The history of playing cards is, in one important way, just like the history of the hammock. Beginning, depending on who you ask, somewhere around the ninth century, or the 11th, or the 13th, playing cards became popular because everyone who saw them for the first time immediately recognized how much fun they could be, tried to get some for themselves, and introduced them to everyone they knew. That's how it spread and the hammock.
But playing cards, unlike hammocks, have an air of mystery about them. The amount of things, basic things, that nobody knows about playing cards is amazing. For something that is a record in itself, playing cards are remarkably unrecordable.
For much of the world, the clues to these mysteries are invisible. The deck that dominates the modern playing card industry has: 52 cards, four known suits, two suits, rigid dimensions. But it's not the only deck. In other decks, there are bells and acorns and swords, cards that are circular or incredibly tall and thin, decks with more than a hundred or less than 25 cards. Given how much time we're all spending at home right now, the idea of a huge variety of playing card variations, all with their own game world, is incredibly tempting. But where all this came from, well, that's one of the mysteries.
The most basic question in the history of playing cards – where were they invented and by whom – has no definitive answer. "There are different theories about it," says Peter Endebrock, a historian, scholar and collector from Germany. "They come from Asia, that's the only thing that's pretty clear, but where exactly they came from and how they came to Europe, that's not clear." Playing card historians generally assume that playing cards originated in either China or Persia, possibly India, but again, documentation is scarce.
Some sources mention a Chinese game called yezi ge , which translates to "card game", as the first game to use playing cards. There are references to yezi ge being played as early as the 800s. But a 2009 study found that there is no indication that the "sheets" actually refer to playing cards, and speculates that the "sheets" may actually have been the pages of the game's instruction book—and that the game used dice, like other Chinese games of the time. In fact, no one seems to have even suggested that yezi ge might have been a card game until the 15th century, which is right around the time that playing cards really started to take off worldwide. This 2009 study cites a police record from 1294 as the earliest clear record of playing cards. Some gamblers in Shandong, China were arrested and their cards and blocks confiscated.
This is a recurring problem with candidates for the world's oldest playing cards: It's unclear if they're playing cards at all. There are card-sized fragments of parchment dating to around the 13th century in a few museums, including the Keir Collection of Islamic Art in Dallas, but it is not known for certain whether these were actual playing cards or simply pieces of parchment of this kind that look like playing cards.
To be clear, we differentiate between cards and tiles. Mah-jongg, for example, uses suits and numbers and symbols on individual game pieces, but these are, traditionally, tiles rather than cards. Cards are printed, tiles are sculpted. The line can get a little blurry, since you can play mah-jongg with cards and, I suppose, you could make a solid, unshuffled set of poker cards out of wood, but scholars see it differently. Tile games are probably older than card games, dice games, and board games so ancient that they date back to recorded history.
The oldest complete deck known to the world is called Cloisters Deck , named after the museum – the medieval Cloisters site of the Metropolitan Museum of Art – in which it was identified and dated. It is from the late 15th century, probably made in the Burgundian territory of the Netherlands, and is very recognizable by modern standards. There are 52 cards in four suits, with both numbered and personal cards. The other most famous very old deck is called Mamluk cards, located in the Topkapi Museum in Istanbul. It's not quite a complete deck and dates to somewhere around 1500. (Some of the cards in the deck are probably much younger, since it looks like someone grabbed one from another deck to replace something missing, like using a chess piece as a hotel in Monopoly.)
Most sources agree that playing cards appeared quite suddenly in Europe sometime before these well-known decks. Michael Dummett, a prominent philosopher, academic and one of the founders of the International Playing-Card Society (which today includes most of the prominent card scholars) suggests that it was in the last quarter of the 1300s. This is around the time of the significant interaction between of Christian Europe and Islamic forces, in the form of the Crusades. During the Crusades, huge groups of Christian and Muslim soldiers fought, but probably not only that. “When the soldiers had nothing to do, which happens most of the time, what do they do? Today they play video games, but in those days they played cards,” says Emilia Maggio, historian, translator and board member of the International Playing-Card Society. Maggio grew up in Sicily,
It seems entirely possible, though unproven, that playing cards were introduced to Europe via bored soldiers during the Crusades. These Mamluk cards in Constantinople, for example, are basically identical in layout to modern Spanish cards, which makes sense, given that Granada was literally an emirate until 1492.
Once playing cards came into their hands, Europeans loved them immensely. At first they were mostly for the rich, because they had to be hand-painted and could be extremely elaborate, with exotic dyes and beautiful designs. The Mameluke cards for example, they are so well decorated that it can be difficult to tell which card each one is. Even before Gutenberg's printing press, other, less sophisticated presses could create playing cards, since they require far fewer variations than, say, a book. Individual countries or regions in Europe created who knows how many different decks. A wealthy son of a Florentine family may have come home after playing cards on his Grand Tour and asked a local painter to make a set of cards for himself, creating a collection of different decks.
The Cloisters deck uses hunting themed figures, which were quite common. Figures can be hunting dogs, deer, decoys, things like that. Some had figures representing the ruling families of Europe, such as a fleur-de-lis for France. But in the late 15th century, with the printing press and the popularity of cards reaching critical mass, the design and layout began to be standardized. There are some obvious advantages to such recreational standardization. You can play the same games with different decks because all those decks contain the same cards, in the same number, with the same faces.
But there was no single dominant pattern, at least not yet. In Europe, four different decks came into widespread use: German, Swiss, French, and Latin (the latter is used in Spain and Italy and has very slightly different designs of the same suits). These are delineated from the late 1400s onwards. It is assumed that the Latin deck came first, since it is almost exactly the same as the Islamic Mamluk cards, followed by the Swiss, the German, and then the French.
Mamluk cards, as well as modern Italian and Spanish decks, use a deck of usually 40 cards, although there are sometimes decks of 48 or 52. They are divided into four suits: Cups, Coins, Swords, and Clubs (the latter sometimes called spades or forceps). A 40-card deck has "dot cards", or number cards, from one to seven, along with three cards, of each suit. Face cards are fante (knave, or jack), cavallo (knight) and re (king). These words are Italian. The Spanish versions are similar, as are many words in Italian and Spanish.
German playing cards usually have 32 or 36 cards, in four suits: acorns, hearts, hearts and bells. The closely related Swiss deck has 36 cards in four suits, with Roses in place of Leaves. None of these three decks – Latin, German or Swiss – divides these suits further by suit. Only the French do that. German cards also differ in their composition. To arrive at these 32 cards, each of the four suits has “pip cards”, or number cards, from seven to 10. The cards are unter ("under knave", a junior officer), ober ("over knave," senior officer), könig (king) and donkey (ace). These pip and face cards are essentially the same in the Swiss deck.
The French deck is by far the most popular deck in the world. Even in countries with their own standard decks, like Italy or Germany, people often play with the French deck. It has 52 cards of four figures (Cups, Diamonds, Spades, Swords), in two suits (red and black). The popularity of the French deck is due to a number of factors. First, suits are easily the simplest to design, which makes them easy and cheap to print. According to another, this deck was the favorite of the most aggressive imperialist powers of the last two centuries: France, the United Kingdom and the United States. It also happens to be the deck used for some of the world's most popular games, including bridge and poker, although the popularity of these games may be a result of the deck's widespread use rather than the cause.
These four decks are the most popular in the West, but they are not the only decks out there. Leaving aside the decks that are printed for specific games like Uno, there are quite a few of them. We also have to put aside the tarot decks, which is something else.
Just because it's exciting, here's the tarot deal. Researchers, especially Dummett (who is a legend in the community of card scholars), have set out to demystify tarot decks. Tarot decks came later than regular decks and consisted simply of new cards added to existing decks, first in Italy in the mid-1400s, where they were called "triumph decks." (This later morphed into "trump".) According to all research, they were not designed for any occult divination, but rather for some fun new games, versions of which are still played today. Tarot games are annoyingly complex card games, kind of like bridge. The occult trend of cartomancy only dates back to the late 1700s, created by a French pastor who believed (completely wrongly but very seriously) that the cards were an epitome of ancient Egyptian wisdom passed down from Thoth, the Egyptian god of knowledge. This pastor has provided zero documentation of his beliefs, and scholars are pretty convinced there is no truth to them, which makes using tarot cards for divination a bit like trying to see the future with a pack of Uno cards. But tarot cards are fancy and cool, so cartomancy took off.
Anyway, there are a lot of decks outside of Europe. Japan, before European contact, played matching games with painted shells. Interaction with Portuguese traders before Japan's isolation period introduced playing cards, which eventually evolved into more Japanese ones. A game, the uta-garuta , is a matching card game in which classic poems have been written. Later versions of Japanese playing cards include the hanafuda , or the flowers, which have 12 flower-themed suits, one for each month, and 48 cards in a deck. Nintendo was originally founded to sell hanafuda cards and, in fact, still does.
In China, a deck called "money-suited" cards is believed by some to be an ancestor of the Islamic and European four-suit decks. This deck contains 38 cards in four suits, all based on money: coins, rows of coins, myriad strings, and tens of myriads (of strings, of coins). China, befitting a giant and diverse country that may or may not have invented playing cards in the first place, has far more decks than that. Some games had non-card pieces – such as those in dominoes or Chinese chess – turned into cards.
India has its own older style of play, although it is much less standardized than other decks. Most, though not all, of these decks, called ganjifa in most of the country and ganjapa in the state of Odisha, they are circular. The designs, card numbers and suit numbers vary tremendously – from eight to 12 suits and 48 to 120 cards. And some cards are printed in circular Indian style, but with French suits and card designs.
There are many, smaller or recently extinct decks out there. One of my favorites is the deck of Galician Jews, who made their own cards to avoid using the European ones, loaded with Christian imagery. The deck of cards, and the blackjack-like game played with it, is called kvitlech and the deck contains only 24 cards. It's mostly dead now, but it was played at Chanukah, where it must have been a lot more fun than playing dreidel.
For the European decks, how and why their particular suit suites were developed, no one really knows. "There are many theories about this, but I don't really believe in any of them, because they can't be proven," says Endebrock. All these theories seem like guesses, stories that fit only the evidence. Perhaps some suits are meant to suggest the aristocracy and others the peasantry (Diamonds and Spades). Perhaps some were for peace and some for war (Cups and Swords). What seems more likely is random: a rich count in Italy or Bavaria or wherever decided to print some cards for fun and asked his painter to make some acorns, because he liked acorns.
Today, the popularity of the French deck and the games that use it have a suffocating effect on most of the other decks out there. "At the beginning of the last century, there was a clear division where people used French and where they used German," says Endebrock, who is German. "But today they use French uniform cards everywhere in Germany." This is the story worldwide. But maybe you shouldn't. I never threw down an Unter of Bells triumphantly. It's worth doing.