The Development of Block Printing in China
Overview
Many centuries before the invention of the printing press in Europe, the Chinese developed a form of printing using carved wooden blocks. Two earlier Chinese inventions, paper and ink, paved the way for block printing; so too did the practice of using carved seals, which dates to early Mesopotamian civilizations. As for block printing, it too had appeared outside China, where textile-makers used it for making patterns on cloth; but in China during the seventh century A.D., the technique of printing large quantities of text with blocks first came to fruition. In time this would spawn an innovation that, when adapted in the West, would literally transform society: movable-type printing.
Background
Long before paper and printing was the invention of writing itself, which seems to have come about independently in Sumer, Egypt, the Indus Valley, and China about 6,000 years ago. This was one of the signal developments toward the beginnings of civilization itself, since the transmission of ideas is essential to the propagation of learning. The Egyptians carved their hieroglyphs into stone, but the Sumerians, lacking an abundance of stone in their homeland, instead used clay blocks. Not only did they write on clay using a stylus, but in time the scribes of the earliest Mesopotamian civilizations began to use carved seals to repeat certain images—in particular, the "signature" of a ruler.
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