Piececlopedia: Dabbabah

Historical notes

The Dabbabah was a piece that already appeared in some very early variants of chess. Its name represents an ancient war instrument, and is sometimes translated as war engine, although information what kind of form it precisely had is not available to me.

In different old chess variants, dabbabah's were used with different movement rules, e.g., it has been used to name a piece that moved like a normal bishop. The movement given below is the one with which the piece is still nowadays in use, e.g., in some fairy chess problems.

Movement

The dabbabah is a (0,2)-jumper, i.e., it moves (with or without taking) two squares horizontally or vertically. It `jumps', i.e., it can move regardless whether the intervening square is occupied or not.

Movement diagram

This is an item in the Piececlopedia: an overview of different (fairy) chess pieces.

Written by Hans Bodlaender. Diagram by Ben Good.

WWW page created: September 4, 1998. Last modified: September 14, 1998.

The above was authored by: Hans L. Bodlaender. .
Created on: September 04, 1998. Last modified on: September 14, 1998.

Comments

Date	Name	Rating	Comment
2005-12-02	David Paulowich	None	http://home.cwru.edu/cwrums/games/shat-pieces.html has movement definitions and diagrams for many pieces from old shatranj variants. A pair of 10x10 variants (both called Shatranj Kamil) are believed to date back 1000 years. One added the orthogonal leaper we now call the Dabbabah. The other variant added a (nonroyal) King. Courier Chess uses the wazir under the name 'schleich', which is sometimes translated as 'fool'. But Ralph Betza may be the first to use the 'wazir-dabbabah' piece in a variant. Jean-Louis Cazaux calls this piece a 'machine' in his 14 x 14 variant Gigachess (2001)
2005-12-01	Christine Bagley-Jones	None	hi just some questions on dabbaba, what are the origins of it, and also the 'dabbaba + wazir'? is 'timur chess' the first recorded game or fairy chess problem with dabbaba? Ralph Betza calls 'dabbaba/wazir' a 'woody-rook' in his 'chess with diff armies' .. did it exist before that?
2004-09-16	John Ayer	Good	Murray says that this device was known in the Middle Ages as a sow, and the Oxford English Dictionary defines this as 'A movable structure having a strong roof, used to cover men advancing to the walls of a besieged town or fortress, and to protect them while engaged in sapping and mining or other operations.'
2004-03-24	John Ayer	None	Very well! The site http://www.goddesschess.com/chessays/calvognosis2.html has this to say about a conjectural parent of Chaturanga: <p>The German historian Johannes Kohtz (1843-1918) supposed that in the protochess the Rook was also a jumping figure, with a mobility limited to a third square. So the squares accessible to a Rook in h1 would be f1 and h3, and later in the game f3, d3, d1, b1, b3, b5, d5, f5, h5, h7, f7, d7 and b7. His theory makes a lot of sense (in spite of Murray's rejection after long arguments by post), because the three jumping pieces (Alfil, Knight, and Rook) represent a diagonal, hook-curved and rectilinear movement of the same range. It also expresses a perfect ranking order: The King and the Knight are the only pieces which can move to any of the 64 squares. The Firzan has half of the board, 32. The Rook half of that, 16 squares. And the Alfil, half of that, 8. <p> End of quotation. The goddesschess page cited above suggests that this protochess traveled to Persia, where the concepts of checkmate and check were introduced. The rook was invented to make checkmate more attainable, and the board was enlarged to ten squares by ten to accommodate it. This game is known to John Gollon and his followers as Shatranj al-Kamil Type I. The orthogonal leaper (0,2) in that game is called a Jamal, or camel. It has the same move as the dabbabah in Tamerlane's Shatranj al-Kabir. We are apparently to infer that the rook was so popular that players used it at the corners of the eight-square board instead of the old 0,2 leaper, and the game in this form traveled back to India and supplanted its predecessor as swiftly and thoroughly as modern chess did medieval chess in the late fifteenth century. My thought is simply that Shatranj al-Kamil I traveled along the Silk Road through Central Asia to China, where the camel/dabbabah became the cannon/catapult, extending its leap from two squares to any number. The game was transferred to a previously existing Chinese game-board, and with a few minor adjustments became Xiangqi.
2004-03-22	Charles Gilman	Good	Perhaps some mention should be added on this page to the theories of this piece's place in Chess history described in John Ayer's comments on Chaturanga and Xiang Qi.

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Last modified: Sunday, August 21, 2005