Sitting in most homes is a deck of playing cards.

Cards and card games have become almost ubiquitous.

They're played by children and in retirement homes.

They're played at family pit nix, and there are also televised games played with millions of dollars on the line. You can play with your friends or you can even play by yourself.

Yet despite how common they are, most people don't realize that they have a very ancient heritage.

Learn more about the origin of playing cards on this

episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. The first thing that we could call a game that resembles cards comes from the

land which invented both paper and printing, China. This should not come as

a surprise to any longtime listeners of this podcast. These first card games weren't

really cards like we know them today. They weren't stiff cards so much as they were just

sheets of paper. They also weren't necessarily even in a deck and nor were they organized by suits.

The earliest reference we have comes from a text in the year 868 in the Tang Dynasty,

from a writer known as Sui.

He writes of the daughter of the Emperor, Princess Tongchan, playing a game known as the Leaf game.

We don't exactly know what the rules of the game were, and it might not have even been exclusively a paper game.

Other writers later wrote about it being a game

that was also played with dice and that the leaves in question were really just pages of a book. Some

researchers think that the first games with paper may have just used paper money, which also originated in China.

This could have been how cards were associated with a rank or number.

The number was what the paper note was worth.

Playing cards in China evolved in its own way starting around the 11th and 12 centuries.

They created stiffer pieces of paper that could be handled like actual cards and developed different types of cards.

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