The history of chess

Chess most likely originated in India around the sixth century CE as a game called chaturanga. The name refers to the four divisions of an ancient Indian army: infantry, cavalry, elephants and chariots, which became the ancestors of the pawn, knight, bishop and rook.

Chaturanga was played on an eight-by-eight board, and many of its pieces moved differently from modern chess. Its main idea, however, was the same: capturing or trapping the opposing king.

The game spread to Persia, where it became known as shatranj. The Persian word shah, meaning king, is the source of the word chess itself, and the phrase shah mat, roughly the king is helpless, gave us checkmate.

After the Islamic conquest of Persia in the seventh century, shatranj spread across the Islamic world. Scholars in Baghdad wrote books analysing openings and endgame problems, and strong players such as al-Suli became famous at the Abbasid court.

Chess reached Europe by around the tenth century through Muslim Spain, Sicily and trade with the Byzantine Empire. It became popular among the nobility and was considered an important skill for knights and courtiers.

Europeans adapted the pieces to their own society. The adviser became the queen, and the elephant became the bishop in English, though in other languages it became a fool, a runner or an officer. The Lewis chessmen, carved from walrus ivory in the twelfth century and found in Scotland, are among the most famous medieval chess sets.

• Around the late fifteenth century, in Spain or Italy, the queen gained its modern power to move any distance in any direction.
• The bishop also gained its long diagonal move, making the game much faster and more aggressive.
• Castling and the pawn's option to move two squares on its first move became standard.
• Chess clocks, introduced in the nineteenth century, made timed tournament play possible.
• The first international tournament was held in London in 1851.

Wilhelm Steinitz became the first official world chess champion in 1886. The Soviet Union dominated chess for much of the twentieth century, treating it as a matter of national prestige and producing champions such as Mikhail Botvinnik, Anatoly Karpov and Garry Kasparov.

In 1972, at the height of the Cold War, the American Bobby Fischer defeated the Soviet champion Boris Spassky in Reykjavik, a match followed around the world. Women's chess has its own championship, and players such as Judit Polgár, who competed at the highest level against men, challenged assumptions about who could reach the top.

Pioneers of computing, including Alan Turing and Claude Shannon, saw chess as a test of machine intelligence. In 1997 IBM's Deep Blue defeated the world champion Garry Kasparov in a six-game match, a landmark event.

Since then, chess engines have become far stronger than any human. Players now use them to prepare openings and analyse games, and online platforms have brought chess to millions of new players. The game saw a surge in popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic, helped by online streaming and the television series The Queen's Gambit.