DANIEL WALKER: This chess set is made of fritware, a clay body mixed with ground quartz. It was created in Iran, in the late eleventh or early twelfth century. Yet the pieces appear abstract, and surprisingly modern by today’s standards. Curator Stefano Carboni explains why.

STEFANO CARBONI: The chess pieces were mostly figural, because they would include the king and the queen, and the elephant, and the horse, with horsemen. And the game was played mostly in the courtyard of mosques, because that was the place of gathering. And so, at some point, the caliph wasn’t very happy with that because within a sacred area, they didn’t want to allow figural objects to be shown. Since the chess game was prohibited at that point, someone came up with the idea of making the figures much more stylized. And so, when you look at the pieces, the king and the queen are represented by their throne. If you look at the horses, they are represented by a kind of head that protrudes from the front of the piece. If you look at the elephant, you can see two protrusions, which would be the two tusks. That’s why they kind of circumvented this prohibition, and so they were allowed to play chess again.