Ivory chessman signed by Yusuf al-Bahlili

This chess piece is carved from a cross-section of a great elephant tusk, 15.3 cm high, and is kept in the Cabinet des Médailles of the Bibliothèque nationale, Paris (Chab. 3271). ¹ It shows a moustached nobleman, perhaps a king, seated with poise on the howdah of a war elephant that lumbers into the fray flanked by four horsemen, its trunk seizing an enemy rider while the mahout, pitched forward from his seat, tugs at the rider's hand. ¹ A repeated relief of foot soldiers with swords and shields runs round the howdah's edge, and twisted limbs crushed beneath the elephant's hind legs imply its triumph. ¹ The front of the base has split off, as have the legs of the endangered rider's horse, and fragments of an arm and a leg on the elephant's head suggest a second, lost mahout. ¹

Dates proposed for it have ranged from the eighth century to the fifteenth. ¹ Souren Melikian-Chirvani recalls that in the nineteenth century it was widely believed to belong to a set given to the emperor Charlemagne by the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid, and he traces the confusion to its listing in the 1505 inventory of the treasury of the royal abbey of Saint-Denis, immediately after a lost ivory chess game recorded as Charlemagne's. ¹

Its underside is signed in Arabic "from the work of Yusuf al-Bahlili"; for Melikian-Chirvani, the plain Kufic lettering and the formula "from the work of" mean the piece cannot be later than the end of the eleventh or the beginning of the twelfth century. ¹ Several details link it to the eastern Iranian world: the foot soldiers' boots of an early eastern Iranian type, their stylised marching pose, and the horse trappings — stirrups, hanging discs and rectangular saddle cloths — known from Sasanian silver and pre-Islamic vessels of Central Asia and Khurasan. ^{1 2} From this he concludes that it was reasonably made at a centre in northwestern India where Iranian military equipment was used, probably a dependency of the Ghaznavid sultanate, which after the conquests of Mahmud of Ghazni ruled from Ghazni a kingdom from the Tigris to the Ganges until 1173. ² He reserves a final judgement until a fuller study is made. ¹