Court de Gébelin and the Egyptian Tarot
This claim was published more than four decades before anyone could actually read a single Egyptian hieroglyph, and no Egyptian evidence for it has ever since been produced. Every later Egyptian-origin claim about tarot traces directly back to this one specific eighteenth-century essay.
Antoine Court de Gébelin, Le Monde primitif, vol. VIII (1781)
The single eighteenth-century source responsible for the enduring popular belief that tarot cards descend from an ancient Egyptian sacred text.