The article is initialed W. P.
William Plate, L.L.D., M.R., Geographical Society of Paris. This
gentleman may have been unacquainted with chess, and so may Don
Pascual de Gayangos and Dr. Sprenger, the other writers in the
Biography, but it happens that many of the articles in the same
volume are by Duncan Forbes, who in other works so prominently
makes due mention of Anna Comnena and her references to chess, and
the fact that her father Alexius was in the habit of playing
the game.
We are told by Hyde that the Princess Anna Comnena relates, in
the Alexius a work written by her in the beginning of the 12th
century, "that the Emperor (Alexius), her father, in order to
dispel the cares arising from affairs of state, occasionally
played chess at night with some of his relations or kinsfolk.
She then says that this game had been originally brought into use
among the Byzantines from the Assyrians." The fair historian says
nothing as to the time when the game came from Assyria, which may
have been five centuries before she wrote, her statement, however,
proves that it came from Persia, and not from Arabia, for Assyria
formed an important portion of the Persian Empire under the
Sassassian dynasty, and in fact was for some centuries a kind of
debatable land, and alternately occupied by the Persians and Romans,
according as victory swayed to one side or the other.
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