Alquerque, the earliest known military game, is a two-player, twelve-piece game played on a board marked with five diagonal lines.
The game does not appear in literature until late in the tenth century when the author Abu al-Faraj al-Isfahani mentions Qirkat in his twenty-four-volume work Kitab al-Aghani ("Book of Songs").
This work, however, made no mention of the rules of the game.
Abu al-Faraj al-Iṣbahānī was born in Isfahan, but spent his youth and made his early studies in Baghdad.
He is a direct descendant of the last of the Umayyad caliphs, Marwan II, and is thus connected with the Umayyad rulers in Spain, and seems to have kept up a correspondence with them and to have sent them some of his works.
He becomes famous for his knowledge of early Arabian antiquities.
His later life is spent in various parts of the Islamic world, in Aleppo with its governor Sayf ad-Dawlah (to whom he dedicates the Book of Songs), in Ray with the Buyid vizier Ibn 'Abbad, and elsewhere.
Although he writes poetry, also an anthology of verses on the monasteries of Mesopotamia and Egypt, and a genealogical work, his fame rests upon his Book of Songs, a collection of poems and songs with the stories of the composers and singers in many volumes from the oldest epoch of Arabic literature down to the ninth century.
The poems are put to music, but the musical signs are no longer readable today.
Because of the accompanying biographical annotations on the authors and composers, the work is an important historical source.
It contains a mass of information as to the life and customs of the early Arabs, and is the most valuable authority we have for their pre-Islamic and early Islamic days.
