Notes · Book E2Chess, Wisdom, and the Kalila and Dimna

E2.1Chess Comes to Anooshirvan

An envoy from the Raja of Hind brings elephants, parasols and a chessboard with a challenge: if Iran’s sages cannot work out the rules, Iran must pay tribute. The court fails. Bozorgmehr solves the game in a day and a night and demonstrates it before the envoy.

A chessboard fashioned as a challenge sent: Chess did come to Iran from India, and Persian tradition puts the arrival in Khosrow’s reign. The Indian chaturanga, “four limbs” after the four arms of an army, became Persian chatrang; a short Pahlavi tract on the game tells this same story of an Indian challenge solved by the king’s minister, and Ferdowsi’s version follows it closely. From Persian the game passed to the Arabs as shatranj, and from them to Europe.

The Rukh, the king, and the counselor’s course: The pieces still carry their journey in their names. The Indian chariot became the Persian rokh, whose meaning is disputed and which Europe turned into the rook; the footman is piyada, the pawn; the elephant’s square became the bishop’s. The piece beside the king is the farzin, the counselor or vizier, and it is on that square that Europe later set its queen.

E2.2Bozorgmehr Answers Chess with Nard

Bozorgmehr shuts himself in a dark room and works out nard, then carries it to Hind with two thousand camel-loads staked on the Raja’s sages solving it. They fail in a week; he explains the game, and comes home with the stake, a year’s tribute and gifts.

He brought the hidden laws of nard to light: Nard is backgammon, later takhte-nard. The same Pahlavi tradition that brings chess out of India credits the Persians with answering it by inventing nard, and the pair was read as an argument as well as a rivalry: chess turns on a player’s skill, nard on the fall of the dice, so the two games between them divide the world into what men contrive and what is dealt to them.

If two friends caught one isolated foe: That is backgammon’s rule of the blot: a piece left alone can be struck off by an opposing pair. Beside the dice, it is the one detail here that belongs unmistakably to the real game, for Ferdowsi otherwise describes nard as a second war-game with kings and battalions.

E2.3Gav, Talkhand, and Chess

In Hind, Jamhur dies leaving the infant Gav; his brother Mai reigns, marries the queen and fathers Talkhand. The brothers’ rival claims end in a battle by the sea where Talkhand dies of thirst, unwounded. To show his mother how, the sages devise chess.

Thus Shahvi spoke, the ancient sage of old: A new source is named, and a second beginning for chess. In E2.1 the game arrives from Hind already finished, as a challenge; here it is invented in Hind to explain a death. The two accounts sit side by side in the poem and are generally thought to come from different sources, and Ferdowsi keeps both rather than choose.

The turning heavens brought him to checkmate: Here is the point of the whole tale. Talkhand dies on his elephant hemmed in by his own trench and the sea, of thirst and heat, with no wound on him — and the board is built to show a king who is destroyed not by a blow but by having nowhere left to move. The word for it is shah mat, usually explained as “the king is helpless,” which English keeps as checkmate.

She raised a mighty pyre to burn upon: Cremation is the custom Ferdowsi consistently assigns to Hind, and Gav in his turn swears to burn himself if he cannot clear his name. The mother’s pyre is for a son rather than a husband, which is unusual; and Talkhand himself is not burned at all but coffined in ivory, gold and teak and sealed with pitch, musk and camphor.

E2.4The Kalila and Dimna Comes to Iran

The physician Barzvi goes to Hind for a herb said to raise the dead, and finds none. An old sage reads the riddle: the herb is wisdom, the corpse the ignorant man, the cure a book. Barzvi memorizes the Kalila chapter by chapter and sends it home.

Barzvi, physician, honored by the crown: This is the most famous transmission story in Persian, and part of it is documented. A Middle Persian version of the Indian Panchatantra was made in Khosrow’s reign; it is lost, but a sixth-century Syriac translation survives. In the eighth century Ibn al-Muqaffa’ turned it into Arabic as Kalila wa-Dimna, after the two jackals of the frame story, and from it came versions in dozens of languages. The journey of the physician the Arabic writers call Burzoe belongs to the book’s own account of itself.

Let him recount my deeds in Chapter One: The one reward Barzvi asks is that his own journey be written into the book’s first chapter, so that his labor will not be forgotten. The Arabic Kalila wa-Dimna does carry a chapter on the physician’s mission and his own life and doubts — so the poem is offering the tradition’s explanation of a real feature of a real book, and the modest request is why we know his name at all.

To Rudaghi, who shaped the prose he heard: Ferdowsi’s closing history of the book is accurate in outline: Pahlavi under Anooshirvan, Arabic in the Abbasid age, then a New Persian prose version made for the Samanid Nasr at his minister’s command, and from that a verse Kalila by Rudaghi, the first great poet of the new Persian, of which only scattered lines survive. He is telling the prehistory of his own enterprise — an old book put into Persian verse — and it is no accident that Mahmud’s name follows immediately.