Medieval Chess Sets

The game we know as chess originated in Iran or India or somewhere thereabouts around 500 AD. The names and identities of the pieces changed over the course of the next several centuries; the details of the rules probably did as well, but that is hard to show, since we don't have any written rules from that time. 

Most older chess sets look like this, with the pieces largely abstract. The value of expensive sets came from using expensive materials, like rock crystal or jade. This is the Ager chess set, the oldest in Europe, from 11th-century Catalonia.

Here is an ivory piece from medieval Persia, showing that the identity of the figures was more often suggested than worked out in detail.

Two ivory pieces from Iran, 11th century.

For the most part, the habit of elaborately carving chess piece into human or animal shapes seems to have developed in Europe, sometime around the year 1100. All but one of the oldest dozen elaborately carved chess sets is European. The exception is this one, which was excavated in 1977 at Afrasiab near Samarkand in central Asia and dated to c 700 to 760 AD. No source I have seen explains how the dating was done, so I am skeptical, but the excavation report was presumably printed in Russian and resides only in a few ex-Soviet archaeological institutes, so for now we are going to have to take the excavators' word for it. Anyway this reigns as the oldest dated chess set.

One of the Afrasiab pieces. Elephants commonly appeared in medieval sets, probably in the slots we know as bishop and rook.

This means that the Lewis chessmen, excavated in the Hebrides in 1832 and dated to the 12th century, are not just wonderful but also one of the oldest chess sets carved into recognizable figures.

The Lewis find contained pieces from at least four sets, so in the 12th century these must have been fairly common. Historians in Spain and France have found traces of chess sets in the wills of rich nobles, which confirms that carved sets in valuable materials had become standard luxury items.

The other really famous carved set from medieval Europe resides in Paris and goes by the name of the Charlemagne chessmen. It seems to date to around 1100 AD. As you can see, this set was very elaborate indeed, with pieces so large as to be an impediment to play. And since they don't look very worn, they were probably not played with all that much.

Still with elephants, as you can see.

The queen. Chess historians are fascinated by the rise of the queen, which replaced the Grand Vizier in European sets, probably in the 11th century.

Knight and bishop.

Here is another early queen, from Spain, dated to the early 12th century. From then on the number of surviving pieces gradually increases. I was surprised to find, though, that there are few surviving sets from before around 1500. After 1500 production seems to have exploded, both within Europe and in Asia, where many elaborate sets were made for sale to Europeans who like to play with sets that suggested the exotic east.

 Here is a 15th century king, from Germany.

A Scandinavian bishop from around 1200.

A 12th-century bone piece, which can stand in for thousands that have been found in archaeological digs across Eurasia. Chess sets are cool because they allow artists to explore a fixed theme in any imaginable style, something modern artists are still doing.