What the First Chess Sets Were Carved From, and Why Wood Still Wins

The oldest chess pieces anyone has found were carved from ivory. Seven of them came out of the ground at Afrasiab, near Samarkand in what's now Uzbekistan, and they're dated to roughly the 7th century, which makes them about 1,300 years old.

Wood almost certainly came first. It was cheap, it was everywhere, and you can carve it with a pocket knife. But wood rots, so the pieces that survived are the ones somebody paid a fortune to have cut from tusk. The honest answer to "what was the first chess set carved from" has two halves: wood in practice, ivory in the museum case.

The materials behind the oldest surviving pieces

The Afrasiab seven are the headline act, but they aren't alone. Move forward 400 years and the material list gets wider, not narrower.

The Lewis chessmen are the ones people know by sight. The hoard held 93 objects, 78 of them chess pieces, cut from walrus ivory and whale tooth between roughly 1150 and 1200. They run from about 2 inches to just over 4 inches tall, and the berserker warders biting their own shields are why museum gift shops still sell resin copies of them.

Why wood came first, and why almost none of it is left

I'd rather tell you a carver in 6th-century India reached for a specific wood and we know its name. We don't. The earliest written references to chaturanga describe the game, not the material, and the pieces themselves are gone. Wood survives in dry caves and waterlogged pits and almost nowhere else, so our sample of early chess is skewed toward durable, expensive materials. A museum case full of ivory doesn't mean ivory was normal. It means ivory was hard.

The cheap option never really changed. A modern boxwood set with a 3.75-inch king is the same idea, repairable and light enough to carry to a club night, and it's still what I'd hand a beginner. If that's the direction you're going, the best wooden chess sets are where the useful comparisons live.

What the pieces in an early carved set actually were

Chaturanga was a war game, so the pieces were an army. The names changed as the game crossed languages, but the shapes map cleanly onto what's on your board today.

The elephant detail is my favorite. In most of Europe the elephant's tusks became a bishop's mitre, but in Russian the bishop is still called slon, which means elephant. Somebody in a Moscow club says "elephant takes elephant" and they're being more historically accurate than the rest of us.

Islamic carvers took the same game and stripped the figures off it, partly to avoid representing living things. A 9th-century set from Iraq or Iran might be turned cylinders and cones, distinguished by height alone, with kings under 3 inches and pawns barely an inch. No faces, no horses' heads, and no confusion at the board either.

Ivory law in 2026, and the substitutes worth paying for

Nobody is selling you a new elephant ivory set legally. International commercial trade was banned under CITES in 1989, the US tightened its federal rule in 2016, and the UK's Ivory Act, passed in 2018 and in force since 2022, covers nearly all ivory sales. Several US states, California among them, restrict mammoth ivory too. Antique sets exist, and the paperwork around them is a headache I wouldn't take on for a player's set.

So modern "carved" sets use four materials. Tagua nut, sold as vegetable ivory, comes from a palm in Ecuador and takes dye beautifully; each nut is about the size of a golf ball, so you get one piece per nut. Camel bone is dyed and polished, mostly out of India, and holds a shine that boxwood won't. Ebonized boxwood is plain boxwood dyed black to stand in for ebony. And resin does a decent job of the look for under the price of a decent dinner.

At the top of that market, hand-carved knights and real ebony routinely run into four figures, and the best luxury chess sets show where that money actualy goes. If you want to know who's carving what and who's just rebranding, the House of Staunton review is the one I'd read first.

Sizes and proportions that make a carved-looking set playable

Here's the wrinkle. Old pieces had no flat base and no felt. A 7th-century ivory king stood on a carved stump and wobbled every time you touched it. That's fine in a display case and miserable at a board.

The Staunton pattern fixed this in 1849, registered by Nathaniel Cook and manufactured by Jaques of London, and it's still the shape every serious set copies. If you're buying something carved today, the best Staunton chess sets are the direct line from that patent. The numbers that matter are simple: US Chess guidance puts kings between 3.375 and 4.5 inches, squares between 2 and 2.5 inches, and the king's base at roughly 75 to 80 percent of a square.

Weight matters as much as height. A weighted plastic tournament set at 3.75 inches comes in around 2.5 to 3 pounds for all 32 pieces plus the spare queens. A wooden set at the same height with weighted bases runs 4 to 6. Under 2 pounds and the pieces skate across the board every time you push a pawn. The best tournament chess sets are sorted by exactly that kind of thing.

If you need a set to learn on

Skip the carved stuff for your first set. A boxwood or plastic Staunton with a 3.75-inch king, a 2.25-inch-square roll-up vinyl board, and a cheap digital clock will take you from your first game to your first tournament without embarrassing you. The chess sets I'd point a beginner toward are all flat-based, felted and replaceable piece by piece, which is what you want when a pawn goes missing behind the sofa.

Carved sets are for later, when you know whether you like the feel of bone or the weight of boxwood, and when losing a knight doesn't mean losing a set.

Before you order, measure the table

Not the board. The table. A 24-inch board with a 4.5-inch king needs about 30 inches of clear space once two players, a clock and a mug of coffee are on it, and most folding card tables are 34 inches wide. Measure that first, then pick the king height. Buying a 20-inch board and finding out it doesn't leave room for the clock is the most common mistake I see, and it costs you a return shipping label.