Tarot cards are not a thousand years old. And they did not come from Egypt. But that doesn't make them any less interesting.
The first known decks - Tarocchi - appeared in Northern Italy around the 1430s. They were luxurious playing cards for aristocracy. The Dukes of Milan commissioned artists to create them, incorporating allegories of virtues, seasons and celestial spheres. Nothing esoteric - just a complex game for educated people.
The tradition of using cards for divination emerged later - around the 1780s in France. Antoine Court de Gébelin published a theory about the Egyptian origin of the cards. The theory was wrong but very popular. Occultists picked up the idea and began building systems - Kabbalah, astrology, numerology overlaid onto card imagery. This is how the Tarot tradition as a tool of knowledge was born.
Artist Pamela Colman Smith, commissioned by Arthur Edward Waite, drew 78 cards where each one tells its own story. Before this, minor arcana cards were simple pip cards - like in a regular deck. Smith made them narrative. This deck - Rider-Waite - became the standard and remains the most studied and commented tarot deck today.
Carl Jung left no records about Tarot, but his ideas about archetypes and the collective unconscious gave a new framework for interpreting cards. Today Tarot is often used as a projective tool: cards help formulate questions, see a situation from another angle, find one's own answer. Not prediction - but a mirror.
In Ukraine, card reading traditions existed alongside folk practices. Modern Ukrainian decks combine the classic structure of Tarot with native culture and imagery. The Ukrainian Historical Tarot was created by Kostiantyn Diachenko and contains 27 Major Arcana: 22 classic ones painted by artist Ihor Hubsky, and 5 arcana of the new era (23-27) by Natalka Kokhal, created in collaboration with numerologist Vladyslav Hrytsai.