ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

When Poets Solved Chess Problems: The Mnemonics of the Earliest Islamicate Knight’s Tour

• In Event: Mathematics and Practical Knowledge

English Abstract

This paper examines the emergence of mnemonic poetics devoted to the knight’s tours in early Islamicate intellectual culture. Building on the earliest known 8×8 knight’s tour, attributed to the chess master al-ʿAdlī (fl. 8th–9th century CE) and preserved in Kitāb al-Shaṭranj, the oldest extant Arabic chess book manuscript, I show how this mathematical puzzle inspired literary scholars rather than specialist mathematicians.
Early Arabic poets and philologists, such as Abū Bakr ibn Durayd (d. 933 CE) and Khālid al-Qannās, composed mnemonic verses encoding the full sequence of knight moves. In doing so, they developed an innovative coordinate system to describe the position and progression of the knight across the board. Remarkably, this framework bears a closer conceptual resemblance to a Cartesian grid than to the astronomical and geographical coordinate practices available in their period.
A central argument of the paper is that this coordinate system was devised not by a chess theorist but by a poet. The methods exhibited in these verses are intuitive, heuristic, and literary, rather than systematic or technical in the manner of mathematical treatises. As such, they offer a distinctive window into how mathematical reasoning surfaced in unexpected cultural domains. This provides a valuable case study in ethnomathematics, a field concerned with identifying mathematical thought embedded in the practices of non-specialists and in genres not usually associated with science.
Finally, I situate the Islamicate material within the longer history of knight’s tours, highlighting their later significance in modern combinatorics and graph theory since the foundational work of Leonhard Euler in the eighteenth century.

Author

• Majideh Ms Qazizadeh, University of Exeter