Chessquest

The Butrint Icon in Vivisection - Part I
The Butrint Icon - 465 A.D
by Don McLean

 

"It seems to me what is called for is an exquisite balance between two conflicting needs: the most skeptical scrutiny of all hypotheses that are served up to us and at the same time a great openness to new ideas. If you are only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you. On the other hand, if you are open to the point of gullibility and have not an ounce of skeptical sense in you, then you cannot distinguish the useful ideas from the worthless ones." (Carl Sagan)

 

"Angels and ministers of grace, defend us!
Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damned,
Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell,
Be thy intents wicked or charitable,
Thou comest in such a questionable shape
That I will speak to thee: I 'll call thee Butrint,
King, father, royal Dane: O, answer me!
Let me not burst in ignorance, but tell
Why thy canonized bones, hearsed in death,
Have burst their cerements; why the sepulchre,
Wherein we saw thee quietly inurn'd,
Hath oped his ponderous and marble jaws
To cast thee up again. What may this mean,
That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel
Revisit'st thus the glimpses of the moon,
Making night hideous, and we fools of nature
So horridly to shake our disposition
With thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls?" (Hamlet, 1. 4)

 

INTRODUCTION

"A truant disposition, good my lord." (Hamlet, 1. 2)

Posing a direct contradiction to baseline chronologies associated with the evolution of chess and other icon-oriented board games, many uncertainties shroud the identity of the unique artifact retrieved from Butrint, Albania. Like the sacred relic described in Salmon Rushdie's "The Prophet's Hair", Butrint passes from hand to hand, eliciting different perspectives and opinions. A curiosity among curiosities, Butrint's powers of suggestion are, nonetheless, formidable.

Although we may never succeed in tracing Butrint's origins to the door of any particular game or guild, his appearance in today's world opens many speculative "gates". As a core sample of 5th Century, Byzantine civilization, he survives regardless of whatever strengths or weaknesses we may project upon him. Too portly not to be concealing a secret of some kind, it seems wise to approach him with forensic caution.

He could be Sleeping Beauty, or Dr. Frankenstein's creature. He may be neither. He may be both at once. In any case, while Butrint lies folded in the cloth of 21st Century scholarship, the difficulties he poses to appraisers have already produced tell tale signs of frustration. Butrint is a "difficult" child - a "bete noire" and a "tarbaby" all rolled into a single compact package. As a result, he (or she) remains less than upraised, or even much praised. A potential "king couchant", while some attempt to put words in his mouth, others insist he has no vital truths to speak.

So, within this cauldron of opinion, controversy bubbles, boils and cannibalizes its subject, producing a broth of tantalizing hypotheses, some of which simmer over Butrint's relevance to board game evolution. These inquiries, including debates regarding the artifact's true iconic status, have generally resulted in series of collapsed soufflés. With the scent of old poison hovering about Byzantium's royal kitchens, skeptics cannot rule out the possibility of foul play. If there happens to be something rotten in the modern state of postscript analysis, it may well be that Byzantium's fermenting political and religious climate helped create resilient strains of bacterial misconception. Carrying over from traditions cultivated during earlier times, these often manifest on today's printed page as a form of iatrogenic disorder. As was the case during Butrint's time, while searching for the "hair of the dog" that has apparently bitten so many good doctors, the most popular place to search for exotic cures, clever canines and healing icons was Alexandria, Egypt.

 

None too solid flesh

Lacking meat and marrow of a firm comparative basis, Butrint could be anything or "nothing" at all. Miniature king, facile impostor, or even a finial from an old four-poster, his enigma plays upon themes of stumbling block and African friction pawn. Although attempts to engage him furnish mixed results, in the final analysis, only Butrint knows his yesterdays.

His tomorrows? The prospect that Butrint's heirloom appearances played a hand in the iconographies of future kings is both palpable and plausible. Within this context, as icon, gamesman, or complete castoff, Butrint's discursive grounds range beyond the specific concerns of board game theorists. Even as many hands from as many different academic disciplines attempt to grasp his mystery, narrow strategies aimed at luring Butrint into a tight corner and a scarlet conclusion fail to satisfy public appetite for details. If Butrint's unsolved mystery suggests that the reach of various experts continues to exceed their grasp, it may well be due to the reluctance of highly regarded professionals to thrust a hand into boiling waters in order to retrieve their prize.

 

Awaiting Fortinbras

"Find out the cause of this effect,
Or rather say, the cause of this defect,
For this effect defective comes by cause." (Hamlet, 2. 2)

Like the king's ghost in Shakespeare's Hamlet, once encountered, it becomes impossible to overlook Butrint's incendiary nature. As much the cause as he is the effect of transoceanic debates swelling about him, Butrint stands poised against the bulkhead of historical opinion threatening to puncture a tiny hole that may yet prove large enough to send conventional wisdom bottomward. Presently serving as a rope for purely academic tugs of war, the will to accommodate Butrint's entry into the passenger list of legitimate board game artifacts underwrites a call to review and correct a significant portion of the current bibliographical and chronological record.

Among influential camps of board games scholars, this request is currently considered nonnegotiable. Nor is their retreat from Butrint's shadow necessary as long as specific sets of issues retain priority. In fact, given Butrint's majestic isolation from any supportive evidence, the entire issue of an affinity for chess is easily cut adrift.

Do we leave him to flounder in the doldrums of conservative caution or do we rescue him from his island and push on?

And indeed, the hard facts of Butrint's solitaire reccommend we have few ways of knowing his precise context unless an identical twin, or fair likeness, should happen to appear over a providential horizon. Although no ivory Fortinbras has arrived to rescue Butrint from exile, there is unstated evidence and a case to be made that broaden and brighten his future.

 

Butrint in Limbo

"Thrift, thrift, Horatio! the funeral baked meats
Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables." (Hamlet, 1. 2)

Suspended judgement over an object that exists in a state of suspended animation remains close to the heart of Butrint's puzzle. More troublesome still - despite how Butrint's standing posture announces him as the sacred reflection of any possible number and kind of religious relic, the idea of cross identification of his iconic profile with other coherent sets of iconic protocols appears not to have troubled the minds of most debators.

With the topic bredth set to "narrow", information detailing possible location, castes of actual designers, craftspersons and historical background responsible for this or any other "Butrint" have cast him as the "Thin Man".

In response to Butrint's "bad background" , I think it is fair to assume that his identification is made all the more onerous due to the historical implications that arise with a concurrent examination of an intensely politicized and propagandized Western moment in the "history of history". Turned from a lathe of Imperial Rome, Butrint exposes Roman propaganda and an Egyptian heart. With great comedy and tragedy in the making, "the great problems of identification" appear to have been self-inflicted.

A bona fide resident of academic limbo, disassociation, anachronism and anonymity may baste Butrint in dysfunction and yet, because he bears some distinguishing marks of kingship upon his person, it may be ill advised to consider his royal goose "well done". As Aristotle might add, the man without a polis is easily sacked and yet, there are times when we must ask ourselves how and why moments arise when the deed can be accomplished with such extravagant ease. To ask what little he can from the situation, Butrint requests that we weigh our judgement of him with deeper penetration and wider perspective.

Sampling the tendencies of Byzantine iconographers to add old spice to new dishes invokes a serious caution with this meal and modern connoisseurs should be particularly careful at whose banquet and upon what bones they choose to dine. Tables, rotisseries and bow lathes may turn quickly or slowly, but can we doubt that those who grill Butrint on Friday might not find themselves trading places with him on Sunday?

 

Alphonso X - Book of Games Bow Lathe c 1280 AD Spain	Tomb of Petosiris - wall relief Egyptian Bow Lathe c. 300 BC
http://www.historicgames.com/lathes/ancientlathes.html http://www.stuartking.co.uk/articles/lathe.htm

 

TO BE CONTINUED...