Guest Post by: Noah
Did you know the history of printing goes back over 5,000 years?
The history of printing is a history filled with inventiveness and innovation, with each development in printing technology building upon the lessons learned from a previous technology.
Part 1: Ancient Printing
Printing first began in one of the earliest known human civilizations. The Mesopotamian culture came to be in what is now Iraq where they formed the first known cities, such as the city of Sumer. It was in these ancient cities that the first known form of printing developed around 3100 BCE.
The first known type of printing used a cylinder that was etched with a design and rolled through soft clay. Once the clay hardened, the design was preserved. This process allowed a single design to be replicated over and over. In other words, printing was created!
This form of printing went hand-in-hand with the world’s first known written language, called cuneiform, which was developed around the same time period.
The next great innovations in printing occurred in ancient China. Around the year 200 CE, the ancient Chinese culture developed wood-block printing. This type of printing featured lines of text carved into wooden blocks that could transfer ink to sheets of paper.
You may be wondering, where did they get the ink and paper? Well, it just so happens that both ink and paper were also invented in ancient China around the same time period!
The next great innovation in printing technology was the development of movable type, which occurred in China in 1041 CE. This innovation dramatically sped up the printing process, as the letters and words on a page could be easily rearranged, eliminating the need to carve the entire design for each page one at a time.
