Ganjifa, Ganjapa or Gânjaphâ,Many different spellings and transliterations can be found, such as Ganjafa, Ghendgifeh, Gunjeefa, Ganjapa, Kanjifa, Kanjifah and so on. In arabic, the spellings كنجفة or جنجفة or غنجفه can be found. The Persian word is ganjifeh (گنجفه). In Hindi the term is गंजीफा. is a card game and type of playing cards that are most associated with Persia and India. After Ganjifa cards fell out of use in Iran before the twentieth century, India became the last country to produce them.At the start of the 21st Century production in India was still ongoing in the town of Sawantvadi in the west, and Odisha in the east for example. See Abram (2003: 53) and Crestin-Billet (2002: 189). The form prevalent in Odisha is Ganjapa.
Description
Ganjifa cards are circular or rectangular,A rectangular example dated to around 1770 is held in the collection of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. See http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b55007315w/f13.item and traditionally hand-painted by artisans. The game became popular at the Mughal court, and lavish sets were made, from materials such as precious stone-inlaid ivory or tortoise shell (darbar kalam). The game later spread to the general public, whereupon cheaper sets (bazâr kalam) would be made from materials such as wood, palm leaf, stiffened cloth or pasteboard. Typically Ganjifa cards have coloured backgrounds, with each suit having a different colour. Different types exist, and the designs, number of suits, and physical size of the cards can vary considerably. With the exception of Mamluk Kanjifa and the Chads of Mysore, each suit contains ten pip cards and two court cards, the king and the vizier or minister. The backs of the cards are typically a uniform colour, without patterning.
History
Etymology The earliest origins of the cards remain uncertain, but Ganjifa cards as they are known today are believed to have originated in Persia. The first syllable is attributed to the Persian word ganj meaning "treasure." Gen. Houtum-Schindler suggested to Stewart Culin that the last two syllables in the word ganjifa may be derived from the Chinese chi-p'ai (= 紙牌 zhǐpái) meaning "playing cards" (Culin p928)Andy Pollett covers this line of argument on http://a_pollett.tripod.com/cards25.htm (retrieved 03/01/2015). In a related passage, William Chatto explains that an early Chinese term was ya-pae (= 牙牌 yápái “dominoes”) meaning "bone ticket", and that the term che-pae came later, meaning literally "paper ticket" (1848: 58). These different terms could account for the different spellings and pronunciations of 'Ganjifa'. These remain unproven theories, but the 18th century, traveler Carsten Niebuhr claimed to have seen Arabian merchants in Bombay playing with Chinese cards.(Niebuhr 1774: 173) In the 19th century Jean Louis Burckhardt visited Mecca and wrote that "cards are played in almost every Arab coffee-house (they use small Chinese cards)".(Burckhardt 1829: 377)
Ganjifa became popular in India under the Mughal emperors in the 16th century. The term has been used at times in many countries throughout the Middle East and western Asia. In Kuwait, the word janjifah has become a general term and so is applied to the internationally known French deck.In Arabic and Persian, there exists also the more general word for playing cards, waraq (ورق). This word can be found in texts that may refer to Ganjifa cards. For example the 16th century work Humayun-namah, about the Mughal emperor Humayun, uses the term waraq. The text describes a gambling game that was played during celebrations upon Humayun's return to Kabul in 1545. The game involved twelve players, each with twenty cards. Refer Beveridge (1902: 178, or 77 in the Persian section of the book).
Arabic sources and surviving cards
An exhibition in the British museum in 2013 noted "Playing cards are known in Egypt from the twelfth century AD. Ganjafeh was a popular card game in Iran and the Arab world." For example, the word 'kanjifah' ( كنجفة ) is written in the top right corner of the king of swords, on the Mamluk Egyptian deck witnessed by L.A. Mayer in the Topkapı Palace museum. The Mamluk cards are difficult to date with any certainty, but Mayer estimated these cards to be from the 15th century. The piece of playing card collected by Edmund de Unger may be from the period of the 12-14th centuries.(Mayer 1971: 9); See also the discussion on the early history of playing cards. The term Kanjifah can be found in the 1839 Calcutta edition of the One Thousand and One Nights, in Arabic, at the end of night 460. The first known reference can be found in a 15th-century Arabic text, written by the Egyptian historian Ibn Taghribirdi (died 1470). In his history of Egypt he mentions how the Sultan Al-Malik Al-Mu'ayyad played kanjafah for money when he was an emir.The text is described in English by Richard Ettinghausen, in his article "Further Comments on Mamluk Playing Cards". The quote refers to the work of Ibn Taghribirdi, called "Nujum al-zahira fi muluk Misr wa'l-Qahira". Ettinghausen notes that the reference comes in the section describing events from the year 820H or 1417-1418 AD (1984: 1194). The original Arabic text can be found online at https://books.google.com/books?id=QCvC39URTY4C&lpg=PP1&dq=editions%3Ae0XIWB1KOVMC&pg=PT535 (Google E-book) or http://shamela.ws/browse.php/book-11988/page-4536 . The relevant passage begins " ... وأخذ فى إصلاح أمر البلاد ".
The cards used by the Mamluks most likely entered Italy and Spain during the 1370s. As early as 1895, William Henry Wilkinson pointed out the similarities between Spanish and Italian playing cards and Chinese money-suited cards.Wilkinson, W.H. (1895) Chinese Origin of Playing Cards . The American Anthropologist, Volume VIII, pp. 61-78. He was unaware of the existence of the Mamluk cards since Mayer did not make his discovery until 1939. The similarities between the Latin European cards and Chinese money-suited cards become more apparent when the Mamluk Kanjifa is described. Looking at the actual games played with Ganjifa cards, Andrew Leibs points out that the cards are divided into strong and weak suits, and in one set the order of the numerical cards is reversed, so that the order runs King, Vizier, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10 the weakest. This feature can also be found in the old games of Tarot, Ombre, and Maw played in Europe, and the Chinese money-suited card game of 'Madiao'. He suggests these games may have a common ancestor.(2004: 130)
Kanjifa consists of 52 cards divided into four suits: Coins: This suit is in reverse order like in Chinese money-suited card games of Madiao and Khanhoo as well as in Tarot, Ombre, and Maw. The high ranking cards of this suit have blue panels (king, viceroy, second viceroy, 1, 2, 3).Gjerde, Tor. Mamluk cards, ca. 1500 at Historical playing cards. Retrieved 23 February 2016. Polo-sticks: Very likely originated from the Chinese suit of Strings of Coins. This suit is also in reverse order as indicated by the blue panels. This suit was converted into cudgels (bastos in Spain) or batons (bastoni Italy) as polo (chovgan) was unknown in Europe. Cups: The cups are called tuman, a Turkic, Mongol, and Jurchen word meaning "myriad". In China, there is a suit of myriads (). Wilkinson proposed that European cups were created by flipping the Chinese character. In Italy and Spain, this suit was inverted but in the Mamluk deck the blue panels are only found in the three court cards. Swords: This suit is in the logical order with blue panels on the king, viceroy, second viceroy, 10, 9, and 8. Andrea Pollett proposes that it originates from the Chinese suit of Tens () of Myriads.Pollett, Andrea. Relations between eastern and western cards at Andy's Playing Cards. Retrieved 23 February 2016.
However, in the “Latin”-suit system, it is the two ‘round’ suits, coins and cups, that have their pips arranged in reverse order, while the two ‘long’ suits follow the ‘natural’ order. This was transferred to French suits, with the two red suits, hearts and diamonds, being reversed, while the black suits, clubs and spades, are not.
Richard Ettinghausen speculated that importation of European cards killed off manufacturers in Egypt and the Levant. Trade continued after the conquest of these regions by the Ottomon Turks in 1517. They were also mentioned by Ibn Hajar al-Haytami. The lack of references or cards after the 16th century is likely due to the Ottomans taking a harder stance against cards and gambling which would last until the 19th century.
Persian sources
The earliest Persian reference is found in Ahli Shirazi's (died 1535) poem, 'Rubaiyat-e-Ganjifa', there is a short verse for each of the 96 cards in the 8-suited pack, showing that the Persians had the same suits and ranks as the Mughals.See Farsi wikipedia article :fa:رباعیات گنجفه, or for the full text refer to Shirazi & Rabbani (1965:668-684). The poem is also mentioned in the bibliography of Katip Çelebi page 832. The Austrian National Library possess eight Safavid lacquer paintings from the 16th-century that mimic ganjifeh cards. Despite being produced around the same time as Shirazi's poem, they do not match his description.They depict a mounted vizier playing polo with two assistants, 10 archers, 8 merchants, 8 farmers, 2 bulls, 3 lions, 10 lions, and 2 genii or demons. It is not known if they are purely artwork or supposed to represent a standard pattern of cards. See: Zimmerman, Rolf. Die verschollenen Spielkarten Zentralasiens at altacarta.com. Retrieved 31 October 2015. Shah Abbas II (r 1642-66) banned ganjifeh and the game decline precipitously with no known rules surviving into the present. Around the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, the game of As-Nas became more popular.The collection of the Fournier playing cards museum in Vittoria, Spain, contains As-Nas cards dated to the 18th and 19th centuries. The Cary playing card collection (Yale University) contains various Iranian cards, spanning a period from 1800 to 1905 (estimated dates). All the cards are of the As-Nas type, rather than the older 8-suited variety. In 1895, General Albert Houtum-Schindler described ganjifeh and As-Nas with the following comments:Quoted by Stewart Culin
"The word ganjifeh is in Persian now only employed for European playing-cards (four suits, ace to ten; three picture cards each suit), which, however, are also called rarak i âs - rarak i âsanâs - or simply âs, from the game âs or âsanâs. From travellers to Persia in the seventeenth century we know that a set of ganjifeh consisted of ninety or ninety-six cards in eight suits or colors.See for example Jean-Baptiste Tavernier (1676: 626), and Jean Chardin (1811: 451).