First of all, noe one knows for sure where the Tarots come from. There are a lot of theories, but we really don't know. All we do know is that the oldest existing deck is the Italian Visconti- deck from ca 1450.
One theory is that the cards come from the Taro-valley in Italy, which would explain the Italian and the French names for the cards, Tarrochi and Tarot.
Some believes that the gypsies brought the cards with them from somewhere in southeast Asia, passed through the Middle East and brought them to Europe.
One of the biggest theories in the 17- and 18-hundreds was that the Tarotcards originally came from Egypt. Some claimed that they were the missing magical texts written by Toth, the Egyptian god of written knowledge. The texts were believed to be incoded into the cards.
A French Lutheran, Antoine Court de Gebelin, was convinced that that was true.
The Egyptian word Ta-Rosh, which resembles Tarot, means "the royal way", and the cards were also linked to the Egyptian godess of birth, Taueret, "the great".
A fourth opinion is the one that claims that Tarot can be linked to Kabbalah, the Hebraic spiritual wisdom. The 22 cards in The Major Arcana are linked to the 22 letters of the Hebraen alphabet.
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