The invention of the printing press changed the world, enabling the spread of knowledge like never before. As Danny Bird reveals, it brought together centuries of innovation at the right place and time
IN A NUTSHELL YOUR BRIEF EXPLAINER TO HISTORY’S HOT TOPICS
WHO INVENTED PRINTING, AND WHEN DID IT DEVELOP?
There is some debate about where and when printing first developed. Although the ancient Egyptians used woodblock printing to mark textiles, the technology was refined in China and Korea, probably around the sixth century AD.
Crucial to that later development, however, was the development of papermaking in China. The process pioneered during the Han dynasty – according to tradition, in AD 105 – involved pulping rags, mulberry fibres and hemp waste with water. Engravers carved whole texts into wooden blocks that were coated with ink and pressed onto paper, producing facsimiles. The earliest-known printed texts were produced using this technique, including the oldest extant book – the Diamond Sutra by Wang Jie, printed in AD 868.
For six centuries, the Chinese kept papermaking a closely guarded secret. But following the defeat of the Tang dynasty at the battle of Talas in 751, the Muslim rulers of the Abbasid Caliphate extracted details from Chinese prisoners of war. Paper mills soon proliferated in Samarkand, a major centre of learning on the Silk Road in what is now Uzbekistan, exporting the commodity throughout the Islamic world. Eventually, knowledge of the process reached Europe, where paper was first produced in 1151 in Xàtiva in al-Andalus, the Muslim-ruled tract of the Iberian Peninsula.
HOW WAS KNOWLEDGE PRESERVED PRIOR TO PRINTING?
The arrival of papermaking in Europe proved instrumental in the eventual success of modern printing. For centuries, reeds harvested from the banks of the Nile had been used to make papyrus on which information could be recorded. Rome’s annexation of Egypt in 30 BC gave the empire a monopoly over its production. Books – albeit handwritten by scribes on papyrus scrolls – were commonplace across the Mediterranean Basin until the fracturing and decline of the Roman empire in the fifth century AD. In East Asia, meanwhile, durable and affordable paper was in plentiful supply, and bound blank notebooks were available to buy.
In Europe, the start of the Middle Ages saw a schism within Christianity between Rome and Constantinople (now Istanbul). Biblical scholars depended on a limited supply of vellum (ca
