The anonymous or rather unknown author of the Asiatic Society’s M.S. often declares that the Hindus were far too stupid a people to have invented chess.

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SALVIO, DOCTOR OF CIVIL LAWS

The inventor as some authors declare, and among them Jacobus de Cessolus, a Friar and Master of the Dominican Order, is Xerxes, a philosopher and minister of Ammolius, King of Babylon whose object was to admonish his monarch of the errors that had been committed in the government of the realm.  This opinion is followed by many, of whom the author of the Historia del Mondo is one.  St. Gregory of Nazianzen in his third oration, Cassiodorus the Great in his thirty-first epistle and eighth book, Allesandri Allesandro in the third book and twenty first chapter of his Dies Geniales, Torquato Tasso in his Romeo del Gioco, Thomas Actius in his Tractatus de Ludo Scaccherum, and other legal authors who have treated of play, say that chess owes its origin to Palamedes who at the siege of Troy, employed it in order that his soldiers should not remain inactive, and not being able to practice actual warfare, they might amuse themselves with mimic conflicts.  For which reason Palamedes played it with Thersites, as Homer tells us in the second book of the Iliad, so also did the other heroes of the Grecian armies, as is related by Euripides in his tragedies.

Carrera 1617, published a large volume concerning the origin of chess, in which he attempts to prove from Herodotus, Euripides, Sophocles, Philostratus, Homer, Virgil, Aristotle, Seneca, Plato, Ovid, Horace, Quintilian, and Martial Vida, that Palamedes invented chess at the siege of Troy.

The Encyclopaedia or Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, dedicated to the King in 1727, contains an account of chess, but it is neither a well informed nor useful article beyond the statement that Schach is originally Persian, and that Schachmat in that language, signifies the king is dead, it vouchsafes neither reasonable nor useful information.

The traditionary names mentioned in the article are Schatrinscha a Persian philosopher, Palamedes, Diogenes and Pyrrhus, its authorities, Nicod, Bochart, Scriverius, Fabricius, and Donates, and it concludes with a sample of the stereotyped character, with which we are so familiar of the trace of chess origin, being lost in the remote ages of antiquity.  Chess is thus described in it: 

“An ingenious game, played or performed with little round pieces of wood, on a board divided into 64 squares, where art and address are so indispensably requisite, that chance seems to have no place, and a person never loses but by his own fault.  On each side are eight noblemen and as many pawns, which are to be moved and shifted, according to certain rules and laws of the game.”

The same work specifies the various ancient opinions upon the origin of the game, inclining to those of Nicod and Bochart, supported by Scriverius, who state that Schach is originally Persian, and Schachmat in that language signifies the king dead.