OLDEST CHESS-MAN FOUND IN JULY 2002

Ancient Chess Piece Discovered If the Albanian artifact is a chess piece, chess history as we know it is wrong. If you've ever searched for chess items on eBay, you've come across the many listings for 'chess horse table lamps', 'chess tower salt & pepper shakers', and similar. For the sellers of these items, the horse-head shape makes the item a knight, and anything resembling a tower or castle must be a rook. Listings on eBay are as transitory as a blitz game, and the only thing that really matters is whether the winning bidder is happy with the item. A recent archaeological find of an early chess piece, widely reported by major news services, is now suspected to be misidentified. At the end of July 2002, an ivory piece 4 centimeters high (a little more than 1 1/2 inches) was discovered in Butrint, an ancient Mediterranean city in southern Albania. The piece was found in a Roman mansion by members of the Institute of World Archaeology, which is affiliated with the University of East Anglia, Norwich, England. Members of the team identified the find as a small chess piece dating from the 5th or 6th century AD. This would make it the oldest chess piece found in Europe. The mansion where it was found has been dated to 465, which could make the piece the oldest found anywhere in the world. Professor Richard Hodges said, 'We are wondering if it is the king or queen because it has a little cross, but we are not sure.' The remark raised eyebrows because the generally accepted history is that chess was invented in the 6th century in northern India. Some historians believe chess was invented in China. If true, it does not change the accepted path of its later migration. From India chess went to Persia (Iran today) and from there to Arabia. The Arabs are credited with bringing the game to Europe in the 9th or 10th century. The earliest European chess pieces are adorned neither with crowns nor with crosses. The Burint piece is certainly not a Queen, which revolutionized the game when it was introduced by an unknown genius in the late-15th century. The oldest known European pieces belong to the Venafro set, named after the central Italian town where they were discovered in a Roman tomb in 1932. The pieces, made of bone topped with ivory, are from the late-10th century and are housed in the Archaeological Museum of Naples. Another early European set is the Charlemagne set, made of elephant ivory. Probably made near Naples, Italy, the set dates from the late-11th century. The 16 surviving pieces are housed at the National Library, Paris. Others were lost during the French Revolution. The best known medieval pieces belong to the Lewis set. They were discovered in 1831 on the Isle of Lewis, Outer Hebrides, northwest Scotland. The pieces, dated from the mid-12th century, were carved mostly from walrus tusk, with a few from whale teeth. Coming from at least four different sets, they are now in the British Museum, London, and the National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh. Getting back to eBay, how do you know if the designer intended the object to model a real chess piece? You don't, unless there are at least two different pieces in the design, like a 'horse' *and* a 'tower'. Then you can be sure. Although the Burint piece fails this simple test, it may still prove to be a chess piece. ---------------------------------------- Maybe archaeologists too nowadays feel forced to put on a false nose for jollity. At the end of last July many media reported that a British team had found during excavations in the city Butrint. The South of what now is Albania, a small ivory chess piece that was dated from the fifth or sixth century (accounts differ) and thereby would be by far the oldest chess piece found in Europe. According to members of the archaeological team, chess in Europe turns out to have a much longer history than we assumed until now. The history of chess will have to be re-written. Can this be true? About the early history of chess there are few hard facts known and consequently the field provides rich opportunities for controversy and speculation. Most historians consider India to be the birthplace of chess, others point to China and an intrepid adventurer has even indicated Babylon in the second millennium BC as the cradle of chess. Nevertheless there exists something that can be called "mainstream chess history". In Whyld and Hooper's The Oxford Companion to Chess it is summed up thus: “The earliest evidence of a recognizable form of chess, chaturanga, is around AD 600. Before that, all is speculation.” This firm statement, not present in the first edition, was added to the second edition of 1992, probably as a warning against too adventurous historians. From India the game goes to Persia and from there to the Arabs, who bring it to Europe during the ninth century. Around the same time there is a Northern route by which chess is brought to Europe via Russia. This is the familiar tale that indeed will have to be strongly revised if the British archaeologists are right, for not only do they claim to have found the earliest European chess piece, they date it from a period (in one account the year 465 is mentioned) of which no firm evidence exists that chess was played anywhere in the world at all. As far as I know, dating a man-made object is not an easy task. It is not enough to date the material (ivory in this case) but what needs to be fixed is the period when the artisan made it into the thing it is now. Not only the established history of chess, but also methods of dating provide room for controversy. But even more difficult, I think, is to decide if the object is really a chess piece. It would be nice if we found 32 little objects of different sizes, reflecting the hierarchy of the pieces, but this is not the case here. Only one "piece" has been found. I look at the picture. What can it tell us? A piece of ivory, four centimeters high, that looks a bit like a miniature Eastern-European church tower, with a little crown or cross on top. Yes, it has some resemblance to European chess pieces of a much later age, but chess pieces have come in many forms. It might have been a chess piece and it might have been a lot of other things. To name only one possibility, it might have been made for purely decorative reasons, with no function at all except to be pretty. The English archaeologist John Mitchell declared that the team had excluded the possibility that the object had anything to do with other board games such as backgammon or the Roman game tabula. It would have to be a chess King or Queen, because of the crown on top. A Queen? That would force us to re-write the history of chess even more drastically, as until now we had been convinced that the Queen was invented in Western Europe during the 15th century. Maybe what Mitchell meant was the Firzan, the Queen's early precursor, but that doesn't sound logical either, for why would a mere councilor of the King wear a crown? I doubt if the team of archaeologists had a detailed knowledge of the history of chess. But they knew enough to realise that their find, if it were really a chess piece, would force a re-writing of a small but substantial part of cultural history. Quite a big consequence of the find of a tiny piece of ivory. Sometimes it happens indeed that history has to be re-written, but for that the new facts have to be at least as firmly based as old theory. You can never be sure, of course. But to me it seems that the British archaeologists found an object that could have been anything. Only if it were a chess piece would it have such an impact on general history. So a chess piece it had to be. Not only chess champions but also scientists and cultural scholars have to jump through hoops to get the media attention that nowadays is indispensable to the funding of their work. The team that did the excavations in Butrint got plenty of media attention after finding their "chess piece". As I said, you cannot be sure. The thing might be what they claim it to be. I certainly do not want to pass as an expert on chess history, but it seems to me that chess has been taken for a ride.