A mystery.The birthplace of ordinary playing cards is shrouded in obscurity and conjecture, but-like gunpowder or tea or porcelain-they almost certainly have Eastern origins. The stone was 3D, a hugely complex shape. Because hundreds of years ago there wasn’t that association between the rhombus shape and the diamond precious stone. But we still don’t know why the card known as paving tile came to be known as a diamond.

And nowadays, because of the playing card that came to be known as diamonds, we associate a diamond shape with a rhombus too. Paving tiles were indeed rhombus shaped in those days, unlike nowadays when they tend to be square or rectangle.

The last of the four suits is the hardest to explain. So clubs is a hybrid of French and Italian/Spanish. But the name clubs refers to the suit bastoni or bastos still used in Spanish and Italian decks, which actually still depicts a club. The design of the clover has been kept for the suit we now know as clubs. Hearts remained hearts, so no explanation needed. Spades coming from the Spanish word spado meaning sword, so similar to pikes. Pike heads became spades in the British/American deck. And as you read these, you can see how close they are to the suits in the international deck of cards that is in use nowadays. Traditional French playing cards still have these four suits – pike heads, hearts, clover, and paving tiles.

Swords, cups, coins and polo-sticks were the suits used in Egypt, and a lot of countries in Europe used some of those suits, and still do. But because of trading routes like the silk road, cards made their way to the middle east and then to Europe by the middle of the last millennium, if not earlier than that. Playing cards are a lot older than the game of poker, almost a thousand years older, and they originated in China. The diamond suit in a pack of cards is thought to have evolved from another shape in use over 500 years ago in France.

Poker spade poker diamond outline