ceoddyn wrote:Ya that brings up a good point, who did make chess anyway?
It's a complicated history, but the game that became what we know as chess is believed to have originated in Eastern India and gradually migrated into the Middle East before being introduced into Europe through trade during the Renaissance, when it first became popular in the West. Words like "rook" and "check" are actually corruptions of the original terms.
What's notable, however, is that throughout that evolution, though the words and names changed, the essential character of the game did not. The game board remained the same, and the four classes of pieces represented by pawn, rook, knight, and bishop functioned the same.