Medieval Afro-Eurasian Card Games
THE SPREAD OF CARD GAMES across Afro-Eurasia is an underappreciated phenomenon of the later Middle Ages. The first games with cards were probably invented in China at some point in the first millennium AD/CE, and the playing card concept seems to have expanded out from there, finding its way as far as Europe and North Africa by the fifteenth century — and possibly to Southeast Asia as well.
Card is just a tough kind of paper, and playing cards, like paper, appear to have been invented in China, perhaps during the Tang dynasty (618–907 AD/CE). The earliest secure mentions of card games in China, though, date to the end of the thirteenth century. A few playing cards from various parts of medieval Afro-Eurasia survive to this day, some excavated archaeologically but most preserved in the form of incomplete packs in private or museum collections. The oldest cards that have come down to us are from medieval Egypt, and there’s a particularly fascinating surviving set from the Mamluk period in the Topkapı Sarayı in Istanbul, apparently made up of cards from at least three original decks (Figure 1; Dummett and Abu-Deeb 1973). The oldest extant Chinese cards, as opposed to textual references to them, date to the end of the fourteenth century, which is also the approximate age of the oldest surviving European playing cards.
Most medieval playing cards seem to have been used in trick-taking games, with the cards typically divided into four suits — although decks may also have been used in divination (whence modern tarot cards) and some appear to have been works of art in themselves (see e.g. the Visconti Tarot in Figure 2). There’s a bias in what survives; most extant medieval cards seem to have been too beautiful to play with regularly and have made it down to us for precisely that reason. Typical playing cards were presumably a bit more humdrum. The rules of some games played with cards in the Middle Ages are, incidentally, unknown; this is the case with the Ambraser Hofämterspiel (Vienna, Kunstkammer, inv. nos. 5077–5124), a chunky deck of intriguing cards made in Central Europe in around 1455 whose suits and numbers will not work with any known games.
No playing cards have survived from medieval Indo-Malaysia, which is perhaps to be expected given the equatorial region’s hot and humid climate. However, a reference to card games can be found in a relevant Chinese text, one that came up in a recent piece on here (links to a piece on my Patreon): a Chinese-Malay glossary produced by the Interpreters Institute in the late fifteenth century, perhaps around 1492. The phrasebook/glossary supposedly records the Malay used in Melaka before the Portuguese conquest of 1511, although it does so using Chinese transcriptions of Malay speech that sometimes aren’t terribly accurate and usually require a little unpacking to turn into legible Malay.
In this glossary we find a reference to ceki, a trick-taking card game associated with the archipelago’s Chinese community (Edwards and Blagden 1931:734 #257). Or, well, it is more accurate to say that the word 竹吉 (pinyin: zhújí) appears in the glossary as the Malay equivalent of the Chinese word 棋 (qí, normally ‘board game’). The early Míng Guănhuà pronunciation of 竹吉 was something like [tʂuʔ kji], close to the modern pronunciation of ceki — certainly close enough to identify the game (Figure 3). As far as I’m aware, this is the earliest reference to a card game in a Southeast Asian context.
The word ceki, by the way, is thought to be a loanword from Hokkien, a southern Chinese topolect, specifically from 一枝 (chi̍t-ki). This makes sense given the Chinese origin of card games, but it might also suggest that the game was principally played by members of the southern Chinese diaspora rather than by all members of Melakan society.
Other games were popular in pre-colonial island Southeast Asia, of course. Tournaments involving fights between armed combatants seem to have been an important part of court culture in Java, and cockfighting appears to have been popular throughout the region, probably having originated either in India or in Southeast Asia itself after the introduction of ironworking (and thus cockspurs) in the late first millennium BCE. Less brutal games of chance must also have been played as well: Two dice of black wood with bone inserts have been recovered from the thirteenth-century shipwreck at Pulau Buaya in Riau (Miksic 2013:133), and dice games (the Old Javanese word for which was dyūta, from the Sanskrit) feature fairly frequently in Old Javanese texts, just as they do in Sanskrit literature. A dice game is an important plot point in the Mahābhārata — a strong influence on popular and traditional culture in Java to this day. Several enigmatic games appear in Old Javanese texts as well; their rules and implements are unknown and obscure, and they cannot be easily connected to games played in Java or the archipelago in modern times (see Creese 2004:57).
In any case, dice and card games were played across Afro-Eurasia in the Middle Ages, and in that sense it’s not so surprising to see them appearing in texts from or pertaining to island Southeast Asia, particularly given the presence of overseas Chinese communities in the region’s coastal towns in the fifteenth century. Nevertheless, the playing of such games was another of the many threads that tied Afro-Eurasia together before modernity.
This is yet another post from my Patreon, one that was also written while I was still living in Leiden. It is publicly accessible to non-patrons on the Patreon page already, but I thought it would be worthwhile to post it here, where more people might see it.
I discuss the same topic in my Ph.D thesis, albeit without all the pretty pictures. For Guănhuà pronunciations I’m relying on Coblin (2000) and (2007), incidentally, and I’d recommend both works if you’re interested in Chinese historical phonology (a fascinating subject).
A. J. West — Leiden, 2022/Lisbon, 2023.
References
Coblin, W. South. 2000. A diachronic study of Míng Guānhuá phonology. Monumenta Serica. 48:267–335.
Coblin, W. South. 2007. A handbook of ’Phags-pa Chinese. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.
Creese, Helen. 2004. Women of the kakawin world. Marriage and sexuality in the courts of Java and Bali. New York: M. E. Sharpe, Inc.
Dummett, Michael. 1976. 15th-century card games and the Hofämterspiel. In Ernst Rudolf Ragg (ed). Berühmte Kartenspiele. Vienna: Piatnik Wien.
Dummett, Michael and Kamal Abu-Deeb. 1973. Some remarks on Mamluk playing cards. Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld institutes. 36:106–128.
Edwards, E. D. and C. O. Blagden. 1931. A Chinese vocabulary of Malacca Malay words and phrases collected between AD 1403 and 1511 (?). Bulletin of the school of oriental studies. 6(3):715–749.
Miksic, John N. 2013. Singapore and the silk road of the sea 1300–1800. Singapore: National University of Singapore Press.
