The Oldest Chess Set in the World Isn't Really a Set

The oldest known chess pieces in the world are the Afrasiab ivories, seven carved pieces dug up at Samarkand in 1977 and dated to roughly the year 700. That makes them about 1,300 years old, and it puts them three to four centuries ahead of the Lewis chessmen everyone pictures when they hear the phrase. Chess itself is older still. The game appears in Indian sources in the 6th century as chaturanga, which means the Afrasiab pieces are already a few hundred years into the story rather than the opening line of it.

The finds that get called "the oldest chess set"

Four candidates come up again and again, and they answer different questions. Here they are side by side, using the dates and piece counts the museums themselves publish.

A word about that seven-piece count. The Afrasiab find is not a playable set, and nobody pretends otherwise. Seven pieces is not 32, and it isn't even the 16 per side that shatranj used. What you're looking at is the earliest group of objects most catalogues will commit to calling chess pieces, which is a narrower claim than "the oldest chess set" and a more honest one.

Why "oldest" depends on which word you stress

Stress "piece" and Afrasiab wins. Stress "set" and you're suddenly arguing about the Charlemagne group in Paris, sixteen elephant-ivory figures that tradition tied to Charlemagne himself even though the carving is centuries too late for that. Stress "complete set you could actually play a game with" and the answer gets fuzzy, because early sets got split up, lost, and re-carved over centuries.

Dating is the other problem. Nobody carbon-dates a carving to a decade. You date ivory by style, by the layer of soil it came out of, and occasionally by radiocarbon work on the material itself, and the error bars run 50 to 100 years wide. So when a label says "8th century," read it as "somewhere in that neighborhood." I've stood in front of enough museum cases to know the label is a best guess with a straight face on it.

The pieces on those old boards didn't move like yours

Chaturanga and its Persian descendant shatranj were 16-a-side games, same as now, but the army looked diffrent. You had a king, a vizier where your queen sits, an elephant where your bishop sits, a chariot (rukh, which became our rook), a horse, and foot soldiers. The vizier crawled one square diagonally. The elephant jumped exactly two squares diagonally and could hop over anything in the way. Nobody had a long-range queen, because there was no queen.

The game changed in a hurry at the end of the 15th century. The queen's sweeping move shows up in Spanish and Italian sources around 1475, the bishop replaced the elephant, and the whole thing sped up. That's why old sets look wrong to you: the pieces are shaped for a slower game. If the carved-army look is what you're after, the best Indian chess sets trace that lineage back to the source.

The Lewis chessmen are the ones you can actually study

Ninety-three pieces came out of a sandbank at Camas Uig on the Isle of Lewis in 1831, and 78 of them are chessmen. Walrus ivory and whale tooth, almost certainly carved in Trondheim in Norway somewhere between 1150 and 1200. The tallest pieces top out around 4 inches and plenty sit closer to 2, which tells you something practical: these were travel pieces, not a tournament hall set. They're also grinning, biting their shields, and slumping in their chairs, which is why they get reproduced more than any other historical set.

Here's my concession. The Afrasiab ivories are the correct answer to the trivia question, but the Lewis hoard does more work. You can read a personality in those faces, and personality is what gets a kid interested in the game.

Seeing them for nothing, and what a replica costs

The British Museum and the National Museum of Scotland both have free permanent galleries, so the two best early chess collections on earth cost you a subway fare and nothing else. The Samarkand material is harder to reach, which is why most people's first encounter with 12th-century chess is a photo on a poster.

Reproductions are everywhere, and the price spread is wide. Cast resin Lewis sets usually land in the $50 to $150 bracket for 32 pieces. Hand-carved reproductions in bone or boxwood run $300 and up, and a proper carved-ivory-tribute set goes into four figures. The listing photos never show you the thing that matters, which is the weight. A hollow resin king that weighs an ounce feels like a toy in your hand, and it will skate across the board every time you nudge the table.

I'd also be straight with you about playability. Historical replicas play badly. The bases are small, the pieces are short, and the king is hard to pick out of a crowd at a glance. Buy one to look at. Buy something else to play on. If you want the medieval silhouette without the museum trip, the best medieval chess sets cover the reproduction market properly, and the themed chess sets page handles the licensed and fantasy end of things if you'd rather have a conversation piece than a history lesson.

There's a whole subculture of strange boards out there, dragons and film tie-ins and sets shaped like castles. Weird is fine. Weird is fun. Just check the square size before you fall in love with a photo, because a beautiful set that won't fit its own pieces is a $200 dust collector. The best unique chess sets are worth a browse for exactly that reason.

If you need a set to learn on

None of this history helps you play better, so here's the practical version. US Chess sizing guidance puts king height at 3.375 to 4.5 inches, squares at 2 to 2.5 inches, and the king's base at roughly 75 to 80 percent of a square. That ratio is the whole game. Get it right and pieces land cleanly instead of crowding each other.

For a first set, a weighted plastic Staunton-style set with a 3.75-inch king and a 2.25-inch vinyl roll-up board runs $30 to $60 and will outlast your interest in three other hobbies. Skip glass. Skip marble. Skip anything with a decorative base that wobbles. And if a themed set is what gets you or a kid to the board, that's a legitimate reason to buy one, which is the argument I make in the best themed chess sets roundup.

Your next step: take whatever set is closest to you right now, pull out the king, and measure the base with a ruler. If the number is under about 70 percent of your square size, the pieces will drift and clack and you'll blame your chess. It was never your chess.