Deciphering the Mamluk Playing Cards: Fragments of Kipchak Culture

You’ve probably heard that the playing cards we know and love today were born in Renaissance Italy. For tarot, that’s true enough. The twenty-two trump cards were added to an ordinary deck in the early fifteenth century, before a French antiquarian spun them into occult lore. But the standard pack didn't begin in Italy. In 1379, the chronicles of Viterbo recorded a new game arriving in the city: nayb [1], named after a Mamluk court rank, complete with coins, cups, swords, and polo mallets that Italians promptly changed for batons [1].

The physical cards themselves sat in the Topkapı Palace archives for centuries before their rediscovery in 1931 [2]. Scholars like Michael Dummett and Kamal Abu-Deeb settled the origin question, establishing the baseline deck structure [1].

A different question remains open: what does this surviving deck preserve of the world that made it?

Written across the bottom of one cup card is a name: Qarājā, second deputy of the tūmān. There is no portrait of him. The court cards carry no human figures at all, but the name is Turkish, as is Qushqulī, the governor one rank above him. Both titles are built on the same word, nā'ib, a deputy, one who stands in for another. Above the suit-sign, a line of verse wishes the holder a life of comfort, leisure, and wealth [1].

What reached Italy likely did not look like this deck, perhaps carrying drawn figures to make sense to an Italian buyer who couldn't read Arabic [1]. But the Mamluk playing cards represent something better than an ancestor. They are the well-worn version that stayed home: forty-eight heavily used cards, five patched in from other packs with mismatching suit-signs [1]. Whoever played with this deck didn't need a portrait because they knew exactly who Qarājā was.

The Kipchak-Cuman horizon

The men who commissioned these cards were not Egyptians. They were Mamluks: boys taken or sold out of the Dasht-i Kipchak, the steppe world Latin Europe called Cuman and the Islamic world called Kipchak, whose modern descendants include the Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Bashkir, and Kazan Tatar peoples [3]. Qarājā and Qushqulī, the governor and second deputy named on the cup cards, carry Turkish names of that world.

The Kipchaks included Mongolic clans like the Ölberli, who migrated out of Manchuria sometime between 1115 and 1150, and became one of the leading subconfederations of the eastern Kipchaks [3]. Absorption ran both directions. Peter Golden describes the resulting confederation as a layered ethno-linguistic structure holding Turkic, Mongolic, and Iranian elements together [3]. The archaeological record agrees: burial sites along the lower Volga show a genuinely mixed population, the eastern and western groupings differing from each other in ways consistent with the region's older Iranian-speaking inhabitants [3].

Unfortunately, no early Kipchak literary texts survive. Everything that records the language, the Codex Cumanicus, and the Arabo-Kipchak dictionaries compiled in Egypt, dates from after the Mongol conquest and was written by outsiders, or by Kipchaks already generations into somebody else's culture [3]. There was no pristine original to preserve, only layers of adoption.

Long before their recruitment shifted toward the Caucasus in the fifteenth century, around the time this pack was created [2], these men brought their own language to Egypt. Arabo-Kipchak dictionaries were compiled because Arabic-speaking Egypt needed to understand the language its rulers spoke among themselves. And that governance rested on a unique institution: the mamlūk.

The word "Mamlūk" resists the easy translation it usually gets. It's rendered simply as "slave," but Islamic legal sources treat it as something more specific: someone born free and later taken, distinct in Arabic from 'abd, the ordinary word for a slave, and from raqīq, someone born into slavery [4]. The distinction wasn't decorative. A mamlūk kept property rights and standing in court, his children were free, and the status was explicitly temporary, ending in formal manumission once training was done [4].

The taking itself was not gentle. These were boys pulled from their families and sold in markets, bought for the armies of the Ayyubid sultans and delivered into a system they had not chosen and could not leave.

What they were given first was religious instruction, and after that the military training that would define the rest of their lives. What waited on the other side of it was freedom, property, rank, and for some of them, the sultanate itself [4]. Trained in the service of the sultan, they eventually overthrew the Ayyubids who had bought them and built their own empire in its place.

The world inside a cup

The suit of cups is not actually called cups. On all three of its court cards, the king, Qushqulī, and Qarājā, the word at the bottom is ṭūmān [1]. Coins are darāhim, swords are suyūf, polo-sticks are jawkān and each suit is painted with these symbols. The suit of cups is named not for an object, but for a number: ṭūmān.

In Turkic, tümen means ten thousand. Gerard Clauson traces it to the eighth-century Orkhon inscriptions, where it was already established Turkic, borrowed from Tocharian, and possibly older still [5]. It was the top rung of the decimal system that organized steppe military life from the bottom up. Centuries later it structured Genghis Khan's army: ten men to a harban, a hundred to a dzhuan, a thousand to a mingan, ten thousand to a tümen [6]. A recruit's grandfather, had he stayed on the steppe, would have known the word the way a soldier knows the name of his division.

By the early fourteenth century it meant money too. Abū Ḥayyān's Kitāb al-Idrāk, a dictionary written so Arabic speakers could follow the language of their own rulers, gives tūmān as a sum of ten thousand dirhams [5].

Why a cup, then, for a word meaning ten thousand? Dummett and Abu-Deeb take the mismatch as evidence that the suit is older than Egypt and point out that the Chinese money packs also carry a suit of Myriads [1]. It's a fair inference, but the cards have more to say than the label. Every court card in the deck carries a line of verse across the top, and the verses in this suit are unlike the others. Coins praises its own beauty. Swords compares itself to a chandelier bringing joy. Polo-sticks describes flowers strung on a necklace of pearls [1]. They are compliments about the artwork.

Cups promises power and wealth. The verse above Qarājā wishes whoever holds him a life of comfort, leisure and wealth. The verse above Qushqulī, governor of the same suit, promises that possessing him makes power everlasting and yields what Abu-Deeb translates as treasures, or spoils [1]. On a card belonging to the suit of ten thousand horsemen, spoils seems more likely to me.

Whoever holds the Governor of Cups is promised the command of tümen and enjoys the spoils that come with it. The Mamluks knew this arrangement from the inside: an Abbasid caliph in Cairo who conferred legitimacy and held nothing, a sultanate they had taken from the Ayyubids who bought them, and real power sitting with the men called deputies.

The Sultan’s game

The fourth suit is jawkān, the polo-stick. It is curved, tapering, and on many of the cards the end opens into a dragon's head [1]. The game arrived in Egypt already carrying more than one history. Mounted contests over an object driven across open ground ran deep in nomadic Central Asia [7]. Separately, there was the courtly game of çevgan, a Middle Persian word that entered Turkic as çögen [8]. The first polo ground in Islam was built in 768 at al-Ruṣāfah in Baghdad for the Abbasid crown prince al-Mahdī, on Sassanian precedent [9]. By the time the Mamluks took it up, steppe practice and court ritual had long since fused into a single inheritance.

In Mamluk Egypt, the game was la'b al-kurra, and it was not played as a pastime. It was a required part of furūsiyya, the military curriculum that also covered horsemanship, archery and the sword [10].

Baybars built himself a field outside Cairo and played twice a week in Egypt and once a week in Syria, for years. When he was poisoned in 1277 he rode out at Damascus anyway, to work the ache out of his body, and died two weeks later. His son Berke fell at the Kerak ground, broke a rib, and died of it. Twenty years on, a third sultan, al-Manṣūr Lāchīn, was gravely hurt in a fall of his own [10].

Under the Bahri sultans the grounds around Cairo were in constant, heavy use. On 19 June 1402, at a commander-in-chief's estate, more than a thousand mamluks rode onto the field to assassinate the emir Sudun Taz mid-match [11].

Under the Burji, the grounds thinned out, were left to rot, and the drills stopped mattering, which Çıplak reads as the military education at the centre of the Mamluk state being quietly abandoned [10]. By the time these cards were made, the suit of polo-sticks was being painted while the polo grounds went to weeds.

Lost in translation

How often they actually played is impossible to say, but the deck testifies on its own. Five cards patched in from other packs to fill the gaps. Inscriptions at the top and bottom edges, where a hand grips a card, worn down and painted back on [1].

One word made the crossing to Europe. Nā'ib, the rank written on Qushqulī's card, is the root of Italian naibi and, still, of Spanish naipes. Five hundred years of Spanish card players have been calling a deck by the title of a Mamluk officer, probably without ever knowing it.

These cards are where the story of European playing cards usually starts. They were the end of a different one.

REFERENCES

1. Dummett, M., & Abu-Deeb, K. (1973). Some remarks on Mamluk playing cards. Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 36, 106-128. (cited pp. 111, 112, 125, 126)
2. Mayer, L. A. (1939). Mamluk playing cards. Bulletin de l'Institut Français d'Archéologie Orientale, 38, 113-118. (cited pp. 115, 116)
3. Golden, P. B. (1992). An introduction to the history of the Turkic peoples. Otto Harrassowitz. (cited pp. 278, 281-282)
4. Sağlam, A. (2023). "Memlûk" sözcüğü: Basit anlamından askeri ve siyasi terim anlamına [The word "Mamlûk": From its simple meaning to a military and political term]. Stratejik ve Sosyal Araştırmalar Dergisi, 7(2), 341-356. (cited p. 345)
5. Clauson, G. (1972). An etymological dictionary of pre-thirteenth-century Turkish. Clarendon Press. (cited p. 507)
6. Świętosławski, W. (2003). The organization of the Mongols' war expeditions in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (Z. Poklewska-Parra, Trans.). Fasciculi Archaeologiae Historicae, 15, 34. (cited p. 34)
7. Köse, F. (2025). Geçmişten günümüze ve geleceğe Türk dünyasının yitik kültürel mirası çevgen / polo. Motif Akademi Halkbilimi Dergisi, 18(49), 14-31. (cited p. 17) https://doi.org/10.12981/mahder.1562702
8. Eyduran, A. (2009). Türk kültürü ve edebiyatında çevgan oyunu. ERDEM (Atatürk Kültür Merkezi Dergisi), (53), 83-114. (cited pp. 85-86)
9. al-Sarraf, S. (2004). Mamluk furūsīyah literature and its antecedents. Mamlūk Studies Review, 8(1), 141-200. (cited p. 145) https://doi.org/10.6082/M1M043JB
10. Çıplak, E. (2021). Memlûklerde la'bü'l-kürre 'çevgân' [La'bu'l-kurre 'čawgān' in Mamluks]. Ortaçağ Araştırmaları Dergisi, 4(2), 255-263. (cited pp. 255, 258) https://doi.org/10.48120/oad.1028632
11. Popper, W. (Trans.). (1954). History of Egypt, 1382–1469 A.D. (Ibn Taghrībirdī, Author, Part II, 1399–1411 A.D.). University of California Press. (University of California Publications in Semitic Philology, Vol. 14) (cited p. 73)