Every modern chess player is, without knowing it, playing a descendant. Before the fast queen and the long-striding bishop, there was shatranj — the game as it was played across Persia and the medieval Islamic world for the better part of a thousand years. Same 8×8 board, a familiar-looking army, but a slower, quieter, more patient game. If you have ever wanted to sit down at the board the way a player in ninth-century Baghdad would have, this is that board.
Where shatranj comes from
The trail begins in India with a game called chaturanga, a Sanskrit word meaning "four limbs" or "four divisions" — a reference to the parts of an army: infantry, cavalry, elephants, and chariots. Most scholars place chaturanga in northern India by roughly the 6th century CE, though its earliest exact form and rules are less certain than what came later. It was a war game in miniature, and its four divisions are the ancestors of the pawns, knights, bishops, and rooks still on the board today.
From India the game passed into Sasanian Persia, where it became chatrang. Persian tradition is fond of this arrival: a cluster of Middle Persian texts — including the Wizārišn ī chatrang ("Explanation of Chess") — tell of an Indian envoy bringing the game to the court of a Sasanian king as a kind of riddle to be solved. These are literary sources rather than a modern history book, so treat the storybook details with a grain of salt, but they do place the game firmly in Persia by around the 6th century.
When the Islamic conquests absorbed Persia in the 7th century, chatrang became the Arabic shatranj — Arabic has no hard "ch" sound. Under the Abbasids the game flourished, and it is here that shatranj becomes unusually well documented: unlike many ancient games whose rules we have to reconstruct from fragments, shatranj survives in detailed Arabic treatises written by the players themselves. From the Islamic world it traveled into Europe through Muslim Spain and Sicily by about the 10th century, where, several centuries later, European players sped up the counselor and the elephant into the queen and bishop we know — and modern chess was born.
The board and the pieces
Shatranj is played on the same 64-square board as chess (period boards were often uncheckered, but the geometry is identical), with sixteen pieces a side arranged almost exactly as in modern chess. What changes — and what makes the game feel different — is how several of those pieces move.
- Shah (King) — moves one square in any direction, exactly like the modern king. There is no castling.
- Firzan / Fers (Counselor) — stands where the queen stands, but moves only one square diagonally. This is the single biggest difference in feel: the most powerful piece on the modern board was, in shatranj, one of the weakest.
- Fil / Alfil (Elephant) — stands where the bishop stands, but leaps exactly two squares diagonally, jumping over whatever sits between. Because it always lands on the same color and skips squares, each elephant can only ever reach eight squares of the whole board.
- Faras (Horse) — the knight, and the one piece that moves identically to modern chess: the familiar L-shape, leaping over other pieces. Because so much else around it is slow, the horse is proportionally more dangerous in shatranj than it is today.
- Rukh (Chariot) — the rook, moving any number of squares in a straight line, horizontally or vertically, exactly as now. Along with the horse, it was the powerhouse of the shatranj army.
- Baidaq (Pawn / foot-soldier) — moves one square straight forward and captures one square diagonally, just like a modern pawn, with two exceptions: there is no two-square first move, and therefore no en passant. On reaching the far rank it promotes — but only ever to a firzan, never to a rook, horse, or elephant.
So the fast, sweeping pieces — rook and knight — are already fully modern, while the diagonal pieces — counselor and elephant — are dramatically weaker. That single fact reshapes the whole game.
How to win
Checkmate is the main goal, exactly as in chess: trap the enemy shah so it cannot escape capture. The Persians are credited with formalizing the announcement of "check" (shah!) so a king was never lost by accident. But shatranj recognized two additional ways to win that modern chess does not:
- Baring the king — if you captured every one of your opponent's pieces and left the lone shah standing, you won. (Regional rulebooks differed on the fine print — some allowed the bared player to draw if they could bare their opponent's king on the very next move.)
- Stalemate as a win — delivering stalemate, leaving the enemy shah with no legal move but not actually in check, generally counted as a win for the player who caused it, not the draw it is today. This convention varied by region and era, so if you're playing a friendly game, agree on it beforehand.
These endings, combined with the weak diagonal pieces, made material grinding and precise endgame technique enormously important — which is exactly what the great players wrote about.
The masters, and how they played
Shatranj produced the first real chess literature. Because the weak firzan and fil made fast attacks nearly impossible, players didn't fight over the opening move-by-move the way they do today. Instead they raced to set up a favorable standard formation — a tabiya (plural tabiyat, "battle arrays") — before the armies clashed. Openings were slow and often developed independently on each wing.
The Abbasid court ranked its masters into classes of strength, and the top players are known by name: al-Adli, who wrote one of the earliest known chess books in the 9th century; ar-Razi, said to have defeated al-Adli around 847; and above all as-Suli and his pupil al-Lajlaj ("the stammerer"), whose analyses were so admired that for centuries "playing like as-Suli" was Arabic shorthand for playing brilliantly. They composed mansubat — chess problems, often demanding a forced mate — the most famous being the Dilaram problem, in which a player sacrifices two rooks to turn a losing position into checkmate. If you enjoy modern puzzle-style chess, you are enjoying something these players invented.
A quick way to try it
You don't need a special set. Take an ordinary chessboard and pieces, set them up as normal, and change just three things: the queen moves only one square diagonally, each bishop jumps exactly two squares diagonally (over anything in between), and pawns move only one square even from their starting row (promoting only to the weak queen). Everything else — king, rook, knight, checkmate — stays the same. Play a few games and you'll feel how patient and maneuvering the older game is. It is a wonderful window into how the people who came before us thought about the same sixty-four squares.
At Ancient.Games we build handcrafted boards for the games history nearly forgot — pull up a chair, set out the pieces, and play the way they did.
Image: "Buzurgmihr Masters the Game of Chess," folio from a Shahnama (Book of Kings), 14th century, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (open access, public domain).