Rook (chess) - History

History

In the medieval shatranj, the rook symbolized a chariot. The Persian word rukh means chariot (Davidson 1949:10), and the corresponding pieces in Oriental chess games such as xiangqi and shogi have names also meaning chariot (車).

Persian war chariots were heavily armoured, carrying a driver and at least one ranged-weapon bearer, such as an archer. The sides of the chariot were built to resemble fortified stone work, giving the impression of small, mobile buildings, causing terror on the battlefield. However, in the West the rook is almost universally represented as a crenellated turret. (One possible explanation is that when the game was imported to Italy, the Persian rukh became the Italian word rocca, meaning fortress. Another possible explanation is that rooks represent siege towers – the piece is called torre, meaning tower, in Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish; tour in French; toren in Dutch; Turm in German; and Torn in Swedish. An alternative name in Russian: Тура (pronounced as Toura). Finally, the chariot was sometimes represented as a silhouette, a square with two points above representing the horse's heads, which may have been seen to resemble a building with arrowports to the medieval imagination.) An exception is seen in the British Museum's collection of the medieval Lewis chess pieces in which the rooks appear as stern warders or wild-eyed Berzerker warriors. Rooks usually are similar in appearance to small castles, and as a result a rook is sometimes called a "castle" (Hooper & Whyld 1992). This usage was common in the past ("The Rook, or Castle, is next in power to the Queen" – Howard Staunton, 1847) but today it is rarely if ever used in chess literature or among players, except in the expression "castling."

The Russian name for the rook (ladya) means a sailing boat or longship of Northern cultures such as the Vikings.