Ex Oriente Scacci. L’origine indienne du jeu des échecs d’après João de Barros et Pedro Teixeira

Abstract

It is common knowledge to say that the game of chess was invented in Ancient India and was brought to Persia in the Sassanian period, and then spread throughout the whole Mediterranean basin by the Arabs before the end of the first millennium CE. In fact, this tradition has its roots in the Iranian and Arab literature of the Middle Ages but it never got into the West where other literary narratives about the invention of chess flourished. Chess historians ascribe to the British Orientalist Thomas Hyde the role of being the first European scholar to ascertain the game’s Indian origin in his De ludus orientalibus (1694). Actually, two Portuguese chroniclers, João de Barros and Pedro Teixeira, had already mentioned this cultural transfer from the subcontinent in their writings based on historical Persian sources.