The Sumerians passed on their script, called cuneiform (Latin for ‘wedge-shaped’), to Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians, and to other neighboring peoples. The Egyptians used hieroglyphics (Greek for ‘sacred carvings’), a form that Minoans and Hittites, as well as Maya and Aztec Indians, also used.
The use of round "cylinder seals" for rolling an impression onto clay tablets goes back to early Mesopotamian civilization, and featured complex and beautiful images, later in both China and Egypt, the use of small “stamps” for seals preceded the use of larger blocks.
Printing Press was invented in 1439 by the German Johannes Gutenberg. Gutenberg's movable type printing is often regarded as the most important invention of the second millennium.
Johannes Gutenberg, a goldsmith and businessman from the mining town of Mainz in southern Germany, borrowed money to develop a technology that could address this serious economic bottleneck.
Gutenberg designed a Latin print Bible which became his signature work. He launched a run of some 300 two-volume Gutenberg Bibles which sold for 30 florins each, or about three years of a clerk's wage.
It allowed ink to be transferred from the movable type to paper in a mechanized way. This revolutionized the spread of knowledge and religion as previously books were generally hand-written (often by monks). The printing revolution opens, probably, the modern era in Europe. The timing between Renaissance and the printing emergence are opening the discussions about humanism and Renaissance as an European phenomena, the true border in history, between the Middle Ages and the Modern Era, a time in which the history of the continent developed in a quick and triumphal rhythm.
History of printing press
