Chess was a board game played in the Middle East already before the coming of Islam. Originating in India, the game reached the Arab world via Persia and arrived in Europe via the Arabs, mostly through interactions in Spain. The Arabic word for “chess” is shaṭranj or shiṭranj, with the latter said to be better according to Arabic lexicographers wishing to make the word conform to standard Arabic morphology. In Middle Persian the term is chatrang and in Sanskrit it is caturaṅga (with four limbs), referring to the four army divisions represented in the game. Al-Jāḥiẓ (d. 255/8…

Backgammon, or trictrac, a board game for two persons, played with dice, of the race-game type, was known in the central Islamic lands as nard, a Persian word of uncertain origin, said to be a shortening of nardashīr, in turn derived from Ardashīr (Artaxerxes, r. 224–41 C.E.), founder of the Sāsānian dynasty (224–651 C.E.), who in some legends is said to have invented the game (in the version of the poet Firdawsī (d. 411/1020), Shāhnāma, trans. Davis, 701–4, the game called nard is not a race game but a battle game, not unlike the Roman latrunculi) [Illustration 1]. In these stories nard is ver…