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Part of a series on the
History of printing
Techniques Woodblock printing 200 Movable type 1040 Intaglio (printmaking) 1430 Printing press c. 1440 Etching c. 1515 Mezzotint 1642 Relief printing 1690 Aquatint 1772 Lithography 1796 Chromolithography 1837 Rotary press 1843 Hectograph 1860 Offset printing 1875 Hot metal typesetting 1884 Mimeograph 1885 Daisy wheel printing 1889 Photostat and rectigraph 1907 Screen printing 1911 Spirit duplicator 1923 Dot matrix printing 1925 Xerography 1938 Spark printing 1940 Phototypesetting 1949 Inkjet printing 1950 Dye-sublimation 1957 Laser printing 1969 Thermal printing c. 1972 Solid ink printing 1972 Thermal-transfer printing 1981 3D printing 1986 Digital printing 1991
v t e

The history of printing begins with attempts to streamline communication of commerce, law and religion.

Technology development

Pre-history

The Phaistos Disc is sometimes classified as an early, if not the first, document of movable type printing. The German professor for linguistics Brekle, who defines typography as movable type printing, writes in his article 'The typographical principle' in the renowned Gutenberg-Jahrbuch:

An early clear incidence for the realisation of the typographical principle is the notorious Phaistos Disc (ca. 1800-1600 BC). If the disc is, as assumed, a textual representation, we are really dealing with a “printed” text, which fulfills all definitional criteria of the typographical principle. The spiral sequencing of the graphematical units, the fact that they are impressed in a clay disc (blind printing!) and not imprinted are merely possible technological variants of textual representation. The decisive factor is that the material “types” are proven to be repeatedly instantiated on the clay disc.

Other authors, who are primarily concerned with its decipherment have called the disc in passing comments as "the first movable type", too. Having been variously dated between 1850 and 1350 BC, the Phaistos Disc precedes later inventions of movable type by more than two millennia.

Woodblock printing

The use of round "cylinder seals" for rolling an impress onto clay tablets goes back to early Mesopotamian civilization before 3,000 BCE, where they are the commonest works of art to survive, and feature complex and beautiful images. In both China and Egypt, the use of small stamps for seals preceded the use of larger blocks. In Egypt, Europe and India, the printing of cloth certainly preceded the printing of paper or papyrus; this was probably also the case in China. The process is essentially the same - in Europe special presentation impressions of prints were often printed on silk until at least the seventeenth century.

The earliest woodblock printed fragments to survive are from China and are of silk printed with flowers in three colours from the Han dynasty (before 220 CE). The earliest Egyptian printed cloth dates from the 4th century. but the dry conditions in Egypt are exceptionally good for preserving fabric compared to, for example, India. It is not clear if the Egyptian printing of cloth was learned from China, or elsewhere, or developed separately.

It is clear that the Chinese were the first by several centuries to use the process to print solid text, and equally that, much later, in Europe the printing of images on cloth developed into the printing of images on paper (woodcuts). It is also now established that the use in Europe of the same process to print substantial amounts of text together with images in block-books only came after the development of movable type in the 1450s.

Movable type

Printing press

Industrial revolution

Halftoning

Color printing

Digital printing

Geographical differences

East Asia

Europe

Spread of printing

References

1. Herbert E. Brekle, "Das typographische Prinzip", Gutenberg-Jahrbuch, Vol. 72 (1997), pp.58-63 (59)
2. Herbert E. Brekle, "Das typographische Prinzip", Gutenberg-Jahrbuch, Vol. 72 (1997), pp.58-63 (60f.)
3. Schwartz, Benjamin. "The Phaistos disk". Journal of Near Eastern Studies (Vol. 18, No. 2 (1959)): 105-112 (107). {{cite journal}}: |issue= has extra text (help)
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5. http://touregypt.net/featurestories/fabrics.htm