It’s only Iceland which uses the word “biskup” (same as bishop) that appears to have pre-dated the 16 th century use of “Bishop”. In Germanic tongues it’s called a “runner” or “messenger”. However, the name “bishop” didn’t arise until the 16 th century. Strangely, the Japanese appear to have reached a similar conclusion about the alfil being too weak a piece at around the same time and invented a bishop there too in the 13 th century. This new piece and its move set was described in the book “Treasury of the Sciences” by Muhammad ibn Mahmud-al-Amuli as moving “like the rook but obliquely”. The first bishop piece was found in a chess variant called Courier Chess. It can thus, reach a half of all the squares on the board.
Bishop chess free#
In some European tongues, including Spanish, the piece remains known as the “alfil” but there’s no doubt that the original alfil move set has been long forgotten in all varieties of chess and the piece now has free reign to move as far down a diagonal as possible as long as it is not blocked.
When Shatranj reached Persia, it became known as the “pil” and that was then corrupted to “fil” (the direct Arabic equivalent of the Persian) before having “al” (an Arabic word meaning “the”) attached to the front. The alfil in Shatranj may only reach one fourth of the squares on the board! The alfil and the “firz” (which would later become the queen, and which had a similarly reduced set of moves available to it in Shatranj) were the weakest pieces on the board other than the pawns. Both of these words meant “elephant” in Sanskrit.
What we do know is that it would have been called a “hastin” or, maybe, a “gaja” when it was invented as the inventors of the game would have been using Sanskrit and alfil is an Arabic name. However, we are not entirely sure if the piece always had this move as the Shatranj rules available to us are rather more recent than the game itself. Though this isn’t the case in the variant of chess known as xiangqi (in that variant, the intermediary square must remain empty). The Shatranj alfil was not the same as a chess bishop though and the alfil could only move two squares diagonally, it was also able to jump over a piece in the square between it and the target square. When Is A Bishop Not A Bishop? When It’s An Elephant This was meant to symbolize the elephant’s trunk and the opening of that trunk was the split in the head of the piece.
This looked very much like, though not identical to, the modern bishop – the head of the piece had a cut all the way down to the tiered collar below the head and it would have cleaved the head in two. However, this would have taken a lot of time and energy to create and as Shatranj became more popular a more specific piece was created. In many early chess sets, the piece was depicted as a carved elephant with a rider sat on top of it. Instead, there was an “alfil” that is a “war elephant”. There was no bishop in the original chess variant known as Shatranj. Why do chess bishops have a cut on top? –