مناظره شطرنج و نرد (تصنيف حسام صراف خوارزمي )

A Debate Between the Games of Chess and Backgammon

The main part of this paper is the text of a short treatise in Persian bearing the above title which is being published for the first time. The editor dates the text somewhere in the "7th or 8th century A.H." (13th/14th century C.E.), and says he found the manuscript in the library of the late scholar Mojtaba Minovi, who himself copied the text from an MS in the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin. The author of the treatise is a hitherto unknown writer by the name of Hisam b. Muhammad-Rasid Sarraf of Khwarazm, who composed it for his patron Amir Mobarak Shah of Shushtar (in present-day Khuzistan). The editor, and Minovi before him, have both tried and failed to find any additional information on the author as well as his patron. It is clear however, that Amir Mobarak Shah was an aficionado of these two games, and the literary debate was written for his entertainment while the chess has been invented in India, the backgammon seems to have been invented by the Iranians themselves. These games were thought to represent some aspect of the human condition. In the game of backgammon, which is decided by the throw of the dice as well as the skill of the two players, manʹs fortune is decided mainly by what his destiny has in store for him, whereas in the game of chess, the deciding factor is the skill of each player.