there have been ways of describing moves from quite early on. manuscripts with move descriptions are known in arabic (9th century) and from europe (13th century).p275 these early notations are usually quite cumbersome; "the pawn of the king forward two houses".p229; 469; 848 this kind of notation is called "descriptive". in a descriptive notation each player describes squares from his own point of view, e.g. 1 p–k4 p–k4. a notation which uses labels for the ranks and files is called "algebraic". in this notation a square has only one label, e.g. 1 e4 e5.