[HN Gopher] Medieval game pieces emerge from the ruins of a Germ...
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Medieval game pieces emerge from the ruins of a German castle
Author : RobertJaTomsons
Score : 132 points
Date : 2024-06-11 09:51 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (news.artnet.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (news.artnet.com)
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| That 'horse' looks like a bishop to me. The head is far more
| person-shaped than horse-shaped. And that necklace - surely
| homage to a surplice or other ecclesiastical garb or jewelry?
| duxup wrote:
| I am thinking a horse with possibly some sort of head covering
| / armor with cutouts for the eyes. Thus the triangle shape.
|
| Possibly a horse's mane in the back:
|
| https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/knight-in-chess-springer-ein...
| jcynix wrote:
| Horses where "decorated" with cloth in medieval times, cf. this
| image
|
| https://fotos.mediafreedom.at/theater/sonstiges/xl/31-honori...
| Symbiote wrote:
| The caparison also served as a light armour, which could
| deflect or reduce the impact of arrows.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caparison
| xandrius wrote:
| Absolutely a bishop to me too but hey, who knows.
| furyofantares wrote:
| Historians
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Who are guessing?
| furyofantares wrote:
| Using evidence rather than just "damn that looks like a
| bishop to me". There's lots of other old chess sets to
| compare to, and it sounds like these are from 11th/12th
| century which would be hundreds of years before bishops
| are thought to have been added to chess.
| compiler-guy wrote:
| Well, who you gonna believe?
|
| A. Some random folks on the internet who have looked at a
| single picture of a chess piece and maybe play
| themselves, but apparently no other qualifications.
|
| Or:
|
| B. Medieval historians who have years of education and
| study, deep familiarity with the subject matter and
| publish books and papers on the subject, as well as
| consulting with historians of chess, and who have
| compared it to other well known, well studied chess sets
| from the era.
|
| I don't think the latter are infallible, but without
| something pretty compelling from the former (evidence?
| what's that?), I'm gonna go with the latter.
| pdw wrote:
| This chess piece likely predates the introduction of the
| bishop. The set would have had elephants instead, which would
| have been depicted with two tusks. See e.g.
| https://www.thehistoricgamesshop.co.uk/early-medieval-chess....
| shagie wrote:
| From https://www.lovecpokladu.cz/en/home/the-mystery-of-
| medieval-...
|
| https://www.lovecpokladu.cz/img/2023/gm4pro/Sandomierzske%20...
|
| In that set you can see the rook being castle like on the end,
| the knight with a "triangular stick out head thing" and an
| elephant which has two bumps that at first glance made me think
| breasts rather than tusks. Then the inner two pieces with the
| king and queen.
|
| The triangular head, however, is that of a horse's head rather
| than an upside-down miter or jewelry.
|
| Another view of it from a different angle -
| https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FsPKPECX0AEwYP6?format=jpg&name=...
|
| The bishop itself was a later introduction -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bishop_(chess)
|
| > The bishop's predecessor in medieval chess, shatranj
| (originally chaturanga), was the alfil, meaning "elephant",
| which could leap two squares along any diagonal, and could jump
| over an intervening piece. As a consequence, each fil was
| restricted to eight squares, and no fil could attack another.
| The modern bishop first appeared shortly after 1200 in Courier
| chess.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| The 'boobs' could be just that, representing the queen.
|
| That 'chess set' isn't even symmetrical! Two with triangular
| 'heads', one with 'boobs', one with a square projection!
|
| Couldn't those two with grooves represent bishops? More
| typical of a mitre than a crown, but hey this was Germany,
| maybe that's correct there. And yeah, that last link to the
| early 'bishop' has a slot cut in it too.
|
| Unless they found it with the board set up, then I'm gonna
| have doubts about any conclusions about correlations with
| modern chess pieces.
| shagie wrote:
| There are two "dual front bumped" pieces that are in the
| position of the bishop today.
|
| There is one piece next to the king that has the same
| structure, except no bit on the top signifying the crown.
|
| That set is hand carved out of deer bone - this isn't a
| super-high quality set (compare with
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_chessmen )
|
| Another set with a similar abstract design -
| https://www.thehistoricgamesshop.co.uk/early-medieval-
| chess.... - https://sites.create-
| cdn.net/siteimages/33/6/5/336500/18/8/3...
|
| > This example of 11th or 12th century chess pieces from
| Scandinavia, now in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum
| Nuremberg, shows two kings and a smaller, though similar,
| queen at the back right. On the left hand side are four
| rooks, and at the front four knights. There are two bishops
| between the knights and the two kings.
|
| The pieces between the knights and the kings again have a
| design that makes me think of breasts again.
|
| However, setting aside that those are bishops / elephants
| (with tusks), the knights at issue are without decoration
| have the triangular shaped heads sticking forward.
|
| Here is an Iranian set: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shatr
| anj#/media/File:Chess_Set...
|
| You can see the horse like shape of the knight and two
| breast-suggestive elephant pieces.
|
| https://thomasguild.blogspot.com/2013/10/byzantine-
| chess.htm... is a byzantine set. https://blogger.googleuser
| content.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg...
|
| > The separate chess pieces of the Sandomierz chess set.
| All have double/triple decorative lines at the bottom and
| belong to one playing set. First row: pawn (top view),
| bishop/elephant (side view), king (overview), counsellor
| (side view). Second row: king (side view), knight (front
| view), pawn (overview) and rook (side view). All images of
| this chess set are from the Sandomierz museum website.
|
| The bishop/elephant again shows the tusks. The second row
| knight doesn't show the triangular shaped head as well
| though. You will see that the counsellor (Byzantine doesn't
| have the queen) is similar to that of the king, without the
| crown.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| I, too, initially thought the 'horse' piece was a person with
| cartoonish eyes similar to the Lewis chessmen:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_chessmen#/media/File:Lew...
| joshuaheard wrote:
| Looking at some of the links to other finds, it looks like
| only one of the players' pieces has the "eyes". I wonder if
| that is an insignia to differentiate the players since I
| don't see a color difference.
| boredhedgehog wrote:
| The 'Bishop' theme for that piece is an English peculiarity. It
| doesn't exist in any other language.
| globalise83 wrote:
| I do find it amazing that even in a place like Germany with
| excellent state-level surveying and archaeology services, as well
| as at least two centuries of enthusiastic amateurs, there are
| still undiscovered castles lurking in the forests...
| hollerith wrote:
| There _aren 't_. I'm guessing you live in a country with vast
| tracts of wilderness like the US or Canada. Germany is not like
| that.
|
| This archeological site is a pile of rocks that once was a
| castle. (The rocks are probably mixed with dirt and plant life
| and might have been completely buried.)
| fumeux_fume wrote:
| I don't think the parent comment meant fully formed, intact
| castles, but rather the ruins of them.
| Swizec wrote:
| > there are still undiscovered castles lurking in the forests
|
| As with all anthropology/archaeology, there is a big difference
| between "discovered" [by science] and "known" [by the locals].
| The locals most certainly know of every castle and even those
| castles that are now ruins probably have local legends/stories
| of how there used to be a castle in such and such place.
|
| But none of that counts until an archaeologist/anthropologist
| comes and writes it down. They then bombastically proclaim to
| have discovered a thing! (that all the locals already knew
| about for decades/centuries)
|
| Sauce: my partner studied anthropology and this was a running
| joke in her program. It is very rare for an academic to be the
| first to discover anything. Usually they get tipped off by
| someone local who doesn't count
| usrusr wrote:
| While there can certainly be case where items of local
| knowledge haven't been cataloged by (recent) science, I think
| that you are giving far too much credit to that side. It's
| not as if there was much oral tradition going on with ancient
| stories passed on from generation to generation, that just
| doesn't happen all that much in a place that had print media
| or better for half a millennium.
|
| What we do have is knowledge encloded in place names
| ("Burgstall"), but locals won't be any wiser about the
| history of the thing unless they happen to be the type of
| person who collects and consumes books written by local
| history science buffs of earlier generations.
|
| A chance discovery like this usually happens when some known
| (usually to science far more than to locals!) but not
| recently disturbed site has to make room for an
| infrastructure project and the archeologists are sent in to
| make use of the last chance to see.
| Swizec wrote:
| You are right. The details are usually more known to
| science than to locals and infrastructure/building projects
| spur many archaelogical digs in Europe. To the point that
| most projects have to budget an archaeology time delay
| because you're always going to hit _something_.
|
| My comment was about completely undiscovered ruins/sites.
| Those are rare. Someone somewhere (could be a notebook)
| usually knows about it.
|
| As for "no oral traditions in a country with long-standing
| books" - the Brothers Grimm famously started writing down
| oral traditions in the 1800's. That's only 200 years ago :)
| For a long long time in most of europe nobody bothered to
| write down what the peasants have to say.
| usrusr wrote:
| Yeah, completely undiscovered does not happen, with the
| exception perhaps of battle sites which seem to keep
| catching archeologists by surprise. What does happen is
| discoveries of the kind "so we dug up this old thing,
| because it's in the way of some project, and we
| discovered that it contains identifiable traces of
| something much older that we did not expect."
|
| The concept we both seem to be tiptoeing around is the
| idea that the best conservation approach is leaving it in
| the ground, for future archeologists to explore or not
| explore. I believe that this is a central principle of
| the modern approach to archeology, and one we laymen
| struggle to really take in. Yes, there are many sites
| known to science, but not analyzed to destruction by
| science.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > They then bombastically proclaim to have discovered a
| thing! (that all the locals already knew about for
| decades/centuries)
|
| See also _" Your finger, you fool"_.
|
| RIP, Terry Pratchett.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| It is sort-of the other way round.
|
| There is an immense number of dilapidated castles, keeps,
| strongholds or oppida all over Europe, with most of those
| barely visible to an untrained eye, and they have been
| catalogized for decades.
| jfengel wrote:
| As the other replies have pointed out, there aren't really
| undiscovered castles.
|
| But I do recommend visiting Germany, where there are way, way
| more castles than you might expect. In particular I can
| recommend the "Castle Way" along the Neckar River. Every bend
| in the river has its own castle, just dozens and dozens of
| them.
|
| Most are not especially dramatic. Many are just ruins; others
| are literally just people's homes now. Still, it's a little bit
| like a D&D fantasy world where there really are just castles
| everywhere. (And yeah, some of them have genuine dungeons.)
| stefanka wrote:
| We discussed a fun fact in the office lately: There is an
| estimated 25K castles in Germany (1) while there are only 13K
| Mac Donald's in the U.S. (2)
|
| (1) https://www.dw.com/en/does-germany-really-
| have-25000-castles...
|
| (2) https://www.scrapehero.com/location-reports/McDonalds-
| USA/
| cuSetanta wrote:
| Lived in a small town along the Jagst river for a while,
| which joins the Neckar at Heilbronn. You get Castle Fatigue
| fairly quickly with how many castles there are around there.
| Its hard to care about the 15th castle you pass in as many
| minutes. And I grew up in Ireland, which itself has a lot of
| castle dotted around the place.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > Every bend in the river has its own castle
|
| The purpose of those castles was to extract money from the
| river traffic.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| More like living on a body of water was like having access
| to a highway. And while a lot of trade happened along a
| river, it's also a risk for invasion from armies and
| raiding parties, hence the need for protection.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Having lived in Germany for a while, and toured the
| castles along the Rhein, I was told by the tour guides
| that toll extraction was their purpose.
| digging wrote:
| Tour guides of historical sites are often completely or
| even willfully wrong about facts like this, but in a
| sense almost all castles exist to exert control over
| nearby resources so they're probably right.
| Archelaos wrote:
| It is not that somebody suddenly stumbled upon this castle. It
| was mentioned in an inventory book from 1454 and in another
| book form 1596. Also local field names indicated a castle. It
| is quite common in such cases that there are a couple of
| canidates for the location of a castle mentioned in a source.
| It required a thorough excavation to substantiate such a
| hypothesis.
|
| Here is a description of the site together with a photo:
| https://www.unsere-burgen.de/de/Burgen-im-LK-Reutlingen/Burg...
| Judging from the photo, there is no immediately obvious
| indication that this free standing rock was the site of a
| castle.
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| A ruined castle was an excellent material source for
| constructing other buildings. That's why they tended to
| disappear if reasonably accessible.
| FlyingSnake wrote:
| I'm sure there are several ruins of castles in the
| Saxon/Bohemian Switzerland region. It's a vast area full of
| rocky terrain and old ruins might be hard to find without
| scientific equipment.
| Isamu wrote:
| >"In the Middle Ages, chess was one of the seven skills that a
| good knight should master,"
|
| Where is that attested in writing of the time?
| shagie wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_chess#cite_ref-Vale...
|
| > Peter Alfonsi, in his work Disciplina Clericalis, listed
| chess among the seven skills that a good knight must acquire.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disciplina_clericalis
|
| > Disciplina clericalis is a book by Petrus Alphonsi. Written
| in Latin at the beginning of the 12th century, it is a
| collection of 33 fables and tales and is the oldest European
| book of its kind.
|
| The English translation -
| https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Disciplina_Clericalis
|
| https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Disciplina_Clericalis/Tale_4
|
| > Then, the accomplishments are: Riding, swimming, archery,
| boxing, the chase, chess, writing verse. The virtues
| (industriae) are: not to be a glutton, a drunkard, a sybarite,
| not to be given to violence, to lying, covetous, and of evil
| life." The disciple: "At the present time I do not believe
| there is any man of this kind."
|
| The latin passage (from
| https://la.wikisource.org/wiki/Disciplina_clericalis ):
|
| > Probitates vero hae sunt: Equitare, natare, sagittare,
| cestibus certare, aucupare, scaccis ludere, versificari.
| hugh-avherald wrote:
| Glad to see that unrealistic job application requirements
| have been around for centuries.
| wumbo wrote:
| This was already gold but went platinum with: "At the present
| time I do not believe there is any man of this kind."
| zwieback wrote:
| I grew up not far from this site but have been living in Oregon
| for 30 years. One of the things that still strikes me when I go
| back to visit is just how much old stuff was around me in my
| childhood. Over there it's like "oh, let's put a nail salon in
| this 400 year old building". Here it's like: "oh, there's a 100
| year old barn, we must turn it into a heritage site."
| philk10 wrote:
| Yeh, moved to Michigan from England and was taken to the oldest
| pub in the city, 120 years old. My local pub used to be a
| hunting lodge used by Henry VIII
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| In my hometown in Germany there's a bakery that's been in
| basically continous operation since about the time
| Christopher Columbus set sail. Annoyingly modern web site,
| and of course in German: https://www.fidelisbaeck.de/
| space_oddity wrote:
| I really want to pay a visit
| INTPenis wrote:
| Yeah they should have kept the website in its original 15th
| century markup.
| space_oddity wrote:
| Will always remember my visit to The Old Wellington pub in
| Manchester. It was built in 1552 and is the oldest building
| in the city.
| larsrc wrote:
| Friends of mine lived for a while in Rennes in one of the
| only buildings to survive a fire in the 18th century. It
| was from 15-something and had nary a right angle to it. A
| bit scary to go up the stairs, but quite cool.
| ainiriand wrote:
| As a kid I used to play football using this building as goal
| https://maps.app.goo.gl/9iBkX42RF6zUgXJd9
|
| Which is like 1k years old aprox.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| As a Czech, I feel the difference between Central Europe and
| the Mediterranean.
|
| In CZ, we have about 1000 years of written history. A building
| from the 11th century is ancient and rare.
|
| In Italy: well, this city is called Naples (Nea Polis = New
| City in Greek), because it is barely 2600 years old.
| sologoub wrote:
| Things get occasionally found that are older, but the
| prevalent building material has been wood and it doesn't
| preserve nearly as well as rock. For example:
| https://www.livescience.com/ancient-cemetery-fortress-
| discov...
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| I had trouble loading the article, so here's the image:
|
| https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2024/06/medieval-gam...
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| Thanks!
|
| That trapezoid-faced dude with the gear feels like he's just
| begging to have an indie puzzle platformer made about him.
| space_oddity wrote:
| That sounds like a great concept for an indie puzzle
| platformer!
| throwway120385 wrote:
| I'm pretty sure that's a knight piece. It looks like a horse.
| nickt wrote:
| The inverted triangle piece reminds me of the Lewis Chessmen.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_chessmen
| LordHeini wrote:
| Nice that they provide the 3d scans.
|
| I want to 3d print the knight and it seems so strange that I can
| do that with a thing someone made 800 years ago.
| nestorD wrote:
| You might also like the Lewis Chessmen 3D scans:
| https://sketchfab.com/britishmuseum/collections/lewis-chessm...
| tajstar wrote:
| I'm amazed that the six-sided dice is so old and yet we still use
| it since it's such a great tool to get a random number for a
| game.
| Tuna-Fish wrote:
| IIRC the design was already established, identical to what we
| use now except for the material, 5000 years ago.
| dark-star wrote:
| Ha, cool, this was found literally 5 minutes from where I live.
|
| I hadn't known about this if I hadn't seen this article on HN
| msephton wrote:
| Very cool, and I love the 3D models they've made available to
| view and zoom in on.
| not_your_mentat wrote:
| Do opposite sides of the D6 they found add to 7, the way God
| intended?
| not_your_mentat wrote:
| OMG, they do. This article just upped my dice snobbery game.
| croemer wrote:
| Original press release in German:
| https://www.staatsanzeiger.de/landesgeschichte/schachfigur-a...
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