The Universe of Disco

Rooks

Yesterday I mentioned the rook:

Wikipedia also tells me that the rook is also named from the sound it makes.

This is the “rook” that is a sort of crow, C. frugilegus. It is not related to the rooks in chess. That word is from Arabic (and earlier, Persian) rukh, which means a chariot. Before the game came to Europe, the rooks were chariots. Europeans didn't use chariots, so when they adopted the game, they changed the chariots to castles. (Similarly the elephants turned into bishops.)

Okay, I've known all this for years, but today I had another thought. Why were there chariots in the Persian form of the game? The Persians didn't use chariots either. Chariots had been obsolete since the end of the Bronze Age, thousands of years, and chess is nothing like that old.

The earliest forerunner of chess was played in India. But I confirmed with Wikipedia that it didn't overlap with chariots:

Chess is believed to have originated in Eastern India, c. 280–550, in the Gupta Empire, where its early form in the 6th century was known as chaturaṅga (Sanskrit: चतुरङ्ग), literally four divisions [of the military] – infantry, cavalry, elephants, and chariotry, represented by the pieces that would evolve into the modern pawn, knight, bishop, and rook, respectively.

Were the Guptas still using chariots in the 6th century? (And if so, why?) I think they weren't, but I'm not sure. Were the chariots intentionally anachronistic, even at the time the game was invented, recalling a time of ancient heroes?

[ Addendum 20200204: Consider the way modern video games, recalling a time of ancient heroes, often involve sword fighting or archery. ]

[ Addendum 20211231: Wikipedia raises the same point: “The first substantial argument that chaturanga is much older than [the 6th century] is the fact that the chariot is the most powerful piece on the board, although chariots appear to have been obsolete in warfare for at least five or six centuries. The counter-argument is that they remained prominent in literature. ]

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Corax

Katara just read me the story she wrote in Latin, which concerns two men who chase after a corax. “What kind of animal is corax?” I asked.

“It's a raven.”

“Awesome,” I said. “I bet it's onomatopoeic.”

So I looked into it, and yup! It's from Greek κόραξ. Liddell and Scott's Greek-English lexicon says (p. 832):

The Root is to be found in the onomatop. words κράζω, κρώζω, croak, etc.

κράζω (krazo) and κρώζω (krozo) mean “to croak”. “Croak” itself is also onomatopoeic. And it hadn't occurred to me before that English “crow” is also onomatopoeic. Looking into it further, Wikipedia also tells me that the rook is also named from the sound it makes.

(J.R.R. Tolkien was certainly aware of all of this. In The Hobbit has a giant raven named Roäc, the son of Carc.)

Liddell and Scott continues:

The same Root often appears in the sense of curved, cf. κορ-ώνη … Karin cur-vus, etc.

κορώνίς (koronis) means “curved”, and in particular a “corona” or crown. Curvus of course means curved, and is akin to Latin corvus, which again means a crow.

The raven's beak does not look so curved to me, but the Greeks must have found it striking.

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