oldmasters

card games are old as paper itself – the real one, not papyrus – let's say between year 666 n' 999. here's an example of an original chinese deck from the 10th cent., with suits & courts like modern playing cards. 

clic&scroll for moar, 'cos we're gonna jump straight to Egypt 1500 during the Mamluk Sultanate. 🧵

these marvelous cards were created by the Mamluk Sultanate, which existed from the 13th to the 16th cents.

in addition to the beautiful graphic richness of the iconoclasts tradition, are clearly appreciated the well-known suits of cups, swords, coins and clubs, in this case, jockey sticks.

rata.wtf - mfer, cryptoratist n' dgnmancer.  🪄 💜 

those were recreations, as you can see, there is not much left from this cards. here is another image for comparison of the size a a modern standard deck. 

researchers say these cards were not used for games but instead for fortune-telling, as well as for various courtly and cultural purposes.

islam entered europe through the iberian peninsula, and along with the quran, brought a deck of cards to tempt fortune. europe, which is not at all iconoclastic, began to reinterpret the designs, and wealthy families could afford to hire painters to portray their illustrious members.

in addition to the suits, medieval decks of cards incorporated the triumphs, which are figurative tropes and characters with heavy symbolism in the feudal society. i bet you can see where are we heading now...

but it's gonna have to be in the next one. don't miss it.

6.  tarot cards are thought to have originated in northern italy in the late 14th or early 15th century. 

some say, the earliest tarot decks were designed for playing card games rather than divination. but imo, as we have seen many times, games can become very serious business.

7. in retrospective we can see the tarot as a power creep for the standard playing cards: someone added the 22 triumphs to the 56 deck of 4 suits in order to have more powerful cardboard rectangles.

earliest tarot decks were used for games like bridge or poker, and still is a popular game in France.

8. tarot cards were being used for divination and fortune-telling in addition to gambling. but, when Antoine Court de Gébelin, a french scholar, wrote about the tarot's ancient egyptian origins in the late 18th century, shts got real.

9. de Gébelin claims are not supported by historical evidence tho.

what matter is that, around that time, Jean-Baptiste Alliette, who used the pseudonym Etteilla, was making business with the divination cards, and the claim of Gébelin about ancient wisdom must been great news to his eyes.
then, Etteilla published...

10. the 'grand jeu de l'oracle des dames', by Etteilla, was probably inspired in the popular marseille tarot, or something like dat.  but there has been many tarots in History and before the 19th century, there was no consensus on the triumphs or 'major arcana'.

11. the major arcana represent archetypes and dramatic events like death or marriage. the minor arcana, excluding the member of the court, are a bunch of numbers represented by swords, cups, blabla... kind of boring, specially if you trying to read the future on a drawing of ten coins.
until you see the sola busca deck

12. the sola busca tarot was the first one known to have figurative depictions on the minor arcana. the deck is from the 15h century and has nothing to do with the french scholars. however, both of them will inspire a new deck that settles the modern tarot once and for all.

will continue in the next one. thx for now.