February 2024 | BIPS Travel Grant
The game of kings at the Ghaznavid court: an examination of the Shatranj-nama MSS held at the Biruni Institute, Tashkent
Summary of topic:
In June 2024, I visited the Biruni Institute of Oriental Studies in Tashkent to view three manuscripts of a Persian chess manual entitled Shatranj-nama attributed to Abu al-Fath Ahmad al-Sijzi. I had previously visited the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin to view an incomplete manuscript of the text, and hoped to reach firmer conclusions around the identity of the author, the circumstances of the text’s composition, and its place in the history of Islamic chess writing by viewing more complete copies of the text. The study of historical chess writing in New Persian is comparatively far less developed than that of Arabic, and I believed the text may well be one of the earliest New Persian works on the game.
Report:
Previous research on the Shatranj-nama is limited to a short discussion by Muhammad Taqi Daneshpazhuh on the Staatsbibliothek MS. Though undated, he connects its style of nastaliq to the period pre- 9th / 15th century and identifies ownership marks for the library of Sultan Bayazid II (r. 1481 – 1512). Daneshpazhuh observes the author Abu al-Fath Ahmad al-Sijzi’s claim to have been undefeated playing chess from the age of fifteen for fifty years while travelling through “Khurasan, Iraq, Ghaznanyn, and Hindustan” and his stated familiarity with the works of Biruni (d. 1048) and the chess author al-Suli (d. 946). Daneshpazhuh dates the Shatranj-nama to the 5th / 11th century or later on the basis of the mention of a poet “Abu Sahl Muhammad ibn Ali al-Badayiʿi”, who he suggests is identical to a 5th / 11th century poet who appears in Awfi’s Lubab al-Albab composed in 1221. However, Daneshpazhuh was only aware of this reference to “Abu Sahl Muhammad ibn Ali al-Badayiʿi” through the Biruni Institute’s catalogue, as it does not appear in the incomplete Staatsbibliothek MS. Proper examination of the Tashkent MSS therefore offered considerable hope of improving on this dating and understanding the circumstances of the text’s composition.
The three Tashkent MSS of the Shatranj-nama are Biruni Institute 478 (dated Jumada al-Thani 1246 / Nov-Dec 1830), Biruni Institute 468/5 (undated), and Biruni Institute 8141 (dated 1083 / 1672-3) respectively. On examination all appeared to be complete copies of the text with broadly similar readings of key passages, and primary attention was therefore paid to Biruni Institute 8141, the oldest dated manuscript. In content and broad structure, the Shatranj-nama has a great deal of similarity to many of the Arabic chess manuals discussed by Wieber, and its stories on the origins of chess are also recognisable from other sources. This report will confine itself to references which may assist in dating the text and those elements which are more unusual.
The final sections of the Shatranj-nama deal with chess poetry and makhariq, mathematical puzzles performed on a chess board of which the knight’s tour is considered but one. Part of the challenge to study is the complexity of the problems and the need to understand the accompanying poetry to find their solution, poetry which may itself be based on further codes. In the Shatranj-nama, al-Sijzi provides poetry which can be used to memorise the movements of the knight using different groups of letters to indicate the horizontal and vertical axes. The result is an apparently random series of letters incomprehensible as either Persian or Arabic. The vast majority of the poetry however is in Persian in masnavi, a portion of which is attributed to the Abu Sahl Muhammad ibn Ali al-Badayiʿi discussed by Daneshpazhuh. I believe that close examination of this masnavi poetry would show it operates in part as code for deciphering certain makhariq.
To conclude, on the basis of the analysis of the Tashkent MSS the weight of current evidence points to a 12th century date for the Shatranj-nama. Offering further support is the fact of Ghazna’s decline as a cultural centre following the Ghurid campaign of 1151 and its razing by the Mongols in 1221, events which would have limited its later capacity to serve as a base for al-Sijzi’s activities. Yet to improve on the circumstantial evidence underpinning this dating, I would suggest we require a true database of chess starting arrangements, tactics, and puzzles as described in historic Islamic manuscripts. Such databases are used extensively in modern chess to assist in the memorisation of chess tactics and positions. Comparing the tactics featured in the Shatranj-nama with such a database would likely make its place in the evolution of chess in the Islamic World far clearer and offer an alternative to datings reached by traditional methods.
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Marc Czarnuszewicz is a PhD student at University of St Andrews.