This got prefixed with the Arabic definite article, al, to form the name Alfil. Murray reports in the same book that the Muslims merely modified the name of the piece to suit their own pronunciation, changing the p to an f for the word fil, which became the piece's Arab name. So the Persian pil lept two spaces diagonally. Perhaps it has its roots in the name for a Chess piece.Īs Murray reports in his Short History of Chess, the game hardly changed when the Muslims got it from the Persians. Although I can't document the connection, elephant does sound similar to alfil. Golombek also points out that the English word elephant was also borrowed from another language. Elephants were not native to Persia, and the Persians borrowed the word from some other language. Curiously, Golombek points out that pil is not a Persian word. When the Persians got Chess from the Indians, they translated the Sanskrit name to pil. So it seems entirely reasonable that Murray is right. Besides that, this same kind of experimentation gave birth to modern Chess during the renaissance, when the Alfil and the Ferz, which was the second weakest piece in the game, were replaced by the Bishop and Queen, while the other pieces were left alone. It can reach only one eighth of all spaces on the chessboard, whereas the Dabbabah can reach one quarter, and the Silver General can reach them all. This makes sense, because the Alfil is weaker than the Dabbabah and the Silver General. Murray reasons that the Elephant was the weakest piece in the game, and people began experimenting with ways to make it stronger, whereas they didn't experiment with improving the other pieces. Murray, writing in his History of Chess, the two-space diagonal leap was the original move. Davidson comments on how this move resembles the four legs and trunk of an elephant. This is the move for the piece in both Burmese Chess and Thai Chess.Īccording to Henry Davidson, the five-fold Silver General move was the original move for this piece. While the former died out, the latter was the move for this piece in the form of Chess that spread to Burma and Siam. One was the Dabbabah move, and the other was the Silver General move. As Murray reports in his History of Chess, there were two other moves for this piece that were current in India. In both Shatranj and Chaturanga, it made a two-space diagonal leap, but Chaturanga was an Indian Contempory of Shatranj, and it is Shatranj, the Muslim form of Chess, that we actually have the earliest documentation for. An elephant was, as far as anyone knows, one of the original pieces. The uncertainty is not over the piece's name. But there is a bit of uncertainty and even disagreement on this matter. It is found in the earliest known forms of Chess, such as Chaturanga and Shatranj, and it is very probably one of the original Chess pieces. This piece very probably came from India, where its original name was one of the Sanskrit words for elephant: hasty or gaja. The Alfil is the predecessor of the modern Bishop. But it is not a set of standards concerning what you must call pieces in newly invented games. The Piececlopedia is intended as a scholarly reference concerning the history and naming conventions of pieces used in Chess variants.
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