It might not look like much to the untrained eye , but this straight piece of sandstone ( below ) could be the world ’s oldest known cheat piece .
John Oleson , an archeologist at the University of Victoria in Canada presented hisinterpretation of the rock pieceat the annual meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research on November 21 .
ground on old discoveries in the Near East , his analysis intimate that the small straightforward Harlan Fisk Stone was once used as a castle ( or castle ) piece for a chessboard . Unlike our modern theme of a castle art object , looking like a tall medieval tower , early Islamic rooks resemble an alter or a chariot .
Some of the earliest reference book to chess playing in the Islamic public can be found in texts that date back to 643 CE and the biz was pop by the end of the Umayyad caliphate in the eighth century CE .
The piece was first discovered in 1991 at the site of Humayma , an other Islamic trading post in the other seventh hundred found along the Via Nova Traiana , an ancient popish route that function as a bustling swop itinerary across the Middle East . base on this cradle , Oleson presumes the chess piece go out to a similar time .
At present , this is just Oleson ’s own rendering , so further work is needed to affirm the nature of the stone object . However , as it stands , this has the voltage to be the earliest known good example of a chess piece .
“ If the designation as a chess spell is correct , it would be the former know physical example for the simplify , nonobjective figure , and possibly the former known example of a chess piece altogether , ” Oleson explain inan abstractof the research .
Early incarnations of the game have been around for millennium , but chess as we love it perhaps originated in Southeast Asia , likely in present - mean solar day India around 1,500 years ago . From here , it drifted westwards through the migration of diplomat and the move of trade .
Some of the most famous – and surely the most worthful – historic cheat objet d’art are the so - name Lewis chessmen . The ornate walrus off-white pieces were carved at some point in the 12th or thirteenth century in Norway . In July 2019 , a freshly identified missing part , the equivalent weight of a Corvus frugilegus , sell at auction for £ 735,000(~$946,800 ) .
