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You may have heard people talk about the "ancient wisdom" of Tarot. Like most modern esoteric traditions, it's a little more complicated than that. So where did the tarot we know today come from?
In its original form, tarot (tarocchi or trionfi in Italian) was a card game similar to bridge, where the cards now known as the Major Arcana were trump cards that outranked the numbered pips. The earliest surviving cards belong to a deck called the Visconti-Sforza, produced for the Duchy of Milan starting in the first half of the 15th century.
About a hundred years later, the first references to using cards for divination start to appear. The use of tarot for divination arose in the 18th century, with occultist Etteilla (Jean-Baptiste Alliette) publishing the first deck specifically for the purpose in 1780. The two most common decks in use today are the Rider-Waite-Smith (also known simply as the Rider-Waite), created by A.E. Waite and Pamela Colman-Smith in 1910, and the Thoth, created by Alistair Crowley and Lady Frieda Harris in 1943 and released in 1969.
It was common in the 18th through early 20th centuries to claim ancient origins for esoteric practices, to try to make them appear more valid. That's also why many people think Wicca is an ancient religion, despite being founded by Gerald Gardner in the 20th century. However, many modern readers view the tarot as psychologist Carl Jung did, as a collection of archetypes common to the collective unconscious, and a tool to help connect to the unconscious mind. While many of the aspects that tarot incorporates, such as Qabalah, numerology, and astrology, are quite old, most of the common tarot decks in use today are very modern.