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...