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How did the elephant piece in shatranj become the bishop?
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chess
Position of chess pieces at the beginning of a game. The pieces are placed on the two ranks closest to the player. In the closest rank, pieces are arranged from left to right: rook, knight, bishop, queen, king, bishop, knight, and rook. In front of that rank, each square has a pawn.
In the game of shatranj, the piece known as the elephant was limited to a two-square diagonal jump. As the game evolved and rules were standardized in Europe, this piece underwent a significant transformation to become the modern bishop.1
Following major rule changes that gained popularity after 1475, the bishop's movement was altered to allow it to traverse any number of squares diagonally, more than doubling its original range. This change, alongside the transformation of the counselor into the powerful queen, shifted the nature of the game from the slower, trench-warfare style of medieval chess to a more dynamic version where checkmate could be achieved much more rapidly.1