We’ve played Chutes and Ladders with
our young daughters for years without ever realizing how good it was for our
karma.
Turns out our Sesame Street-inspired
Chutes and Ladders, the Americanized name for what the British called Snakes
and Ladders, was originally a morality game from ancient India, one of a variety of family board games, in fact, that started with the invention of dice.
Archaeologists once excavated the
oldest known dice from a 5,000-year-old backgammon set in Shahr-i-Sukhta (Burnt
City) in Southeastern Iran. But more recent excavations in the Indus Valley
suggest a possible South Asian origin. Possibly corroborating this discovery is that
dice were mentioned in the ancient Indian tomes, the Rig Veda and Mahabharata, as a means for gambling. It was even listed as one of the
games the Buddha would not play. (He
kept a list? Apparently, he also didn’t approve of board games, pick up sticks,
hopscotch, playing with toys or balls, charades, or the olden-day version of Pictionary.
There are also lists of things he would not watch [dancing and animal fights,
among them] and things he wouldn’t wear [mainly anything ornamental or decorative]).
But the ancient Indians loved dice,
even creating a number of popular board games with them, games the world
continues to play today. The modern forms of Parcheesee and Ludo, for example
came from an old game called pachisi (from pachis, which means twenty-five, the
largest score that could be thrown in one shot).
Before Milton Bradley brought Snakes and Ladders from England to the States and changed its name, it was Moksha Patam, which literally means the path to salvation (or the ladder to salvation). The original version was based on the ideas of luck, chance, and destiny. The ladders represented the attainment of higher virtues, such as humility, faith, and knowledge, and the snakes represented vices such as greed, rage, theft, and murder. In the original game, there were more snakes than ladders, to signify how much more difficult the righteous path is than its alternative.
Another game that’s weathered the
travel through time and place is chess. The Gupta dynasty in India created it sometime
between the 5th and 6th century AD and called it chatrang or chaturanga, meaning “having four limbs,”
which in turn was thought to represent the four divisions of the military
(in those days, elephants, chariots, foot soldiers, and horsemen). Originally, the Indian
military played it as a battle simulation game to work out strategy—with 100 or
more squares on the original chess boards compared to 64 in our most common modern
form. Scholars from those days noted that one of the main reasons ancient Indians used ivory
was to produce the pieces for chess and backgammon sets.
 |
| An illustration from an old Persian manuscript shows Indian ambassadors presenting the chatrang to the king of Persia, Khosrow I Anushirwan. (Photo by Firdausi) |
From India, chatrang spread to Persia, which changed its name to shatranj. When attacking the piece we
now know as the king, the Persians would call out “Shah!” (the Persian word for
king, typically the military ruler) and shah mat for checkmate.
(Hear the similarity with the current form?) From there, the game spread throughout
the Arab and Greek empires then to the Byzantine empire through Spain. Once it made
its way through Europe, the game took on its current form around the 15th
century, with ornamental pieces shaped as kings, queens, bishops, knights, and
rooks, before making its way to East Asia via the Silk Road.
Much of the world derived its names
for chess from the Persian one: in Latin, shatranj
became scacchi, thus influencing the
names in languages derived from Latin, such as echecs in French, or inspired by the Germanic, Russian, or Slavic, such as schack in Swedish or szacyhy in Polish. Mongols call the game
shatar; Ethiopians, senterej; and the Russians as shakhmaty. In German, Schachmatt means checkmate.
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