The tarot's origin is one of the few points in Western esotericism where the documentary evidence is complete enough to settle the question, and it settles it against the tradition's own story.
Tarot decks appear in northern Italy in the middle of the fifteenth century, Milan, Ferrara, Bologna, Florence, as playing cards for a trick-taking game with a permanent suit of trumps. The surviving Visconti-Sforza cards are luxury objects made for a ducal court. The rules of the game are recorded, the game continued to be played across Europe for centuries under the names tarocchi, tarot and tarock, and it is still played in parts of France, Italy, Austria and central Europe today by people with no interest in divination whatever.
There is no evidence of any esoteric use before the eighteenth century, and none of Egyptian origin at any point. The Egyptian claim was made in 1781 by Antoine Court de Gebelin, a French freemason and antiquarian, who declared the cards a surviving book of Egyptian priestly wisdom. He was writing before the Rosetta Stone was deciphered, so he could not read a word of Egyptian, and he supplied no evidence at all. Etteilla, a Parisian cartomancer, produced the first deck designed for divination shortly afterwards.
The historical work that established all this, principally by Michael Dummett and his collaborators, who reconstructed the game's spread from surviving rules and decks, is thorough and is not seriously contested by historians.
Occultists have generally responded not by disputing the evidence but by relocating the claim: that the game was a vehicle carrying older symbolism, or that the meaning was placed there later and is no less real for it. That is a defensible position about symbolism. It is not a claim about the fifteenth century, and the two should not be run together.