Checkmate

As war continues to wage between Iran and the United States, might Donald Trump find himself in a position of ‘checkmate’ against the ayatollahs? The word itself, despite initially appearing to come from the combination of the two English words check and mate, actually finds its roots in the very language of the Iranians.

Its origins lie in the Persian phrase ‘shah mat’ (شاه مات), which can be translated as something like ‘the king is helpless’. Shah is a word you might recognise as the title given to the rulers of Iran up until the 1979 Revolution, whilst mat, meaning helpless or defeated, comes from the verb māndan, meaning ‘to remain’.

To take a quick detour into the world of Proto-Indo-European languages, the Persian word mandan and the English word remain actually have a shared cognate themselves, becoming clearer when the English version is traced back to the Latin verb ‘manere’. Mansion is another word that stems from this cognate, a place where someone dwells or remains.

Getting back to chess, the game is believed to have first originated around 1500 years ago in India before finding its way to Persia. It was here that the game would evolve and coin the famous phrase ‘shah mat’ when a player pursued their opponent’s king and warned of an imminent attack, with this rule added to prevent an early and accidental end to a match. It also slightly changed the strategy behind the game from killing the king to instead forcing a surrender.

The Arabs, after their invasion of Persia, would embrace the game and spread it to new parts of the world. They brought chess with them to Europe via their conquest of Spain, with traders and scholars then disseminating it across the whole continent. It would find its way to the British Isles, where the phrase which started as ‘shah mat’ evolved to ‘eschec mat’ in Old French and then finally into Middle English as ‘checkmate’.

Next time you sit down to play a game of chess, you can be reminded of the Persian Empire. In the country’s clash today against the world’s modern superpower, there would be a certain etymological irony if Trump, a president who seems very keen to project himself as a modern-day monarch, finds himself ‘helpless’ from his reckless gambit in the Gulf.