Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Origins of Playing Cards (Encore)

Episode Date: October 6, 2024

Sitting in most homes is a deck of playing cards. Cards and card games have become almost ubiquitous They are played by children and in retirement homes. They are played at family picnics, and there are also televised games played with millions of dollars on the line.  You can play games with friends, or you can even play them by yourself. Despite how common they are, most people don’t realize that they have a very ancient heritage.  Learn more about the origin of playing cards on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Sponsors Plan your next trip to Spain at Spain.info! Sign up at butcherbox.com/daily and use code daily to get chicken breast, salmon or ground beef FREE in every order for a year plus $20 off your first order! Subscribe to the podcast!  https://link.chtbl.com/EverythingEverywhere?sid=ShowNotes -------------------------------- Executive Producer: Charles Daniel Associate Producers: Ben Long & Cameron Kieffer   Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere Update your podcast app at newpodcastapps.com Discord Server: https://discord.gg/UkRUJFh Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/ Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/everythingeverywheredaily Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The following is an encore presentation of Everything Everywhere Daily. Sitting in most homes is a deck of playing cards. Cards and card games have become almost ubiquitous. They're played by children and in retirement homes. They're played at family pitnics, and there are also televised games played with millions of dollars on the line. You can play with your friends, or you can even play by yourself. Yet despite how common they are,

most people don't realize that they have a very ancient heritage. Learn more about the origin of playing cards. on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now.

Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. The first thing that we could call a game that resembles cards comes from the land which invented both paper and printing, China. This should not come as a surprise to any long-time listeners of this podcast. These first card games weren't really cards like we know them today. They weren't stiff cards so much as they were just sheets of paper. They also weren't necessarily even in a deck, and nor were they organized by suits. The earliest reference we have comes from a text in the year 868 in the Tang Dynasty,

from a writer known as Sue Yi. He writes of the daughter of the emperor, Princess Tong Chan, playing a game known as the Leaf Game. We don't exactly know what the rules of the game were, and it might not have even been exclusively a paper game. Other writers later wrote about it being a game that was also played with dice, and that the leaves in question were really just pages of a book. Some researchers think that the first games with paper may have just used paper money,

which also originated in China. This could have been how cards were associated with a rank or number. The number was what the paper note was worth. Playing cards in China evolved in its own way starting around the 11th and 12 centuries. They created stiffer pieces of paper that could be handled like actual cards and developed different types of cards. Domino cards were developed in China, which were very similar to regular dominoes, except in card form. The path we need to follow to get to the modern day playing card takes us, again, not surprisingly, through the Middle East. As with so many Chinese inventions, they were taken west by Islamic traders.

Around the 11th century, playing cards was common in much of the Islamic world. Persia and Arabia had cards that started to show similarities to the cards we have today. Cards were divided into groups of four suits, with 12 cards in each suit. There would be 10 cards that were numbered, called PIP cards, and then a card with a king and a vizier card. Cards became further developed when they moved west to Mamluk Egypt. The oldest existing playing cards are a set of Mamluk cards found in the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul. They were discovered after the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Sultan in 1939.

These cards are clear ancestors of modern playing cards. They have four suits, polo sticks, coins, swords, and cups. Each suit had 13 cards, 10 numbered cards plus three royal cards, the king, the viceroy, and the under-deputy. While the royal cards were given those names, there were no images on the cards due to the Islamic prohibition against depicting images of people. At some point, playing cards were then brought to Europe. We don't know exactly when or where it happened, but they almost certainly came to Europe via the Islamic world. The earliest mention of playing cards in Europe comes from an edict in Bern, Switzerland in

1367, which banned the playing of cards. And likewise, a ban on playing cards was enacted in the city of Florence, Italy, in 1777. A Swiss monk, known only as Johannes, also wrote in 1377 about the various games that could be played with cards. So certainly, playing cards must have been quite popular well before 1367 if they made it all the way to Switzerland and caused enough problems to result in a ban. There are many mentions of playing cards appearing in the records around the same time in the late 14th century. There were also changes to the suits from the Mameluk playing cards.

Different parts of Europe developed different types of suits. In Italy and Spain, the four suits were cups, coins, clubs, and swords. In Germany, it was hearts, bells, acorns, and leaves. And in France, it was clover, tiles, hearts, and pikes. The other changes had to do with the royal cards. The king, for the most part, remained the same. The viceroy became the queen, and the under-deputy became a knight or sometimes a knave. Some 15th century decks actually had 56 cards with both the knight and the knave.

As playing cards were taking off in Europe in the early 15th century, something else was happening that dramatically facilitated their spread. Printing. Many of the first centers of printing in Europe, in particular Ulm and Augsburg, also had printers that specialized in playing cards. These printed cards didn't require the fancy movable type printing presses of the type that Gutenberg developed. These were just simple wood-block presses, although there were some fancier decks that were hand-painted. France took another major step towards modern cards in the 15th century when they divided up the suits by color. Hearts and tiles were red, and clovers and pikes were black.

Despite the early popularity of card printers in Germany, it was French playing cards that eventually became the most popular in Europe. The French suits were kept the same, but given different names in English. Pikes became spades, Clovers became clubs, and tiles became diamonds. In the 16th century, French cards developed some unique features which still exist in playing cards today. Each of the artwork on the royal cards were given a unique personality. For example, the image of each king was modeled after a famous historical king. King David was Spades, Alexander the Great was Clubs, Charlemagne was Hearts, and Julius Caesar was Diamonds. For the Queens, the Greek goddess Palace Athena was Spades, Judith from the Old Testament was Hearts, Jacob's wife Rachel,

also from the Bible, was Diamonds, and the Queen of Clubs is known as Argin. There is no Queen Argyne, but it's an anagram for the Latin word Regina, which means queen. For the knaves, hearts were represented by La Jier, who was a French general, the 100 years war, spades were represented by Charlemagne's Knight-Ogeier, diamonds were represented by Hector of Troy, and clubs were represented by Lancelot. The word ace comes from a Latin word by way of French. The original Latin word was As, which was the word for a single undivided unit, and it was the name of a Roman coin. The French used the word to describe the side of a die with just one pip on it. As the lowest card in a deck also just had a single pip, the word carried over from dice into cards.

In the late 17th century, another innovation came to playing cards, when the small abbreviations were placed in the upper right-hand corner. This allowed for cards to be held in just one hand in a fan shape, yet still be read. 1628 saw the creation of a Guild of Plain Card manufacturers in London, known as the Worshipful Company of Makers of Plain Cards. They're one of London's 110 livery companies, which are guilds. The worshipful company of makers of playing cards still exist today and has 150 members. The 18th century saw the development of reversible royal cards. Previously, players would have to turn royal cards around to see them, which was a giveaway as to the type of cards they held in their hand.

The French Revolution saw a change in the value of the ace. Traditionally, it was always the lowest card, but having gotten rid of their king, the French began to use it in games where the ace was now higher than the king. And today, aces can be high or low depending on the game. And speaking of aces, did you ever wonder what was so special about the Ace of Spades? The British declared a stamp act on all playing cards. Beginning in 1765, each printing house had to show that it paid the tax in the deck and on one card in particular, the Ace of Spades. After a change in the law in 1862, many printers began to create elaborate Ace of Spade cards where they would put their logo.

So, if you ever wondered what Lemmy from Motorhead was singing about, it was an 18th and 19th century British tax on playing cards. And that tax on playing cards in Britain existed until 1960. One final 18th century innovation was rounded corners. This was simply a measure that was taken because sharp corners tended to wear out faster. Worn out corners made it easier to mark and spot cards. The 19th century saw the development of many of the printing quirks that are on today's cards. The King of Hearts, for example, is the only king without a mustache. No one is really sure why, but the most common explanation is that it was a printing error that just stuck. Likewise, the King of Hearts is usually shown with a sword pointing at his head. Known as the Suicide

King, it actually shows the king with a sword raised behind his head. Before that point, the King of Hearts actually held an axe instead of a sword. There were two 19th century innovations in playing cards that came from the United States. The first was the change in the name of the nave card to the jack. The nave had always informally been called Jack, which is just a generic nickname for a man, like in the phrase Jack of All Trades. In 1864, the American Samuel Hart published a deck of cards where the initial in the corner was J, and this caught on because it was a lot clear than having the confusion of KG for King and KN for Knave.

The other American innovation occurred around the same time. It was the inclusion into the deck of a new card called The Joker. It was included mostly for the game of Yucre, which was a European game that had spread to the United States in the late 18th century. Today, the Joker is usually where the printer's logo is placed in modern decks. And because the Joker doesn't have the historical lineage that other cards do, card printers have far greater artistic variation in how they make jokers. One thing I haven't mentioned so far is the backs of playing cards.

Cards all used to have a uniform white back. The problem was that even the slightest bit of dirt would make it very easy to mark cards. This led to more elaborate designs, and in the 19th century, photos were often used. The back of the card is one area where manufacturers can individualize their product. So today, most backs of cards are geometric patterns, colored either red or blue. The deck, as we know it, was firmly established by the late 19th century. Most of the innovations in plain cards came in the area of printing and security. Today, the largest manufacturer of plane cards, by a wide margin, is the U.S. playing card company.

They purchased almost all of their competitors and still operate many of those brands, including bicycle, B, Talley Ho, Congress, Aviator, Aristocrat, Mohawk, Maverick, KEM, Hoyle, and Fornier. By far, the biggest consumer of playing cards are casinos. They will often order their own customized decks, and most blackjack tables will only use a deck of cards for anywhere from 2 to 24 hours, depending on the number of decks in use and the policy of the casino. This security procedure ensures that no cards become marked or damaged. The Las Vegas-Nevagnes Nevada casinos will collectively use 27 million decks of playing cards every year.

Playing cards have become something that almost everyone can relate to. They can be used for fun or gambling millions of dollars. While playing a game of cards, what few people realize is that the cards in their hand are part of a set of traditions that go back over 1,000 years. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Benji Long and Cameron Kiever. I want to give a big shout out to everyone who supports the show over on Patreon, including the show's producers.

Your support helps me put out a show every single day. And also, Patreon is currently the only place where Everything Everywhere Daily merchandise is available to the top tier of supporters. If you'd like to talk to other listeners of the show and members of the Completionist Club, you can join the Everything Everywhere Daily Facebook group or Discord server. Links to everything are in the show notes.