Chess in Early Literature

Chess In Early Literature

One of the most common ways for chess historians to trace when the board game chess entered a country is to look at the literature of that country. Although due to the names associated with chess sometimes being used for more than one game (for instance Xiang-qi in China and Tables in England), the only certain reference to chess is often several hundred years later than uncertain earlier references. The following list contains the earliest references to chess or chess-like games.

Read more about Chess In Early Literature:  Byzantium, China, England, France, Germany, India, Italy, Persia, Russia, Spain, Sumatra, Switzerland

Famous quotes containing the words chess, early and/or literature:

    Of all my Russian books, The Defense contains and diffuses the greatest “warmth”Mwhich may seem odd seeing how supremely abstract chess is supposed to be.
    Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)

    We have good reason to believe that memories of early childhood do not persist in consciousness because of the absence or fragmentary character of language covering this period. Words serve as fixatives for mental images. . . . Even at the end of the second year of life when word tags exist for a number of objects in the child’s life, these words are discrete and do not yet bind together the parts of an experience or organize them in a way that can produce a coherent memory.
    Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)

    Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.
    Gore Vidal (b. 1925)