The Origins of Chess

Thoughts on The Origin of Chess
by Joseph Needham, (Cambridge), 1962

The game of chess (as we know it) has been associated throughout its development with astronomical symbolism, and this was more overt in related games now long obsolete. The battle element of chess seems to have developed from a technique of divination in which it was desired to ascertain the balance of ever-contending Yin and Yang forces in the universe.

According to the Chinese literature this "image-chess" (hsiang chhi) was developed during the reign of the Emperor Wu of the Northern Chou dynasty (+561 to +578), and the date of the first treatise on the subject is definitely named as +569. The preface of this by Wang Pao still exists. It appears that the pieces on the board in this divination technique represented the sun, moon, planets, stars, constellations, etc. The suggestion is that this "game" passed to +7th-century India, where it generated the recreational game conceived in terms of battling human armies.

Now this "image-chess" derived in its turn from a number of divination techniques which involved the throwing of small models, symbolic of the celestial bodies, on to prepared boards. Thus there was a dice element as well as a move element, and there were many intermediate forms between pure throwing and placement followed by combat moves. All these go back to China of the Han and pre-Han times, i.e. to the -4th or -3th century, and similar techniques have persisted down to late times in other cultures.

On a parallel line of development numbered dice, anciently wide-spread, were on a related line of development which gave rise in +9th-century China to dominoes and playing-cards. The most significant of the ancient boards was the shih (used from the Warring States period onwards) - a double-decked cosmic diagram having a square earth-plate surmounted by a rotatable discoidal heaven-plate, both being marked with cyclical and astronomical signs (compass-points, lunar mansions etc.) as well as the symbols of the I Ching (Book of Changes) and other technical terms used only in divination. "Pieces" or symbolic models were employed with this in a variety of different ways, and in the round heaven-plate of the shih we can recognise the lineal ancestor of all compass-dials. The reason for this is because among the symbolic models used there was one representing the Great Bear (the Northern Dipper), so important in Chinese polar-equatorial astronomy - carved into the shape of a spoon. This replaced the picture of the Great Bear, or Northern Dipper, which previously had been carved on the heaven-plate of the diviner's board.

This model spoon was probably first of wood, stone or pottery, but in the +1st century (and possibly already in the -2nd century) the unique properties of lode-stone (magnetite) suggested in China the use of this substance. Since polarity would establish itself along the main axis of a bar of the mineral, whether or not it was removed from the rock in a north-south direction (i.e. in the earth magnetic field), the "south-pointing spoon" was discovered. During later centuries the frictional drag of the lode-stone spoon on its bronze base-plate was avoided by inserting the piece of lode-stone in a piece of wood with pointed ends which could be floated, or balanced upon an upward-projecting pin. Such methods were used as late as the +13th century. But some time between the +1st and +6th century it was found in China that the directive property of the lode-stone could be transfered to (included in) the small pieces of iron float upon water by suitable devices. The earliest description still extant of such water-compasses, from which all subsequent forms must derive, is the early +11th century. By the +7th or + 8th century the needle was replacing the lode-stone, advantage being taken of the property of induction; on account of the much greater precision with which readings could be taken.

By the late Thang period (+8th or +9th century) the declination as well as the polarity of the magnet had been discovered, antedating the European knowledge of the declination by some six centuries. The Chinese were theorising about the declination before Europe knew even of the polarity, an event which took place at the end of the +12th century. Thus it may be said that the ancestor of all dial-and pointer-readings, the greatest single factor in the voyages of discovery, and the oldest instrument of magnetic-electrical science may perhaps be said to have begun as a proto-"chess"-man used in a divination technique. Not without some surprise we are brought to the conclusion that the recreational game of chess, and the magnetic compass, with all that flowed from it, took their origin at a single point - namely, a group of divination techniques in ancient Chinese proto-science.

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Additional References:

See also Goddesschess' pdf downloads of related excepts of Needham's study

Science and Civilisation in China: Physics and Physical Technology, Part I: Physics, Cambridge University Press, 1962, ISBN 0521058023; Ch. 26 Physics, (8) The Magnet, Divination, and Chess, pp. 314-334.

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../chessays/needham2.pdf

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From Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 2: History of Scientific Thought (Cambridge University Press, 1956), pp. 280-81:

A number of modern students -- H. Wilhelm, Eberhard, Jablonski, and above all Granet - have named the kind of thinking with which we have here to do, "coordinative thinking" or "associative thinking." This intuitive-associative system has its own causality and its own logic. It is not either superstition or primitive superstition, but a characteristic thought-form of its own. H. Wilhelm contrasts it with the "subordinative" thinking characteristic of European science, which laid such emphasis on external causation. In coordinative thinking, conceptions are not subsumed under one another, but placed side by side in a pattern, and things influence one another not by acts of mechanical causation, but by a kind of "inductance". In the Section on Taoism (pp. 55, 71, 84) I spoke of the desire of the Taoist thinkers to understand the causes in

http://www2.kenyon.edu/Depts/Religion/Fac/Adler/Reln270/Needham.htm

Nature, but this cannot be interpreted in quite the same sense as would suit the thought of the naturalists of ancient Greece. The key-word in Chinese thought is Order and above all Pattern (and, if I may whisper it for the first time, Organism). The symbolic correlations or correspondences all formed part of one colossal pattern. Things behaved in particular ways not necessarily because of prior actions or impulsions of other things, but because their position in the ever-moving cyclical universe was such that they were endowed with intrinsic natures which made that behaviour inevitable for them. If they did not behave in those particular ways they would lose their relational positions in the whole (which made them what they were), and turn into something other than themselves. They were thus parts in existential dependence upon the whole world-organism. And they reacted upon one another not so much by mechanical impulsion or causation as by a kind of mysterious resonance. On "the problem of providing modern science with an ethic of contemporary validity:"

From Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 5, part 5 (Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 20:

" Knowledge should be developed within a context of universal cosmic meaning, not simply for the purpose of domination and power over Nature. Knowledge and power have been too much separated from meaning and morality. But now the idea of man as the perfect observer, and hence the all-powerful controller, has broken down, because observation is known to imply perturbation, necessary paradigms are liable to be fundamentally incompatible, and science without ethics will clearly lead to self-destructive situations.... How to combine wisdom with power is the great problem now before humanity. "

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Colin Ronan's five volume set of paperback editions is generally well-received abridgement of Needham's "Science and Civilisation in China" - available at the following site:

Synopsis http://www.atleest.com/en-us/dept_498.html
Joseph Needham's Science and Civilisation in China is a monumental piece of scholarship which breaks new ground in presenting to the Western reader a detailed and coherent account of the development of science, technology and medicine in China from the earliest times until the advent of the Jesuits and the beginnings of modern science in the late seventeenth century. It is a vast work, necessarily more suited to the scholar and research worker than the general reader. This paperback version, abridged and re-written by Colin Ronan, makes this extremely important study accessible to a wider public. The present book covers the material treated in volumes I and II of Dr Needham's original work. The reader is introduced to the country of China, its history, geography and language, and an account is given of how scientific knowledge travelled between China and Europe. The major part of the book is then devoted to the history of scientific thought in China itself. Beginning with ancient times, it describes the milieu in which arose the schools of the Confucians, Taoists, Mohists, Logicians and Legalists. We are thus brought on to the fundamental ideas which dominated scientific thinking in the Chinese Middle Ages, to the doctrines of the Two Forces (Yin and Yang) and the Five Elements (wu hsing), to the impact of the sceptical tradition and Buddhist and Neo-Confucian thought.