Check out Janggi (Korean Chess), our featured variant for November, 2024.

Enter Your Reply

The Comment You're Replying To
John Ayer wrote on Wed, Mar 24, 2004 04:48 AM UTC:
Very well! The site http://www.goddesschess.com/chessays/calvognosis2.html has this to say about a conjectural parent of Chaturanga: <p>The German historian Johannes Kohtz (1843-1918) supposed that in the protochess the Rook was also a jumping figure, with a mobility limited to a third square. So the squares accessible to a Rook in h1 would be f1 and h3, and later in the game f3, d3, d1, b1, b3, b5, d5, f5, h5, h7, f7, d7 and b7. His theory makes a lot of sense (in spite of Murray's rejection after long arguments by post), because the three jumping pieces (Alfil, Knight, and Rook) represent a diagonal, hook-curved and rectilinear movement of the same range. It also expresses a perfect ranking order: The King and the Knight are the only pieces which can move to any of the 64 squares. The Firzan has half of the board, 32. The Rook half of that, 16 squares. And the Alfil, half of that, 8. <p> End of quotation. The goddesschess page cited above suggests that this protochess traveled to Persia, where the concepts of checkmate and check were introduced. The rook was invented to make checkmate more attainable, and the board was enlarged to ten squares by ten to accommodate it. This game is known to John Gollon and his followers as Shatranj al-Kamil Type I. The orthogonal leaper (0,2) in that game is called a Jamal, or camel. It has the same move as the dabbabah in Tamerlane's Shatranj al-Kabir. We are apparently to infer that the rook was so popular that players used it at the corners of the eight-square board instead of the old 0,2 leaper, and the game in this form traveled back to India and supplanted its predecessor as swiftly and thoroughly as modern chess did medieval chess in the late fifteenth century. My thought is simply that Shatranj al-Kamil I traveled along the Silk Road through Central Asia to China, where the camel/dabbabah became the cannon/catapult, extending its leap from two squares to any number. The game was transferred to a previously existing Chinese game-board, and with a few minor adjustments became Xiangqi.

Edit Form

Comment on the page Dabbabah

Conduct Guidelines
This is a Chess variants website, not a general forum.
Please limit your comments to Chess variants or the operation of this site.
Keep this website a safe space for Chess variant hobbyists of all stripes.
Because we want people to feel comfortable here no matter what their political or religious beliefs might be, we ask you to avoid discussing politics, religion, or other controversial subjects here. No matter how passionately you feel about any of these subjects, just take it someplace else.
Avoid Inflammatory Comments
If you are feeling anger, keep it to yourself until you calm down. Avoid insulting, blaming, or attacking someone you are angry with. Focus criticisms on ideas rather than people, and understand that criticisms of your ideas are not personal attacks and do not justify an inflammatory response.
Quick Markdown Guide

By default, new comments may be entered as Markdown, simple markup syntax designed to be readable and not look like markup. Comments stored as Markdown will be converted to HTML by Parsedown before displaying them. This follows the Github Flavored Markdown Spec with support for Markdown Extra. For a good overview of Markdown in general, check out the Markdown Guide. Here is a quick comparison of some commonly used Markdown with the rendered result:

Top level header: <H1>

Block quote

Second paragraph in block quote

First Paragraph of response. Italics, bold, and bold italics.

Second Paragraph after blank line. Here is some HTML code mixed in with the Markdown, and here is the same <U>HTML code</U> enclosed by backticks.

Secondary Header: <H2>

  • Unordered list item
  • Second unordered list item
  • New unordered list
    • Nested list item

Third Level header <H3>

  1. An ordered list item.
  2. A second ordered list item with the same number.
  3. A third ordered list item.
Here is some preformatted text.
  This line begins with some indentation.
    This begins with even more indentation.
And this line has no indentation.

Alt text for a graphic image

A definition list
A list of terms, each with one or more definitions following it.
An HTML construct using the tags <DL>, <DT> and <DD>.
A term
Its definition after a colon.
A second definition.
A third definition.
Another term following a blank line
The definition of that term.