Historical Deck - Simplified Topkapi

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variantventures
Deck Artist
Deck Artist
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Historical Deck - Simplified Topkapi

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So, the Topkapi playing cards are from the 16th Century. They are Mamluk (Egypt/Syria) in origin and the 'deck' held by the Topkapi Museum is actually three partial decks that have been put together to make a single, still incomplete, deck. These cards are enormous. They're nearly ten inches tall and they were all hand-painted. Absolutely gorgeous work even today after 400 years of sitting around. What's really interesting is the De Unger fragment in Berlin. This fragment of a playing card agrees very closely with the style of the Topkapi cards AND it's dated to the 12th Century. If this dating is correct (and I have some doubts) that would make the De Unger fragment the oldest playing card in the Mediterranean region. A reproduction deck (which was incorrect in some details due to faulty interpretation by scholars) was printed back in the 80's and sold for around $100 dollars. They made about 500 of those decks and they're hard to find and expensive to buy.

I decided to make my own because that was too expensive for me and, really, how hard could it be? :) As it turned out.... yeah, pretty hard. These are an intermediate step. I needed to layout the elements and get some practice working with them before I move on to the actual colored and detailed deck. But I liked the layout so much I decided to put them onto actual cards. Rather than using custom-sized cards I kept the proportions of the designs and sized them to fit on Tarot sized cards. There's extra white space around the design but if that really bothers anyone they can hand trim the cards to size.

I simplified the design elements, but not by much. It was pretty easy to leave off the detailing. I considered adding color but decided to leave them black and white. I can't really explain why, I just like the stark contrasts better than any colored cards I made for testing. With the simple, black and white works better. With the color, you really need all the extra details.

The cards are supposed to have blank backs but I did a repeating geometric pattern simply because I liked that better. For those of you unfamiliar with the suits, these are like the Latin (Spanish and Italian) suits. The Islamic suits are swords, cups, coins, and polo sticks. The courts are the king (recognizable by the square throne) and his two deputies. These are reminiscent of the ober/unter (over/under) found in German/Swiss suits.

https://scontent-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-prn2/t1.0-9/1482767_10201234021432586_482816747_n.jpg
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