"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."
> being replaced by the bishop in the 15th and 16th centuries.
> The bishop is a modern European invention.
Actually the Atlas Obscura article shows that only a small portion of Europe adopted bishop. I often consider the English version of Wikipedia as the "universal" one, but this remembers me that it's likely to be biased, instead.
The pieces are mainly defined by their movement - not by their name or shape.
"[A piece that jumps two squares diagonally, leaping over any intermediate piece] was used in standard chess before being replaced by [a piece that moves along diagonals without jumping over intervening pieces] in the 15th and 16th centuries."
Of course whether the name changed or not is relevant for the structure of the wikipedia entries and impacts the degree of detail about the historical evolution.
By the way the English entry for "bishop" also mentions that the elephant-linked naming remains in some languages (and has a table of names/translations in 72 languages with 17 elephants in it):
"Derivatives of alfil survive in the languages of the two countries where chess was first introduced within Western Europe—Italian (alfiere) and Spanish (alfil) [...] In some Slavic languages (e.g. Czech/Slovak) the bishop is called [...] while in others it is still known as "elephant" (e.g. Russian slon)."
