![]() Michael Dummett, a prominent philosopher, academic, and one of the founders of the International Playing-Card Society (which today includes most prominent card scholars) suggests it was in the last quarter of the 1300s. Most sources agree that playing cards appeared fairly suddenly in Europe sometime before these known decks. (Some of the cards in the deck are probably much younger, since it appears that somebody snagged one from another deck to replace something missing, like using a chess piece as a hotel in Monopoly.) It’s not entirely complete deck, and date to some time around 1500. The other most famous very old deck is called the Mamluk cards, located in the Topkapı Palace Museum in Istanbul. There are 52 cards in four suits, with both numbered and face cards. It’s from the late 15th century, probably made in the Burgundian Netherlands territory, and very recognizable by modern standards. ![]() ![]() The oldest complete deck of playing cards known to the world is called the Cloisters Deck, named for the museum-the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s medieval Cloisters location-in which it was identified and dated. The Keir Collection of Islamic Art/Dallas Museum of Art A fragment of a mid-13th-century playing card (from the suit of cups) from Egypt. Tile games are probably older than card games, with dice games and board games so ancient they date as far back as recorded history goes. The line can get a little blurry, since you can play mah-jongg with cards and, I suppose, you could create a solid, un-shuffle-able set of poker cards out of wood, but scholars view them differently. Mah-jongg, for example, uses suits and numbers and symbols on individual game pieces, but these are, traditionally, tiles rather than cards. We are, to be clear, differentiating between cards and tiles. There are fragments of card-sized parchment dated to around the 13th century in a couple of museums, including the Keir Collection of Islamic Art in Dallas, but it’s not known for sure if these were actual playing cards or simply scraps of parchment that sort of look like playing cards. This is a recurring problem with candidates for the oldest playing cards in the world: It’s unclear if they even are playing cards at all. A couple of gamblers in Shandong, China, were arrested, and their cards and printing blocks confiscated. That 2009 study cites a 1294 police record as the earliest unambiguous record of playing cards. In fact nobody seems to have even suggested that yezi ge may have been a card game until the 15th century, which is right around the time that playing cards started to really take off worldwide. But a 2009 study found that there is no indication that the “leaves” actually referred to playing cards, and supposes that the “leaves” may have actually been the pages of the game’s instruction book-and that the game used dice, as other Chinese games of the time did. There are references to yezi ge being played as early as the 800s. Some sources cite a Chinese game called yezi ge, which translates to “game of leaves,” as the first game to use playing cards. “They come from Asia, that’s the one thing that’s rather 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 have their origins in either China or Persia, possibly India, but again, documentation is scarce. “There are different theories about that,” says Peter Endebrock, a playing card historian, scholar, and collector from Germany. The most basic question in the history of playing cards-where were they invented, and by whom-has no conclusive answer. An 1843 illustration of women in China playing cards. But where these all came from, well, that’s one of the mysteries. Given how much time we’re all spending at home right now, the idea of a vast array of playing card variations, all with their own world of games, is incredibly enticing. 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 fewer than 25 cards. One deck dominates the modern playing card industry: 52 cards, four familiar suits, two colors, inflexible dimensions. For something that is itself a document, playing cards are impressively undocumented.įor much of the world, clues to those mysteries are invisible. The amount of things, basic things, that nobody knows about playing cards is astounding. That’s how the hammock spread, too.īut playing cards, unlike hammocks, have an air of mystery about them. Starting, depending on who you ask, sometime around the ninth century, or the 11th, or the 13th, playing cards spread 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 know. The history of playing cards is, in one major way, just like the history of the hammock.
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