Hyde, and all the traditionists
down to the days of Sir William Jones would seem to have been
unacquainted with it. In respect to Asia, so far as can be judged
or gathered, the details and essence of the Sanskrit translations
mentioned in the biography of the famous and magnificent Al
Mamun of Bagdad 813 to 833 or those for the enlightened Akbar
1556 to 1605 are unknown to European scholars; there are no
references to any translation of them, or to the nature of those
alluded to in the Fihrist of Abu L. Faraj.
Eminent contributors to the Archaeologia, F. Douce, 1793, and
Sir F. Madden, 1828, adopt the conclusions of Dr. Hyde and Sir
William Jones and they receive confirmation from native works of
this century, and incidentally from Sanskrit scholars who wrote
not as chess players.
Duncan Forbes, L.L.D., Professor of Oriental languages in
King's College, London, is the next great authority upon the
Chaturanga; in a work of 400 pages published in 1860 dedicated
to Sir Frederic Madden and Howard Staunton, Esq., he further
elaborated the investigations of Dr. Hyde and Sir William Jones
and claimed by a better acquaintance with chess and choice of
manuscripts and improved knowledge of the Sanskrit language to
have proved that the game of chess was invented in India and no
where else, in very remote times or, as he finally puts it at page
43: "But to conclude I think from all the evidence I have laid
before the reader, I may safely say, that the game of chess has
existed in India from the time of Pandu and his five sons down
to the reign of our gracious Sovereign Queen Victoria (who now
rules over these same Eastern realms), that is for a period of
five thousand years and that this very ancient game, in the
sacred language of the Brahmans, has, during that long space
of time retained its original and expressive name of Chaturanga.
Pages:
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95