Victor Keats, London, 1993:
IS CHESS MENTIONED IN THE TALMUD?

The Babylonian Talmud was a product of the Jewish settlements on Persian territory, first under the Parthian Empire and then under the Sassanian Empire which succeeded it from AD 226. In these settlements, the descendants of the Jews who were forced into exile in Babylon, Mesopotamia (Iraq) and Persia by Nebuchadnezzar in 586 BC were joined by the refugees from Judaea which was devastated by the Romans in 70 AD. As a systematic and conscious endeavour to record the history, laws and customs of the Jews, the Talmud provides an authentic account of the social life of its time. It was finalized in about AD 500.

The Talmud was written in Aramaic or Chaldaic, which had long been the diplomatic language of the entire Middle East. It was the language of Jesus, and was written by the scribes or cicil servants of the extended Persian Empire, where stones with Aramaic (Chaldaic) inscriptions have been found. From the Pahlavi and Sassanian dynasties there is a paucity of recorded history of this period. Thus, history written in Aramaic (Chaldaic) is of particular importance. ......

...... A further reference to a board game occurs in "Nedarim" (25a), where we are told how the rabbinical law court imposes an oath on a litigant. The standard English translation reads:

 "When an oath is administered, the man swearing is admonished: "Know that we do not adjure you according to your own mind,but according to our mind and the mind of the Court." Now, what does this exclude? Surely the case of one who gave his creditor iskundrée and mentally dubbed them coins".

To perceive its implications of the word "iskundrée", we do not need to go into all the niceties of the argument. The difference between a valid oath and a disingenuous one is like the difference between money and pieces in a game -- something that looks like money but is not the real thing. (A similar point arises in Shebuoth 29a).

This same game is mentioned in "Kiddushin" (21b), where two judges are arguing about a point of law. By way of challenging his opponent's competence, one of them says:

"When you were at Mar Samuel's academy you wasted your time playing iskundrée".

From the reference to Mar Samuel, the passage is to be dated as early as the third century AD. Mar Samuel was a known historic princely figure and recorded friend of the last Emperor of the Parthian Empire which ended in 226 AD.

Clearly these references to games are no more than incedental and casual. But this very fact suggests that the games must have been broadly familiar to the population supporting the Talmudic Academies; they were firmly enough established in day-to-day usage to be included as a matter of course in legal argument.

A careful discussion of these and other passages was published in 1892 by the American scholar Alexander Kohut. He concluded that only a sufficiently "serious" game could have distracted law students from their studies, hence that the word "iskundrée" (of which I shall later discuss the possible derivation) could have only one meaning -- chess. .....

..... One theory is that chess has an ancestor in the ancient Greek game "of pesseia (or petteia)" which spread to the East in the period of colonization following the conquests of Alexander the Great (d.323 BC) -- when the name Alexandria was given go so many towns of the greater Persian Empire. In this theory, the original Indian war-game of "chaturanga", which was played with dice, was transformed by the influence of "pesseia" -- which is mentioned in classical sources as a game essentially dependent on skill. Chess, then, resulted from an amalgamation of the two types of game. In this context it is significant that the talmudic word "pispussin" has been equated with "pesseia".

But the word "iskundrée", which Kohut interprets without reservation as chess, suggests similar thoughts about the derivation of the game. In his article that I have mentioned, Kohut considers that iskundrée derives from "Iskander ibn-Phillip Maqudon" which is nothing other than the Persian and Arabic version of the name "Alexander son of Philip of Macedonia". In the Talmud, Alexander the Great is himself called Alexandros; the contrasting word iskundrée may have been specially chosen to denote the game of which Alexander was the mediator.

Existing theories on the origins of chess are necessarily tentative. Among the sources of information on the societies where chess made an early appearance, the Talmud possesses the unique status of a historical record diligently preserved without a break in time. As further research in the field develops, it is to be hoped that the Talmud will be given the attention which this status demands.