The Mameluke deck contained 52 cards comprising four “suits”: polo sticks, coins, swords, and cups. Wide use of playing cards in Europe can, with some certainty, be traced from 1377 onwards. The first documentary evidence is a ban on their use in 1367, Bern, Switzerland. Playing cards first entered Europe in the late 14th Century, probably from Mamluk Egypt, with suits very similar to the tarot suits of Swords, Staves, Cups and Coins (also known as Disks, and Pentacles) and those still used in traditional Italian, Spanish and Portuguese decks. The Chinese word pái (牌) is used to describe both paper cards and gaming tiles. In Kuei-t’ien-lu, a Chinese text redacted in the 11th Century, we find that dominoes cards were printed during the Tang Dynasty, contemporary to the first printed books. However, it may be that the first deck of cards ever printed was a Chinese domino deck, in whose cards we can see all the 21 combinations of a pair of dice. The designs on modern Mahjong tiles likely evolved from those earliest playing cards. Wilkinson suggests that the first cards may have been actual paper currency which were both the tools of gaming and the stakes being played for, as in trading card games. These were represented by ideograms, with numerals of 2–9 in the first three suits and numerals 1–9 in the “tens of myriads”. By the 11th century playing cards could be found throughout the Asian continent.Īncient Chinese “money cards” have four “suits”: coins (or cash), strings of coins (which may have been misinterpreted as sticks from crude drawings), myriads (of coins or of strings), and tens of myriads (where a myriad is 10,000). The first known book on cards called Yezi Gexi was allegedly written by a Tang-era woman, and was commented on by Chinese writers of subsequent dynasties.ĭuring the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), characters from popular novels such as the Water Margin were widely featured on the faces of playing cards. The Song Dynasty (960–1279) scholar Ouyang Xiu (1007–1072) asserted that playing cards and card games existed at least since the mid-Tang Dynasty and associated their invention with the simultaneous development of using sheets or pages instead of paper rolls as a writing medium. The first reference to the card game in world history dates no later than the 9th Century, when the Collection of Miscellanea at Duyang, written by Tang Dynasty writer Su E, described 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’ husband). They were found in China as early as the 9th Century during the Tang Dynasty (618–907).

History of the Playing Cards – Source: WikipediaĮarly History Playing cards were invented in Ancient China.

1st shop playing cards