Coming to Europe through Egypt

By the 11th century, playing cards were spreading throughout the Asian continent and later came into Egypt. A near complete pack of Mamluk deck dating to the 15th century was discovered by L.A.Mayer in the Topkapı Palace, Istanbul. The Topkapı pack originally contained 52 cards comprising four suits: polo-sticks, coins, swords, and cups. Each suit contained ten pip cards and three court cards, called malik (king), nā'ib malik (viceroy king), and thānī nā'ib (under-deputy). The thānī nā'ib is a non-existent title so it may not have been in the earliest versions; without this rank, the Mamluk suits would structurally be the same as a Ganjifa suit. Influence from further east can explain why the Mamluks, most of whom were Central Asian Turkic Kipchaks, called their cups tuman which means myriad in Turkic, Mongolian and Jurchen languages. Wilkinson postulated that the cups may have been derived from inverting the Chinese and Jurchen ideogram for myriad (万).