Playing cards

From: Andrew Barton <AndrewBarton_at_compuserve.com>
Date: Tue, 21 Dec 1999 10:27:06 -0500

> (I heard that Tarot was developed around 1200 in Alexandria, from an
interpretation of Kabbalist methods, and degenerated quickly into a card game Tarock. I don't know if this was a well-recherched source, but someone else might.)

The Tarot pack is usually claimed to be older than the 52-card one, but there is no evidence for this and I prefer the accounts which suggest that the Tarot pack was developed by adding the Trumps and an extra court card to the 52-card version. Both versions were used from a very early stage for fortune-telling, and fortune tellers had and still have an interest in exaggerating how long their tools have been around. This distorts even modern accounts.

From memory I think the earliest documentary evidence for playing cards is around 1320, not long before the introduction of gunpowder to Europe.

Making cards strong and thin enough to be shuffled and dealt is harder than making paper, and impossible with parchment. As someone pointed out, dominoes/tiles are much older and can be used in many of the same ways. One reason Mah Jong is still played with tiles is that it is harder to cheat.

Dice and board games are much older. Early versions of chess and backgammon were around in classical times, and Go has been played with unchanged rules for longer still.

Andrew

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