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Bird, H. E. (Henry Edward), 1830-1908

"Chess History and Reminiscences"

1 following page 423, is exactly in accordance
with the game as explained to us by Sir William Jones and
Professor Duncan Forbes, though Linde seems to call it by the
name of Indischer Wurfelvierschach or Indische Kriegsspiel, and
there is not a single diagram of what the German writer
conceives it to be other than the real Tschaturanga (Chaturanga).
NOTE. From such an assumptive writer, one would like to ask
whether he had looked through the pages of Livy Polybius and
Tacitus, or explored the treasures in the Fihrist, or the
Eastern Works referred to by Lambe, Bland, and Forbes, as well
as Dr. Hyde and Sir William Jones.
Forbes in the body of his work roughly estimates the Chaturanga
at 3000 B.C., but at page xiii of appendix, he says: "The first
period (of chess) is altogether of fabulous antiquity, that is,
of three to five thousand years old," in fact, he seems to have
been rather loose in his estimation, and not to have
sufficiently distinguished between the supposed antiquity of the
four sacred Vedas, the Epic poems, the Ramayana and the
Mahabarata, and the Puranas. Professor Weber and Dr. Van der
Linde assume a much more recent date for the Bhavishya Purana,
from which the account of the Chaturanga is mainly taken, than
that assigned to it by Sir William Jones and Professor Duncan
Forbes.


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