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A Visual History of Chessmen
2,500 BC Indus Valley The earliest ancestors of chess may have been played by the Indus Valley civilisation more than four thousand years ago. Clay figurines discovered in Lothal may be the earliest "chessmen".
The earliest surviving European description of chess is the Versus de scachis, a 10th C. poem found in the Einsiedeln Abbey in Switzerland, which praises the game and describes the board and how the pieces may move. Reflecting wartime austerity during the 1940s, simple travel sets, where chessmen were represented by symbols printed onto card or wooden tokens, were sent to soldiers on the front or in Red Cross parcels to prisoner-of-war camps (such as this one from the World Chess Hall of Fame, St. Louis, Missouri). In a forum thread, Langer related some biographic details: Biró, a strong chess player and carpenter, is from a Hungarian-speaking community in modern-day Romania and began producing these pieces in 1992.
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