A playing card is a piece of specially prepared card stock, heavy paper, thin cardboard, plastic-coated paper, cotton-paper blend, or thin plastic that is marked with distinguishing motifs. Often the front (face) and back of each card has a finish to make handling easier. They are most commonly used for playing card games, and are also used in magic tricks, cardistry, card throwing, and card houses; cards may also be collected. Playing cards are typically palm-sized for convenient handling, and usually are sold together in a set as a deck of cards or pack of cards.
The most common type of playing card in the West is the French-suited, standard 52-card deck, of which the most widespread design is the English pattern, followed by the Belgian-Genoese pattern.Pattern Sheet 80 at i-p-c-s.org. Retrieved 23 August 2020. However, many countries use other, traditional types of playing card, including those that are German, Italian, Spanish and Swiss-suited. Tarot cards (also known locally as Tarocks or tarocchi) are an old genre of playing card that is still very popular in France, central and Eastern Europe and Italy. Customised tarot card decks are also used for divination; including tarot card reading and cartomancy. Asia, too, has regional cards such as the Japanese hanafuda, Chinese money-suited cards, or Indian ganjifa. The reverse side of the card is often covered with a pattern that will make it difficult for players to look through the translucent material to read other people's cards or to identify cards by minor scratches or marks on their backs.
Playing cards are available in a wide variety of styles, as decks may be custom-produced for competitions, casinos and magicians (sometimes in the form of trick decks), made as promotional items, or intended as souvenirs, artistic works, educational tools, or branded accessories. Decks of cards or even single cards are also collected as a hobby or for monetary value.
History China
Playing cards were most likely invented during the Tang dynasty around the 9th century, as a result of the usage of woodblock printing technology.. "it is also now rather well-established that dominoes and playing-cards were originally Chinese developments from dice." "Numbered dice, anciently widespread, were on a related line of development which gave rise to dominoes and playing-cards (+9th-century China)." The reference to a leaf game in a 9th-century text known as the Collection of Miscellanea at Duyang (), written by Tang dynasty writer Su E, is often cited in connection to the existence of playing cards. However the connection between playing cards and the leaf game is disputed. The reference describes Princess Tongchang, daughter of Emperor Yizong of Tang, playing the "leaf game" in 868 with members of the Wei clan, the family of the princess's husband. The first known book on the "leaf" game was called the Yezi Gexi and allegedly written by a Tang woman. It received commentary by writers of subsequent dynasties. The Song dynasty (960–1279) scholar Ouyang Xiu (1007–1072) asserts that the "leaf" game existed at least since the mid-Tang dynasty and associated its invention with the development of printed sheets as a writing medium. However, Ouyang also claims that the "leaves" were pages of a book used in a board game played with dice, and that the rules of the game were lost by 1067.Parlett, David, "The Chinese "Leaf" Game", March 2015.
Other games revolving around alcoholic drinking involved using playing cards of a sort from the Tang dynasty onward. However, these cards did not contain suits or numbers. Instead, they were printed with instructions or forfeits for whoever drew them.
The earliest dated instance of a game involving cards occurred on 17 July 1294 when the Ming Department of Punishments caught two gamblers, Yan Sengzhu and Zheng Zhugou, playing with paper cards. Wood blocks for printing the cards were impounded, together with nine of the cards.Lo, Andrew. (2000). The Game of Leaves: An Inquiry into the Origin of Chinese Playing Cards. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 63(3), 389–406.
William Henry Wilkinson suggests that the first cards may have been actual paper currency which doubled as both the tools of gaming and the stakes being played for, similar to trading card games. Using paper money was inconvenient and risky so they were substituted by play money known as "money cards". One of the earliest games in which we know the rules is madiao, a trick-taking game, which dates to the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644). Fifteenth-century scholar Lu Rong described it as being played with 38 "money cards" divided into four suits: 9 in coins, 9 in strings of coins (which may have been misinterpreted as sticks from crude drawings), 9 in myriads (of coins or of strings), and 11 in tens of myriads (a myriad is 10,000). The two latter suits had Water Margin characters instead of pips on them with Chinese to mark their rank and suit. The suit of coins is in reverse order with 9 of coins being the lowest going up to 1 of coins as the high card.Money-suited playing cards at The Mahjong Tile Set
Persia
Despite the wide variety of different patterns, the suits show a uniformity of structure. Every suit contains twelve cards with the top two usually being the court cards of king and vizier and the bottom ten being pip cards. Some decks can contain 8 suits to make a 96-card deck, like the deck for Ganjifa. Half the suits use reverse ranking for their pip cards. There are many motifs for the suit pips but some include coins, clubs, jugs, and swords which resemble later Mamluk and Latin suits. Michael Dummett speculated that Mamluk cards may have descended from an earlier deck which consisted of 48 cards divided into four suits each with ten pip cards and two court cards.Playing card basics at the International Playing-Card Society website
Egypt
By the 11th century, playing cards were spreading throughout the Asian continent and later came into Egypt. The oldest surviving cards in the world are four fragments found in the Keir Collection and one in the Benaki Museum. They are dated to the 12th and 13th centuries (late Fatimid, Ayyubid, and early Mamluk periods).
A near complete pack of Mamluk playing cards dating to the 15th century, and of similar appearance to the fragments above, was discovered by Leo Aryeh Mayer in the Topkapı Palace, Istanbul, in 1939. It is not a complete set and is actually composed of three different packs, probably to replace missing cards. The Topkapı pack originally contained 52 cards comprising four suits: polo-sticks, coins, swords, and cups. Each suit contained ten pip cards and three court cards, called malik (king), nā'ib malik (viceroy or deputy king), and thānī nā'ib (second or under-deputy). The thānī nā'ib is a non-existent title so it may not have been in the earliest versions; without this rank, the Mamluk suits would structurally be the same as a Ganjifa suit. In fact, the word "Kanjifah" appears in Arabic on the king of swords and is still used in parts of the Middle East to describe modern playing cards. Influence from further east can explain why the Mamluks, most of whom were Central Asian Turkic Kipchaks, called their cups tuman, which means "myriad" (10,000) in the Turkic, Mongolian, and Jurchen languages.Pollett, Andrea "The Playing-Card", Vol. 31, No 1 pp. 34–41. Wilkinson postulated that the cups may have been derived from inverting the Chinese and Jurchen ideogram for "myriad", , which was pronounced as something like man in Middle Chinese.
The Mamluk court cards showed abstract designs or calligraphy not depicting persons possibly due to religious proscription in Sunni Islam, though they did bear the ranks on the cards. Nā'ib would be borrowed into French (nahipi), Italian (naibi), and Spanish (naipes), the latter word still in common usage. Panels on the pip cards in two suits show they had a reverse ranking, a feature found in madiao, ganjifa, and old European card games like ombre, tarot, and maw.Mamluk cards. Cards.old.no. Retrieved on 2015-05-10. A fragment of two uncut sheets of Moorish-styled cards of a similar was found in Spain and dated to the early 15th century.Wintle, Simon. Moorish playing cards at The World of Playing Cards. Retrieved 22 July 2015.
Export of these cards (from Cairo, Alexandria, and Damascus), ceased after the fall of the Mamluks in the 16th century.The Mamluk Cards. L-pollett.tripod.com. Retrieved on 2015-05-10. The rules to play these games are lost but they are believed to be plain trick games without trumps.No trump trick-taking games at pagat.com
Spread across Europe and early design changes
Playing cards probably came to Europe from the East, specifically those used by the Mamluks in Egypt, and probably arrived first in Spain since the earliest European mention of playing cards appears in 1371 in a Catalan language rhyme dictionary which lists naip among words ending in -ip. According to Trevor Denning, the only attested meaning of this Catalan word is "playing card". This suggests that cards may have been "reasonably well known" in Catalonia at that time, perhaps introduced as a result of maritime trade with the Mamluk rulers of Egypt.Ferg, Wayland & Wayland (2007), p. 117.
The earliest record of playing cards in central Europe is believed by some researchers to be a ban on card games in the city of Bern in 1367,Peter F. Kopp: Die frühesten Spielkarten in der Schweiz. In: Zeitschrift für schweizerische Archäologie und Kunstgeschichte 30 (1973), pp. 130–145, here 130.Timothy B. Husband: The World in Play. Luxury Cards 1430–1540. Metropolitan Museum of Art 2016, S. 13. but this source is disputed as the earliest copy available dates to 1398 and may have been amended.Hellmut Rosenfeld: Zu den frühesten Spielkarten in der Schweiz. Eine Entgegnung. In: Zeitschrift für schweizerische Archäologie und Kunstgeschichte 32 (1975), pp. 179–180. Generally accepted as the first Italian reference is a Florentine ban dating to 1377.Detlef Hoffmann: Kultur- und Kunstgeschichte der Spielkarte. Marburg: Jonas Verlag 1995, p. 43. Also appearing in 1377 was the treatise by John of Rheinfelden, in which he describes playing cards and their moral meaning. From this year onwards more and more records (usually bans) of playing cards occur,Wilhelm Ludwig Schreiber: Die ältesten Spielkarten und die auf das Kartenspiel Bezug habenden Urkunden des 14. und 15. Jahrhunderts. Heitz, Straßburg 1937. first appearing in England as early as 1413.
Among the early patterns of playing card were those derived from the Mamluk suits of cups, coins, swords, and polo sticks, which are still used in traditional Latin decks.Donald Laycock in Skeptical—a Handbook of Pseudoscience and the Paranormal, ed Donald Laycock, David Vernon, Colin Groves, Simon Brown, Imagecraft, Canberra, 1989, , p. 67 As polo was an obscure sport to Europeans then, the polo-sticks became batons or cudgels.Andy's Playing Cards - The Tarot And Other Early Cards - page XVII - the moorish deck. L-pollett.tripod.com. Retrieved on 2015-05-10. In addition to Catalonia in 1371, the presence of playing cards is attested in 1377 in Switzerland, and 1380 in many locations including Florence and Paris.J. Brunet i Bellet, Lo joch de naibs, naips o cartas, Barcelona, 1886, quote in the "Diccionari de rims de 1371 : darrerament/per ensajar/de bandejar/los seus guarips/joch de nayps/de nit jugàvem, see also le site trionfi.com Wide use of playing cards in Europe can, with some certainty, be traced from 1377 onward.