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Good question! Who did invent playing cards? We'd like to thank them for thousands of hours of pleasure, having long enjoyed card games from simple solitaire to high-stakes poker. To find the answer, we decided to search on the phrase "playing cards." The results were pretty good, returning a link to auctions and quite a few specific sites. Browsing over the Yahoo! categories that contained the sites, we spotted Hobbies > Collecting > Cards, which seemed like a great place to start. Among the wide variety of resources listed there, two seemed particularly promising. The World of Playing Cards,
from the English Playing Card Society, offers dozens of links to various antique decks, as well as a short essay on the history of playing cards in England. Unfortunately, while it was interesting, it didn't give us the information we were looking for. Next up was The International Playing Card Society (IPCS) with a similar essay on the history of playing cards and dozens of great illustrations. After reading this article and an entry from the Playing Card FAQ"), we concluded that the original inventor of playing cards is lost to history. However, the opinions seem
amicably divided between ancient China and 12th or 13th-century Egypt. Take your pick. As for cards and their relationship to the calendar: We scoured the Net using all different kinds of Boolean searches -- +"playing cards" +calendar was the most successful. That led us to The Medieval Calendar within a Deck of Playing Cards, a cool little annotated chart. Sadly, we could only admire its pleasing design, since we couldn't make heads or tails of what it all means. Guess we'll just have to go fish...
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