Card Games

Playing cards were first created in China around 900 A.D. and were based on the game of dominos. Suited cards were developed from Tarot cards and had four original suits: swords, clubs, cups and coins. Playing cards originating in Asia evolved from symbols and paraphernalia associated with ancient divinatory practices. In the same way that dice came into existence with religious ritual, cards appeared alongside the divinatory use of the arrow around the 12th century. The cards of Asia and Europe were miniature pieces of artwork with the social and cultural life of their country of origin embodied in the exquisite detail of their design. They were as individual and faithful a mirror of the taste and temperament and traditions of the people as other braches of their arts. During the late 13th and early 14th centuries cards were introduced, along with paper money, and gunpowder, into Europe through India and the Middle East. Over the next several centuries the design of European playing cards was modified to reflect their social and political milieu, eventually resulting in the present-day four suits and court figures -- kings, queens, and knaves. Originally the hand-crafting of cards made their cost prohibitive to the majority of the population; it was not until the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century that cards came into mass everyday use and became widely disseminated throughout Europe. Parlett describes the conclusions of Michael Dummett (THE GAME OF TARO, 1980), who conducted painstaking research on the matter. Iran (formerly Persia) is indeed the home of As-Nas playing cards, so called from the game typically played with them. Actual cards surviving from the seventeenth century, consonant with descriptions of the game, reveal twenty or twenty-five to a pack, consisting of four or five each of ranks designated Ace (or Lion and Sun), King, Lady, Soldier, and Dancing-girl. There are no suits, although each rank is sometimes associated with a color. Players receive five cards each and vie on them as in non-draw poker, based on combinations of pairs, triplets, fulls, and quartets. Contrary to some who claim amazing antiquity regarding As-Nas, there is no evidence of the game being mentioned in Persian literature at any date earlier than the oldest surviving cards, nor do we have any rules of the game earlier than the nineteenth century. The kinship of As-Nas to other games can be more plausibly explained as a borrowing from European games than vice versa, especially when it is observed that As is not itself a relevant Farsi (Persian) word, but does happen to be the French for Ace.