Mamluk Playing Cards — Mulūk wa-nuwwāb (the Direct Ancestor)

The single most important upstream object in this repo: the four-suit pack Europe copied. The surviving deck — Mulūk wa-nuwwāb ("Kings and Deputies"), the game called kanjifah — is a Mamluk-era set (Egypt & Syria, dated to roughly the 15th century, c. 1500), of which roughly 48 cards survive — about 43 from the original pack plus a handful of cruder later replacement cards (the original deck had 52), held at the Topkapı Palace Museum, Istanbul (found and published by L. A. Mayer, 1939/1971).

It has four suits — cups, coins, swords, and polo-sticks — each running Ace–10 plus three court cards (a king and two deputies). The courts are aniconic: no human figures, only abstract design and calligraphic inscriptions naming the rank. When this pack reached Iberia and Italy in the 1370s (as naipes / naibi), Italians later added a fifth suit of 21 triumphs + the Fool — and that addition, in the 1440s, is tarot. So tarot is this deck plus trumps. The polo-sticks, a game Europeans didn't play, were redrawn as batons/wands; cups, coins and swords carried over directly.

How the suits became European: Cups → Cups, Coins → Coins, Swords → Swords (Latin suits), and Polo-sticks → Batons. The Latin-suited packs (Italian/Spanish) preserve the Mamluk shapes most faithfully; the later French suits (hearts/tiles/clovers/pikes) are a simplification of these.

China → Islam → Europe: Playing cards most likely begin in Tang-dynasty China (money-suited cards). Through an undocumented transmission they reach the Islamic world as kanjifah; the Mamluk pack is the form that crossed into Iberia and Italy in the 1370s. Italy's fifth suit of triumphs (1440s) makes it tarot. The deepest roots are gaming, not divination.

GAME OR DIVINATION? A gaming/gambling object. The deepest roots of tarot are a card-game tradition (Tang-China money-suited cards → Mamluk kanjifah → European naibi); divination cultures existed alongside but used other instruments.

ANCESTRAL STATUS: direct ancestor (the parent of the European four-suit pack), as distinct from the cousin branches (e.g. Ganjifa) that did not become tarot.

SOURCES: L. A. Mayer, Mamluk Playing Cards (1971); Michael Dummett, The Game of Tarot (1980); Topkapı Palace Museum, Istanbul.

IMAGE PROVENANCE / TODO (2026-06-13). The images here are 7 genuine public-domain photographs of the original Topkapı cards (Wikimedia Commons, Mamluk playing card 1–7) — but the pack has ~48 surviving cards, so these 7 are shown as REPRESENTATIVE stand-ins: the same court photograph (card 6) currently illustrates all four suits' deputies, and the pips reuse one or two images. That is a display stand-in, NOT a claim that the four deputies (or pips) are identical, and the specific image↔suit/rank assignments are not yet verified against the originals. TODO: source the full surviving set from Wikimedia Commons Category: Mamluk playing cards and the reconstructions at mamluk.spiorad.net / l-pollett.tripod.com, and map each image to its actual card.

Where the pictures come from: who holds this deck's pictures, how sharp they are and what their rights allow: Sources: Mamluk.