Playing Cards- Brief History and Fun facts
If you are a playing-card game enthusiast, or even just a casual player, then I am sure you feel you are familiar with the deck of cards like the back of your hand. But how often do you think about the cards, their origin, symbols and their value rather than the game? Here we would like to tell you some fun and real facts about what they are, where they originated from, and why they are the way they are.
Decks of cards actually originated in China in the 9th century. Well that’s what most scholars believed. It is agreed that the first printed playing cards also originated in China, but in a very different form and later were spread across India, Persia and Egypt before arriving in Europe, where they underwent numerous variations.
The pictures of kings and queens looking at you from your winning hand might look like random illustrations, but they’re actually based on very real monarchs. In British and French card decks, the king cards always show the same roster of famous rulers: Charles, David, Caesar and Alexander the Great. The queen cards have been more varied, but Pallas, Judith, Rachel and Argine are some very famous choices.
As the popularity of playing cards grew in the 18th century, British rulers levied taxes on the sale of playing card decks to fund wars and their own lifestyles. When a card deck owner had paid his tax, the ace of spades was stamped with a design indicating the deck was legal. Forging this stamp or an ace of spades card was a crime punishable by death. Fortunately this trend of executing people for forged cards didn’t last long, but the tax did: England’s tax on playing cards was on till 1960.
The clubs, diamonds, hearts and spades that grace modern card decks are the same ones that appeared on French decks hundreds of years ago. Historians have different theories about the origin of the symbols themselves, which are called pips, but many believe they represent the economic classes of the time.
It is believed that the 52 cards in a deck correspond to the number of weeks in a one year. The two colours, i.e., red and black, symbolise day and night, and that the four suits represent the four seasons. And also there are 13 cards in a suit to match the number of lunar cycles, and 12 court cards that represent the 12 months of the year. If you add up all the symbols in a deck of cards, there are 365, the exact number of days in one year!
The world’s rarest and supposedly oldest full deck of cards is on show at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The hand-painted tarot deck hails from mid-15th century Netherlands and is in amazing condition, suggesting the cards were hardly played.
Some of Our Previous Posts!!
