi, in Murray, A. S., Excavations in Cyprus, 12, fig. 19Google Scholar) which all exhibit five, or multiples of five, rosettes, it is interesting to recall the statement in a Spanish History of the Indies (reproduced by Tylor, in Internat. Archiv für Ethnographie, Suppl. to Bd. IX (1896), 9 Google Scholar) that in a Mexican game the players invoked a god whose name was Five Roses.

page 70 note 5 See Mrs.Buren, D. Van in Iraq, IV. 11 ffGoogle Scholar.

page 70 note 6 An ivory Rook (French, of about the 12th century A.D.) in the Louvre is illustrated here, Pl. VIII, Fig. 5, after Goldschmidt, A., Die Elfenbeinskulpturen aus der romanischen Zeit, IV pl. LXIII, no. 180 bGoogle Scholar. A Latin poem of the same century, quoted by Murray, 499, calls the piece bifrons rochus.

page 71 note 1 Manuel d'archéologie orientale? 1, p. 482 Google Scholar.

page 71 note 2 C. L. Woolley, Ur Excavations, The Royal Cemetery, pl. 92.

page 71 note 3 Andrae, W., Die archäischen Ischtar-Tempel in Assur, Tafel 61, dGoogle Scholar. The first modern discovery of these is illustrated by Loftus, W. K., Travels and Researches in Chaldaea and Susianay p. 259 Google Scholar.

page 71 note 4 To narrow somewhat the immense gulf of more than three thousand years between the Sumerian dynasties and medieval Europe one may recall the observed fact that it was precisely models of that remote period which so strongly influenced Romanesque art; see Frankfort, H., Cylinder Seals, pp. 316 ff.Google Scholar In particular, Dr.Jacobsthal, P. adds in the American Journal of Archaeology, XLVIII. 350 Google Scholar, ‘there was always a strong influence upon the West from these Eastern quarters in all things connected with horses and chariots’.

page 71 note 5 It is hardly necessary to mention here the unmistakably Sumerian chariot which lives for ever in the vast Wain of the night sky.