Chess Quest : The Butrint Icon in Vivisection Part 2

"And art made tongue-tied by authority..."

This is the story of the royal egg who knew too much. There is no other way to explain why public discussion made such a quick corpse of our dear Mr. Memory. Nonetheless, Butrint's legend is archetypal and therefore impossible to suppress. Knowing this, we need not accept any prior opinions or decisions made about him on faith alone. Inasmuch as incurious, often "imaginative" efforts to define him avoid the proper contextual ingredients required to reach accessible goals, prior observations and the manner in which these testimonies conflict with hard facts demonstrate that good faith has been repeatedly broken and much of the previous discussion about Butrint cannot be trusted to deliver what archaeologists suspected all along.

As those who have followed the Butrint controversy with interest may be aware, the public has been privy to everyone's side of the case except Butrint's. Had a complete analysis of this icon's traditional form and mnemonic content been properly investigated and published from the outset, it would have revealed an astoundingly complex pedigree extending well beyond the limits of what many orthodox chess historians admit within the prescribed bounds of some histories. Many - but not all...

Critical remarks attesting to historical anachronisms embedded in the heraldry and romantic imagery of chess and chessmen are not uncommon among scholars seeking to put a hermeneutic fine point on the game’s symbolic attributes - its meanings and origins. Examinations of this type have led to a variety of observations that serve to demystify underlying enigmas found in the reliquary of early Persian, Indian and Chinese gaming prototypes leading up to and including chess. A number of excellent inquiries, including those set forth by Joseph Needham, Pavle Bidev, Ferlito and Sanvito, David Li, Gerhard Josten, Victor Keats and the late Ricardo Calvo, whom this site honours, expose problematic factors that repeatedly call for more open handed appraisals and opinions. For this and various other reasons, modern critique rightfully views older paradigmatic standards such as H.J.R. Murray’s A History of Chess with a skeptic's eye.

"And strength by limping sway disabled":
As previously mentioned in Part I of this essay, Butrint has been judged according to Murray's chronological standard and while the outcome may be meaningful to historical chess, its limitations result in the replication of oversights Murray's canon fails to adequately address. Although Murray remains vital to the catalogue and production of a lingua franca for discussing and evaluating historical chess and other board games, his views are often accused of bias and omission. In Butrint's case, Murray's all too brief explanation of the Egyptian term, "nfr" appears to have proven ill-starred for the man we may casually refer to as "Mr. Memory", or less casually as "Nfr-Butrint" - i.e. "Good King Butrint".

Although recourse to Murray may have brought the chess papparazi's axe down on Butrint' head, the passage of one Internet show trial does not signal an end to inquiry. As this particular case emphasizes, while it is the domain of board games scholars to pass final judgment over contentious artifacts on the basis of how well or poorly they participate within the accepted theoretical context of a 6th-7th Century Indian chess, they are not the experts we look to for evaluating icons in general. Butrint's eloquent response to an arbitrarily "caged" or "bracketed" appraisal makes this point patently clear and with that response he escapes momentary exile into iconic limbo.

The many legitimate iconic constructs we can apply with impunity to Butrint's form and content circumvent a litany of delinquencies and prior oversights. In addition, Butrint plays to important historical objections pertaining to evidence that other board games preceding chess incorporated a king's icon. These studies remain available to those who care to investigate beyond the limits of H.J.R Murray's historical paradigm. However, because Butrint's iconic legitimacy has been questioned and even denied by some journalists, refutation of this fallacy sets one of the primary objectives of the following analysis, which, it must be emphasized, represents only the summary of a much larger unpublished study spanning several years and a few hundred pages.

Let us begin by simply stating that the idealized kings we find in heraldry, icon and chess are never anything less than perfected archetypes and that Butrint's sterotype reassembles a perfect copy according to how the traditional canon presented itself to Egyptianized partners of a Byzantine confederacy. Conforming to expectations regarding selective reconstruction of patterns suitable to the most sacred iconographies of pharoahs in particular and future Western monarchs in general, contrary views pale at the sight of what can be proven obvious, self evident and self stated. These statements can be accessed and found in accord with authoritative catalogues and lexicons required to translate Butrint's influential Sumero-Egyptian terminologies into modern syntax.

"And right perfection wrongfully disgrac'd":
As already suggested, precursors of chess such as 5th Century CE hnefatafl and an as yet unproven form of Greek penta gramma or Egyptian pent alpha board game(s) offer various reassurances that the figure of the king had already been established as a viable gaming commodity prior to its inclusion in chess and chaturanja. As we find it incised into the Kurna masonry of 1400 BCE, the pent alpha star is particularly auspicious since it recapitulates the five pointed seba star, emblematic of enlightened royal disposition. In coinage, the seba emblem becomes a symbol of authority later adapted to suit the diadems of Byzantine era monarchs, thereby testifying to its currency during the estimated period of Butrint's construction and beyond.

In Egyptian custom, use of the seba emblem is extremely prolific. Overall, the vast historical continuity linking arcane Egyptian and Byzantine emblems of this exact type can be easily explained through Ptolemaic and Coptic mediation between antique Egyptian and subsequent archaic Greek, Graeco-Roman and Byzantine terminologies and modes of symbolic expression. As appears constant in parallel statements of this kind, the esoteric basis of Egypt's ephemeral seba legend is, as always, respectfully implied but never directly stated. Its full meaning dwells amid the hidden center formed by the "crosshaired" junction of Butrint's cruciform "crown" and more clearly stipulated in Butrint's five footed base. This aspect of coronal "hiddenness" suggests a typically remote, abstract and virtual reward requiring deductive and inductive efforts in order that it may be gathered up and reframed in perfect context. As a result, the gathering up of the king's iconic subsections relates extremely well to game board activities in general and Egyptian senet in particular.

Despite that it is obliquely understated at the crown, the seba emblem offers a "head to toe" statement about Butrint's divine legitimacy. Even as it gives deeper shape and substance to ritualized "hermetic" processes of coronation, acts intended to solidify the cooperative bond between divine authorization and a given king's political incorporation part the curtain separating ritual rites of passage from the gestalt of various board game processes and embedded reward structures. While the advancement of tutelary messages and royal propaganda is clearly, if variously stated in a number of games, in Egyptian terms, the seba emblem offers a self contained mnemonic system used to express unification of the five symbolic aspects of fully "illuminated" or enlightened individuals. This symbolic schema relates to issues that emerge in Pavle Bidev's analysis of the Platonic or "elemental" style of corporate kingship apparent in Indian chess and also insinuates itself into Ulrich Schadler's inquiry into the "five birds" or "five dogs" of an ostensible dice chess precusor to Indian chess.

As further detailed in Leslie Kurke's "Coins, Bodies, Games and Gold", archaic Greek games of a similar dice and board type defer to a fivefold definition of merit ("the language of metals") inhibiting commentaries related to metaphorical Greek standards of excellence. Conspicuously however, the probability that both archaic and classical Greek as well as subsequent Roman/Byzantine restatements regarding the nature of perfected excellence revert to a formative Egyptian standard can be confirmed though evidence wending from Sumero- Egyptian sources onward. These converge upon the historical development of Greek Hygeia, Roman Salus and the subsequent Byzantine "globus cruciger" or "orbis terrarum", which is, no less, the iconic essence of Butrint's post Christian recapitulation of the Egyptian "nfr".

Be this as it may, the five feet that compose Butrint's lower section confirm that he is well versed in the appropriate symbolic conventions, including ritualized tutelary processes designed to engage the various evolutionary stages of a king's formal completion. As such, we come to understand that seba and pent alpha signify a specific form of consecration - a title earned through actual trials rather than successional ascription. Whether an aristocratic restatement of the five essences, five names, five elements, five rivers, or the five-fold "language of metals", Butrint's feet proclaim that he has successfully engaged the complex formative path that makes him every inch a king and in all likelihood, a "king of kings".

"And simple truth miscalled simplicity":
As with most gold-star standards, an aristocratically defined form of merit or earned excellence is fully implied, whereas seba's linkage to the Sothic crown and Sirius (Sopdet) implies more than is immedately evident since her presence also illuminates the figures of Osiris (Orion), Nut and Isis. By calling attention the seasonal cast of her coregnal arrangement with Osiris-Orion as well as the Sothic cycle incorporating the daily appearances of Venus (Isis), Sothis carries with her substantial connotations regarding seba's constancy, cyclical renewal and/or a reliable "gold standard". While the pith of Sothic/Isian worship and wisdom closely approximates a similarly arcane Sumero-Babylonian approach to Inanna's stellar imagery and transfers effectively onto the symbolic forms of Roman and Greek goddesses, this star wanders into other interpretive spheres, including the northern circumpolar "imperishables" (Ikhemu-sek) rearing out of Hathoric primordialism and most likely well Egyptian pre-dynastic times. Thus, in terms of stellar imagery, it would generally appear that a common focal point unfolded into a plethora of metaphorical approaches applied with consequence to subsequent Magiian, Pythagorean, Mithraic and New Testament usage of perfectionistic "bright morning star" imagery, to name only those more relevant to Butrint's day and age.

In keeping with interrelated perspectives, lunar, solar, stellar and planetary metaphors repeatedly cluster around similarly invested votive objects and select board games, with either form of "sacred media" primed to pay sterotypical homage to self-preoccupying spiritual/metaphysical goals of transformation, soul quest and self-illumination. Presumably based upon active interchange between earthly and cosmic cycles, mathematical ratios and proportions, the plum line of board game history repeatedly settles upon the sophisticated symbolic language of mystics, luminaries, proto-scientists, mathematicians, cosmographers, diviners and tribal shamans. Through the independant work of various scholars, it is now patently obvious that their public and more cloistered transmissions are fingerprinted into a larger assembly of "sacred games" than generally assumed or openly admitted and that certain esoteric, cross pollinating anchor points persist despite exoteric classification of games into "hunt", "race", "count", "capture" etc. Butrint serves as a prime example of this well cultivated trend whle drawing attention to the shortcomings of a commonly cited system of board game classification.

Syncretizations poring in and out of "stellar" anchorages tend to inhale and exhale the same "air" and other elements. The practical outcome has bred cultic inflation, amplification and resonant overlaps across interactive geo-political and linguistic zones. Invariably, the stellar archetype addresses auspicious importance and necessity that can be harnessed in a variety of ways. Some parallelisms are particularly striking and in many board game instances, including the earliest known form of senet (3200 BCE) and the so-called "Royal Game of Ur", (2600 BCE) stellar objectives transliterate into rosette patterns, a subject that proposes an historical fugue we dare not enter at this point due to its prohibitive length, but which actually represents the formal starting point for any discussion dealing with the appearance of celestial markers and their embedding in early board games.

(Suffice it to say that Hathoric conflation of agricultural and astrological cycles produced at least one important Egyptian hybrid, the godlet "Nefertem" - a rogueish figure whose nose for perfume leads alternately to paradisic as well as chaotic places. Nonetheless, because Nefertem bridges associative gaps between "nfr" (Butrint's archetype) the seba star, rosettes, the blue lotus, agricultuarlism, perfumes, proximity to throne and various interrelated factors, he requires early mention at this stage of our Egyptian rebus.)

Given its Sothic and Isian context, the mysterious Egyptian pent alpha game apparently focused upon how an unusually ephemeral star assembled itself in the midst of ritual quest and spiritual conquest. Again, Egyptian systemization allows us to trace this star directly to the transmissive heights of a religious subjectivism characterized by mediated ritualization of cosmogonic rebirth and the many sacredotal sub-cycles appending to it. The fact that such an engrossing, self-involving event composed a stellar reward in itself draws attention to the way in which theatrically fulsome rites of passage appear compressed into Egyptian gaming signposts and symbols. Further indication of sacredotal connotations echo in Greco-Roman gaming strategies involving dice and terms such as "Double Venus", a concept describing the perfect roll of two cubic dice or "astragaloi".

Less generally, among various archetypal symbols of perfection available to protochess, there exist many more loosely held "quintessences" that could be added to this list. More distinctively however, the compelling idea of perfection and perfectibility runs parallel to reward structures appearing in several games, including Egyptian senet, a demonstrably "sacred race game" with a complex votive pedigree spanning literally thousands of years.

Senet and the religious texts used to describe it pose additional calendrical, astronomic, astrological and divination analogies for the Sothic "zenith" further ascribed to Isis, Nut and the seba star. Thus, if we care to extrapolate from Alexander Piankoff's research into the meaning of senet, the composite reward structure that develops through the serial promotion of either five or seven senet pawns forms the hidden grail of sublime "completion" implied in promotional activities of various types, both sacred and secular, real and imaginary. Senet pawns form the evidentiary, experiential processes traditionally applied to the gathering up interrelated fragments of pharaoh's Osirian archetype and the cyclical reconstitution required reproduce the whole, holistic, or fully integrated aspect of kings in general. Thus, through the incorporation of Egyptian texts outlining the sacred basis of pawn promotion, the result offered in senet's promotional venue reflects a similarly composite "process view" of victorious self mastery as well as its dependence upon individual integration of tributary aspects traditionally used to define various Egyptian and non-Egyptian models of divine intelligence, kingship and aristocratic nobility.

"And gilded honour shamefully misplac'd":
Even as further examination of Butrint's ringed midsection proclaims a specifically Sumero-Egyptian typology, (see: Sir Allan Gardiner's Egyptian Grammar - specifically, the "placenta" hieroglyph "Section Aa Unclassified - Aa1" and its identical Sumerian translation) it is no accident that Butrint's composite structure defers to Egyptian convention and similar constructs appearing in ancient Sumero-Egyptian religious epigraphy, pictography and texts. Offering no contradiction whatsoever, accompanying commentaries by reputable scholars delving into the semiotics of Egyptian senet provide a fortuitous example of how the profile of a symbolically divine king emerges according to senet's reward structure. Thus, the receptacle image of Egyptian kingship, "nfr", its direct association with the "sema" hieroglyph and the "sema tawy" throne, as well as the appearance of "nfr" incised into the 26th square of senet boards and applied in conjunction with the "lucky days" of the Cairo Calendar stand in firm defense of Butrint's legitimate ancestry. Additionally volumionus amounts of supportive data also exist which draw senet closer to chess on various fronts. However, with the minimal amount of evidence stated in this summary, the case for Butrint’s iconic, royal and board game attributes becomes open and shut, despite that we are left to speculate upon what type of game, if any, and through which manufacturing auspices he emerged during the 5th Century CE.

Putting aside the possibility that he is even older than estimated, clearly, from whatever available avenue of interpretive approach, Butrint remains a plausible Byzantine era restatement of the Egyptian "nfr" (meaning: "good" or "beautiful") and its sema counterpart. In due course, for the benefit of those who remain skeptical, we shall come to the crossroads of judgment that allows for additional reflection upon the meaning of our Good King "Nfr-Butrint" while also bringing into critical focus the gross inadequacy of H.J. R. Murray's truncated interpretation of what "nfr" meant to senet (see: A History of Board Games other than Chess) and what it currently means to the kings of Western chess.

Circumscribing this approach like a shen ring, the perplexing outcome of a long-range historical contract that still exists between Egyptian power objects and the regalia of Western kingship emerges from behind the vizier's "curtain of appearances". As a direct consequence and with considerable evidence already well in hand, we no longer have reason to doubt that primordial Sumero-Egyptian standards conscripted into senet and the "Royal Game of Ur" recall the pivotal die from which composite profiles of Western kings and their accompanying symbols of divine ordination were decisively, intentionally and attractively recast from ancient essences and the idea of perfection implict in all of them. Moreover, we can also say with complete confidence that the proven tendency of Christianity and Christianized cultures to reintegrate pagan standards within the lexicon of royal and religious heraldry flock to Butrint's defence like bees to a hive. Combined, these manifestations of royal power serve to unmask and disarm whatever questionable motivations may have been skulking behind today's journalistic columns - the long knives responsible for Butrint's unwarranted post-modern exile and attempted character assassination.

"Tir'd with all these, from these would I be gone,
Save that, to die, I leave my love alone."

a bientot
Donald A. McLean