纪录片《大英博物馆世界简史》 061刘易斯棋子（3）（在线收听）

This week, we're making an almost full turn of the globe around seven or eight hundred years ago, with porcelain in China, sculpture in Africa, and a throne from the Caribbean. We're also in Spain with a Jewish scientific instrument, but in this programme we're in Scandinavia and Scotland. Valuable objects are always markers of high status - but this week's objects show more than just wealth or power; the people who owned them were also showing off knowledge, taste and intellect.

For over five thousand years people have been playing board games, but chess is a relative newcomer - it seems to have been invented in India at some point after the year 500 AD. Over the next couple of hundred years, the game spread through the Middle East and on into Christian Europe, and in every place, the chess pieces were changed to reflect the society that played it. So in India, there are pieces named "war elephants", while in the Middle East, Islamic reservations about the human image ensured that all the pieces were virtually abstract. European pieces, by contrast, are often intensely human, and the Lewis Chessmen not only appear to show us particular kinds of characters, but strikingly reflect the structures of the great medieval power game as it was fought out across northern Europe, from Iceland and Ireland to Scandinavia and the Baltic.