Say, around the Sixth Century B.C. (the age of the first definitely known Greek philosopher, Thales of Miletus), when alphabetic Greek was just getting going as a literary language. Suppose you go back in a time machine to around then and introduce a printing press and make no other change – or somebody of that time gets the obvious idea from seal-stamps or textile-printing blocks – does the course of history change? Or do we just have a better record of it?
It was. IIRC, the Chinese invented the printing press over 600 years before the Europeans did. Problem was, their written language just didn’t lend itself to moveable type, though they did use it extensively.
-XT
I think we’re supposed to consider an alternate history in which alphabetic written language and the printing press got popular in the same place at the same time around 600bc.
In many (although not all) ways, the question is akin to asking what the world will be like hundreds or thousands of years from now. The printing press was slightly overdue being invented, but much of what we do and are today is a product of it - to the breadth of extent that, had it been.invented earlier, we’d be living in whatever is a plausible future to.us now.
One thing I’ve always fantasized is that the Great Library at Alexandria had a printing press and the availability of large quantities of paper, ink and book making skills. Imagine what might have been saved simply due to having large numbers of copies distributed from the library to various nations or even individuals who might have been interested in copies of the various works. Even before the place was burned they were losing information just because making copies was so difficult, and you had to physically go there to view much of what was there. Imagine the impact of all that knowledge being more widely distributed and available to more people throughout the ancient world.
-XT
Well, the paper is the other part of the puzzle. It doesn’t do much good to have a printing press if the only material to print on is expensive parchment. You need the combination of cheap paper and printing.
Wouldn’t that move antiquity back before that? Isn’t anything before moveable type antiquated?
And to really get highest-and-best-use of it all, somebody needs to invent the sewn-sheet or glued-sheet codex-book to displace those cumbersome scrolls as the industry standard.
Well, that’s what we’re talking about here: Cheap written/printed matter for the masses means (or stimulates) mass literacy, with all that implies.
A lot would have changed. It is surprising that it took so long to invent moveable type. But it is slightly more complex than it seems. And without the spread of Christianity and the Bible as a book worth printing, the whole thing may not have been able to jump start. You need people who can read, and something people consider worth reading. Christianity may have gotten in the way initially by making scriveners out of monks to keep them busy.
Yep. The Phaistos Disk is an interesting artifact, representing movable type circa 1700 BCE, but if your only medium is soft clay, it’s of limited use.
Of course, we’re not just talking about Greece – the contemporary Phoenicians (who invented the alphabet) would use printing too (mainly for commercial purposes, at first). And before long, the government of the Persian Empire would be using printed paperwork.
The printing press was invented (in Europe) almost as soon as paper was introduced.
Paper itself was being used just on the other side of the Mediterranean by the Arabs, so there was worry by the Church that if paper was introduced, exchange with the Arabs would pick up and Catholicism would be taken over by Islam or ancient Roman and Greek ideas. It was the initial introduction of paper and other knowledge from the Middle East into Europe that caused the little Renaissance, probably cut short by the Medieval Inquisition starting around 1230.
However, starting around 1300 the church started to persecute the Jews. While the Jews had always been something like outsiders in Medieval society, there hadn’t been active dislike and fear of them. These fears and suspicions of Jews that pervaded society caused the uprise of the written business contract, which allowed the uprise of loaning, which in turn lead to people trying new business ventures, which included bringing over paper from across the Med, inventing the printing press, and overall leads into the true Renaissance.
The printing press may have changed history significantly, but then again it might not have. The Arabs were building animatronic devices and performing experiments according to the scientific method, all with paper at hand. But you’ll note that it didn’t really lead anywhere. Wealthy geniuses had fun toying about with various devices and so on, but that was basically just a hobby. At most, you built something big and fancy to gain the attention of the king and gain favor for a while, but you didn’t set up a factory to build millions of them, hire on workers, and bring the invention to market.
Similarly, the ancient Greeks had gears and screws and whatnot, making things like the Antikythera mechanism, but again, this was probably just the product of a lone tinkerer, playing about in the ancient Grecian equivalent of a garage.
The Arabs had all the technology they needed to produce the printing press, as did the ancient Greeks. In the former case, they even had paper. But they didn’t invent the printing press because no one was trying to start a business and make a profit.
Medieval financial thought was probably not all that different from say, the finances of modern Mexico. If someone in your family is doing well, then everyone goes over to his house every weekend to gorge. All of the wealth spreads through the whole family, with the most productive member earning (effectively) no more than the least productive. If someone in your family has a hammer and you need one, you go over and take it, as though it was yours, because you need it at that moment, and they do not.
In modern America, on the other hand, if your own brother came into your room to “borrow” something, most people would throw a screaming fit, let alone cousins or more distant family.
This level of possessiveness is necessary for people to start thinking along the lines of profiting off of their neighbors. That’s what the mistrust between Medieval Christians and Jews introduced into society, the willingness and desire to screw over your neighbor for your own sake (aka make a profit). It just so happened that the best way to profit off of your neighbor is to produce things that would make his life better, and the more inventive you are at that, the better a chance you have at profiting from him. Once people realized they could profit off outsiders and scoundrels, they started to do it to their own society and eventually even their family (though to a much limited extent).
Basically, the printing press in Ancient Greece would have been an interesting toy. But until a society somewhere had enemies living across the street from one another, forming strict contracts based on mistrust, and devising ways to get rich off of one another, you wouldn’t see much scientific growth beyond what a single wealthy genius can develop in his garage.
Ah, if only it had occurred to them to use movable type to print porn, it would have spread like wildfire, like VCRs and the internet.
Codices were in use at least as early as the first century CE, and were pretty standard by about the 5th century CE. They may not have been around yet at the OP’s 600 BCE, but they probably would have shown up sooner if the printing press were in existence.
That is a fair point. If it had been invented during Grecian or Roman times, instead of Christian, porn would have been fairly popular I imagine.
What was literacy like during those times? Was it just scribes who knew how to read and write, or did high ranking men learn it? Would they start to learn to read so that they could read smut to their wives, and their wives learn it as well, or would they just have a slave read to them?
This is the part I don’t know, and only lightly alluded to in my previous post (and thank you for that information you responded with). There had to be enough people that could read to make printing worthwhile. As I recall the libraries of the romans were just a pile of scrolls and papers with no real organization. This indicates to me that there weren’t all that many people reading them. Some other thing I vaguely recall was the the library at Alexandria was more like a museum than a library, with people looking at the collection and not the content. But I have little background in history to judge the applicability of these snippets of info.
Western Civ is based on antisemitism?!
Wait, there was all of that in ancient Greece, and ancient Phoenicia – highly-developed merchant-culture. With written contracts, certainly, and lawsuits, and business ventures.
And do you think that, in a society as mentally and politically alive as ancient Greece, there would not be any demand for newspapers?!
People say that, and it is true, but it’s not quite the same. Unfortunately, it’s hard to distinguish what the exact differences are due to the lack of written information from the time, and due to the same sort of thinking that calls the ancient Mesopotamians “electricians” because they had batteries.
Basically, there’s some fundamental philosophical underpinnings that need to permeate a society before they take law and trade, and approach those like a business, not just as a way to keep the world organized and mostly functioning.
I see no reason why a printing industry could not flourish without whatever you’re talking about, in an ancient Greek society that seems to have supported a pretty big book-copying industry and a lot of highly bureaucratic papyrus-driven governments (especially in the Hellenistic period).