What the World's First Chess Set Was Carved From, and What Actually Survived
The first set is gone. The oldest pieces we still have are ivory, and how they got that way is the story of chess itself.
Nobody knows what the world's first chess set was carved from, and anyone who says otherwise is guessing. The oldest pieces that survive are ivory: seven of them came out of the ground at Afrasiab, near Samarkand in modern Uzbekistan, and they date to roughly 700 AD.
That's less romantic than the version where a Gupta emperor hands a carver a block of sandalwood and a commission. It's also the truth. Wood rots. A wooden set left in a monsoon climate for 1,400 years is compost, so what museums hold is not the first set. It's the earliest set that happened to survive.
The oldest surviving pieces are ivory, bone, and walrus tusk
Three finds carry most of the weight, and they span about 500 years.
| Find | Date | Material | Pieces surviving |
|---|---|---|---|
| Afrasiab hoard, Samarkand | c. 700 AD | Ivory | 7 |
| So-called Charlemagne set | 11th century | Elephant ivory | 16 |
| Lewis chessmen, Scotland | c. 1150 to 1200 | Walrus ivory and whale tooth | 78 chessmen (93 objects total) |
The Afrasiab pieces are the oldest of the three and the most fragmentary: seven pieces, all ivory, several of them broken. The Charlemagne set is elephant ivory and lives in the Cabinet des Médailles at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. The Lewis chessmen are the crowd-pleaser. Carved in Norway, buried in a sandbank at Uig on the Isle of Lewis, dug up in 1831, and now split between the British Museum and the National Museum of Scotland.
Wood almost certainly came first, and that's exactly why we can't prove it
Chess appears in Indian sources in the 6th century as chaturanga, a word meaning "four-limbed," a reference to the four divisions of an Indian army: infantry, cavalry, elephants, chariots. A board game built around those four divisions would of been carved from whatever was cheap and local in 550 AD. Wood, bone, maybe fired clay.
Some scholars push the origin earlier and further west, into Persia or Central Asia, and I won't pretend that argument is closed. It isn't. But the material logic holds either way. Ivory is dense, oily, and survives burial. Boxwood and palm do not. The archaeological record isn't showing us the first sets, it's showing us the ones made from the one material that doesn't rot.
Six pieces, four army divisions, and what each one was carved as
The original pieces were portraits of an army, not abstractions. Here's how the names traveled.
| Modern piece | Sanskrit | Persian and Arabic | Carved as |
|---|---|---|---|
| King | raja, later shah | shah | A seated king, sometimes on an elephant |
| Queen | mantri (counselor) | farzin, then firz | A seated adviser, often holding a writing box |
| Bishop | gaja or hasti (elephant) | fil, then alfil | An elephant with a mahout |
| Knight | ashva (horse) | asp | A horse, usually with a rider |
| Rook | ratha (chariot) | rukh | A chariot, sometimes with a driver |
| Pawn | padati (foot soldier) | piyada, then baidaq | A single infantryman |
Then the shapes got lost in translation, and that's the part most people never hear. Figurative carving ran into religious objections in the Islamic world, so Persian and Arab carvers abstracted the pieces into cylinders, blocks, and knobs. By the time those forms reached Europe, nobody knew what an elephant was supposed to look like on a board.
Two English piece names are pure accident. "Bishop" comes from the shape of the alfil's top, which European carvers thought looked like a mitre. "Rook" comes from rukh, the Persian word for chariot, which got confused with the roc, the giant bird from the Arabian Nights. Set up a modern set tonight and you're handling 1,400 years of mistranslation.
Ivory, bone, wood, and marble: what sets have been carved from since
The materials changed as the game moved and as the money changed.
| Material | Where and when | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Wood | India, Persia, Europe, everywhere | Boxwood for the light pieces, ebony for the dark from the 19th century on |
| Ivory | India, Islamic world, Europe, 7th to 19th century | Dense and slow to decay; international trade banned under CITES since 1989 |
| Bone | European sets, 18th and 19th century | The cheap alternative, usually turned on a lathe |
| Walrus ivory | Scandinavian sets, 12th century | Softer than elephant ivory, easier to carve |
| Marble | 19th century onward | Heavy, decorative, rarely played on |
| Plastic and resin | 20th century onward | The default for clubs and schools |
If you want the material that almost certainly started it all, wood is the honest answer. It's still what a good club set is made from, and the best wooden chess sets follow the same logic the old carvers did: dense hardwood, enough weight to stay put, felt on the bottom.
What 1,400 years of carving means when you pick a set today
The set you can buy is a descendant of the Persian shatranj pieces, not the Indian ones, and the design has a date. Nathaniel Cook registered the Staunton pattern in 1849, John Jaques made it, and Howard Staunton put his name on it. Every weighted club set since is a variation on that shape.
Sizing is where people get burned. US Chess guidance puts king height at 3.375 to 4.5 inches and squares at 2 to 2.5 inches, with the king's base around 75 to 80 percent of the square. Go below those numbers and the board gets crowded in a way you'll feel before you can explain it.
| King height | Square size | Where you see it |
|---|---|---|
| 3.375 in | 2.0 in | Bottom of the US Chess range |
| 3.75 in | 2.25 in | The most common club pairing |
| 4.5 in | 2.5 in | Top of the range, big hall territory |
Those pairings are convention, not law. The base-to-square ratio is the number that actually matters. If you're buying for a school or a club, the best tournament chess sets are built to those proportions and survive being stacked in a cupboard. If you want the museum look on a shelf, the best Staunton chess sets go heavier and prettier, and you'll pay for the wood, not the playing quality.
If you need a set to learn on
None of this history helps you play better, so here's the short version. Any chess sets page worth its salt will list king height, square size, and piece weight, and those three numbers tell you more than the photos do. Skip anything with a king under 3 inches, because it will feel like playing with buttons.
Ivory is off the table, and that's a good thing. But there are modern sets carved and finished to a standard the old carvers would recognize, and the best luxury chess sets are where that conversation starts.
One thing to do this week: take whatever set you own, measure the king's height and the base diameter, then divide the base by your square size. If you land between 0.75 and 0.80, you've got a properly proportioned set. If you don't, now you know why it always felt slightly wrong.
Questions people ask me
Was the first chess set made of wood?
Probably, but nobody can prove it. Wood rots in the Indian and Persian climates where chess grew up, so no wooden set from that era survives. The oldest pieces we still have, the Afrasiab hoard from around 700 AD, are carved from ivory.
How old is the oldest surviving chess piece?
The Afrasiab pieces, found near Samarkand in 1977, date to roughly the 7th or 8th century AD, which makes them about 1,300 years old. Written references to chaturanga go back to 6th century India, but no pieces from that period have turned up.
What are the Lewis chessmen carved from?
Walrus ivory and sperm whale tooth, mostly. They were made in Norway around 1150 to 1200 and found in a sandbank at Uig on the Isle of Lewis in 1831. Of the 93 objects recovered, 78 are chessmen.