In the year of our Lord, 1448, in Mainz, Germany,
a goldsmith named Johannes Gutenberg
was experimenting with a lead alloy
and a hand-held mould.
His aim was to speed up the process of putting ink on paper.
But what he did was speed up history.
Gutenberg's invention spelled the end of the Middle Ages
and ushered in the modern world of science and industry.
Every innovation of today is built on this foundation.
Yet behind Gutenberg's press, lay centuries of development and change
in the way words were written -
without which, he could never have succeeded.
This is the story of history's most important technology.
The technology of putting words on a page.
Looks a bit out of place.
Well, I take a pretty experimental and hands-on approach
to calligraphy, to say the least.
It only takes a few moments actually to make one of the best pens I know.
You're making a pen. Yeah, that's right.
Brody Neuenschwander is a calligrapher, an artist who takes
letters as his starting point.
Brody is a modern artist, but he stands in a tradition
that stretches back 5,000 years to the beginning of writing.
For most of that time, words were written by hand
using a variety of tools.
In this film,
Brody and I want to explore the changing methods people have used
to create written texts and how changing the way we write
changed the course of history.
I'm going to write a phrase from a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins,
"As kingfishers catch fire" and use this pen.
One of my favourite pens, made of a drinks can, because it gives me
so many possibilities, produce different kinds of lines.
So the A, we'll start with a great...
Oh, yes!
And you should see right away what this is doing for me.
It's doing something very particular.
It's giving me the almost splattered feel of a brush.Yes.
And then the finest hairline of a quill.
And then this great big fat line.
I can do all those different things with this one...
That you made in a minute? In moments, absolutely.
And you know what?
The great thing is, I'm never without a pen.
I can always find a Coke can.
I can always find a pair of scissors and some tape and a pencil
or a stick to put it on. It's beautiful.
So you've created a new piece of technology here.
But I know that you're also interested in the writing implements
of the past, aren't you?
Writing is obviously the fundamental, most important
technology of society.
It's how knowledge is created, how it's shared, how it's preserved
for the future.
And each society does that in its own way,
with its own tools and materials.
And I can investigate that in a very, very precise way
by going back to those tools and materials and see what happens
when I write with them.
So, it's a sort of experimental approach to historical research
using the real tools and materials that were used in earlier times.
Arguably, the history of writing begins in Egypt.
The ancient Egyptians created the world's first nation state.
And they ran it with the help
of one of the very earliest writing systems.
Egyptian hieroglyphs can still be read in monumental inscriptions
carved in stone.
But the Egyptians also had a portable everyday medium
on which to write.
Brody has come to Egypt
to learn about this pioneering information technology.
My name is Sam.I'm Brody.Welcome.
I'll give you a brief idea about this plant, the papyrus plant,
and how the ancient Egyptians were using this plant
to make paper.
Papyrus is a type of sedge,
which grows all along the banks of the Nile.
Readily available and easily harvested,
this unassuming plant was turned by the Egyptians
into one of the foundations of civilisation.
We remove the green parts,
all of the green cover.
We divide it into a long and thin slices, like this.
But that part once was breakable, as you can see,
or easy to break.
To make the slices more flexible,
we use this one.
The slice now would be more strong and more flexible
than before when it was big.
Then we soak the slices in fresh water.
After two weeks, we take the slices from the water.
We arrange them between two pieces of cotton.
These are the slices that we have here, the slices,
in vertical and horizontal lines, like this.
One vertical, another horizontal
and down in space.
One by one, and so, by two, then we complete the whole sheet.
We cover them.
We put them under a press machine for one week.
One week, and off the press,
we get this paper,
and this is the first paper in the world.
Well, it feels like a wonderful surface.
I think I would really enjoy writing on it, actually.Mm.
As civilisation spread from Egypt across the Mediterranean world,
so did papyrus. It became an important export,
and when Egypt was finally conquered by the Roman Empire in 30 BC,
one of the biggest prizes of conquest was domination
of the Mediterranean papyrus trade.
The Romans had a large and complex empire that ran on the written word
and papyrus, being their form of paper, was imported from Egypt,
and it shipped over here in enormous quantities,
and papyrus, rolled up into scrolls, was for centuries the Roman book.
If there was a fresco of a householder,
wanting to show they were literate,
they would be holding a scroll. Very deeply ingrained.
But how were those papyrus scrolls produced?
Back in Brody's studio, we set out to explore how the Romans wrote.
What have you got here?
Well, I just got back from Cairo, where I bought this papyrus,
which I'd never used before.
Now, I'm really interested to see what the surface is like,
and so I've got a reed pen here, cut to nearly a point,
which is what they used for writing semiformal Roman books.
Brody sets out to copy a letter, sent from Rome to Egypt,
preserved in the desert sand for nearly 2,000 years.
So I'm going to see what it's like to write those letters
with this reed pen.
You always learn a lot at the very first moment
that you touch the pen to the writing surface.
How does it feel?
Very...
..smooth, even...
..I would say almost slippery.
It's, er...
..it's like skating.
Whoa, you're going at quite a pace.
Yes, it's encouraging a very light,
sort of almost flicking kind of motion of the pen.
Seems really it's rather amazing.
I have to dip frequently. That's one thing I'm noticing.
So it uses more than... Well, I think, you know, this,
that's probably because of the reed doesn't have a natural reservoir,
the way a quill would. Ah, a quill does, yeah.
So it's flowing out very quickly. Yes.
But it's naturally urging me
to stretch the letters out,
and I'm getting that feeling, that I recognise from Roman scrolls,
of a spacious, horizontal style of writing.
But that's just coming naturally, is it, because of the paper?
Yeah, that's how it feels...Yeah. ..with this pen.
So you are getting a feel for what it is to be a scribe
in Roman Empire?
Yeah, I have the feeling that if I were one of those scribes
working in the book shops near Trajan's Forum,
and you walked in with your copy of Ovid, and you said,
"I need it before a dinner party on Friday",
you know, I think I could manage that for you.Right.
So this is really going very quickly...Yes.
..and since I can write on this papyrus quickly,
and since it's not an expensive, was not an expensive material,
then I think the price of books would not have been very high
in ancient Rome.
So we're here in Trajan's market.Yeah,
and these spaces here are like Roman shops,
single rooms, open directly out onto the street,
and they've got accommodation in there for supplies
and for merchandising, maybe for staff,
and if you look at this travertine doorway here,
you can see there's a shutter or a groove into which...Oh, yes.
Yes...the shutters, there's space here for a door to open.
Right.Inside, space for merchandise and stock,
maybe a mezzanine floor above,
where the shopkeeper could sleep at night,
and a really large amount of space for stuff.Right.
And when this was in use, if it was a shop, you could imagine
the merchandise spilling out onto the street here.
We know about adverts written up on the walls,
so if it's a book shop, there would be books on display up here for sale
to try catch passing trade
and intrigue people to come and make a purchase.
So there's a thriving book culture?
Well, we know that there's a lot of books in ancient Rome
and the book market seems to get more vibrant and busier
as the centuries go by.
Papyrus imported in bulk from Egypt was not necessarily very expensive.
It came in different grades, and the top grade might be pricey,
but there were other cheaper grades available.
The labour might be furnished by slave scribes,
working for book-sellers and publishers,
so the labour might not be terribly expensive as well,
and sometimes authors do criticise book shop copies as being cheap
and rushed, made for a mass-market and not with a great deal of care.
The poet Martial says, for example, you could buy a volume of his verse
for one denarius. That's a soldier's daily wage.
So it's not an inaccessible purchase for many people.
And if you couldn't afford a particular book,
you could always go and consult it in one of Rome's public libraries.
As well as the commercial book-sellers,
there were public libraries, founded by the Empress.
We know of about 29 of them by the late antique period,
so lots and lots of them.
It all adds up to a picture of a world where books
were widely available.
In the libraries, we can estimate maybe tens of thousands of scrolls,
and that's just the big public collections.
So around us here in this square mile or so of the city centre,
maybe hundreds of thousands of scroll books.
But that thriving literary culture was all based
on the ready availability of papyrus,
and by the end of the third century,
Rome's control over the Mediterranean had begun to slip.
Over time, the Roman Empire split into East and West.
Seaborne trade became harder and more expensive to do,
as the empire fragmented,
and the trade in papyrus became harder and harder to sustain,
and you can count the number of fragments of books that survive
by each century, and you can see the number goes down and down.
So there are just fewer books being made,
and this city of great libraries and thousands of thousands of papyri
changes, and a late antique writer says, "Libraries are shut up now,
"and echoing like tombs, and empty".
Rome's empire shrinks
and becomes the start of the new Christian Middle Ages.
The fall of the Roman Empire is one of the great inflection points
of history, and it coincides with a change in the technology
of writing in Europe.
As papyrus disappeared, so did the book,
as a relatively inexpensive, everyday commodity.
Books would become rare and precious objects,
as Europeans turned to a new and much more expensive material
on which to write.
I am Lee Mapley.
I am the only traditional master parchment maker left in the world,
which is quite unique.
Essentially, we're taking a raw material,
completely natural sheepskin, calfskin or goatskin,
and we are converting it into a beautiful writing material.
We tie the skin into a frame and it has to be stretched.
I'm realigning the fibres of the skin to get it nice and solid,
to keep that nice flat surface,
so then I can also work any flesh off the skin
and work the grease out of the skin in the frame.
So it's literally elbow grease and hot water to remove
that grease from the skin.
Ah!So I've got here a fabulous quality piece of parchment,
prepared for writing, and you can see where it comes from.
You can see its origin.
The four legs of the cow and the four corners coming out.
This is the spine of the animal.
You can just see a slightly paler line running down the middle
of the skin,
with the pelvic bones even showing here.
This would be where, for a large book, the page would be folded.
That's why we call it the spine of a book.
The spine of a book! Yeah, of course!
The fact the parchment could be folded made it possible
to stitch leaves together into a codex,
the form of the modern book.
Each sheet of parchment would yield eight pages of an octavo volume,
which meant that it took a lot of animals to make a single book.
But a book made from parchment would be extremely durable.
It's resistant to natural acid in the air.
You can't burn it. It is classified as non-combustible.
You can't tear it. It's incredibly strong.
It holds the insides of a beast.
A beast could be 500 or 600 kilos and they don't fall out, do they?
So it's nigh on indestructible.
You know that, whatever you write,
you're leaving this nugget of history for thousands of years
for those that follow.
The medieval pen was also an animal product.
A bird's feather.
Cutting a quill starts with shortening it.
Sadly, it's a little less romantic that way,
but otherwise it would stick in your eye.
And then you have to open the end of it,
and make a slit,
and the slit that I make now by lifting the knife
is what brings the ink to the point of the pen,
and then, starting on the other side,
I cut from one side towards the slit that I just made,
and then from the other side, towards the slit,
and I make a symmetrical point.
Now I use a lot of different tools, modern ones and all,
but I've still never found anything better than a good swan quill.
The lines have been scored into the parchment.
That has an advantage because both sides are lined at the same time.
Same time, in the same place, same thickness, yes.
Exactly what we want, because parchment is translucent.Mm.
You always have show-through to the other side.Yes.
You want the rows of letters back-to-back.Yeah.
Otherwise, they interfere with the reader.Yeah, yeah.
That makes sense.
I don't want to write into the line,
because that's a little gutter and my ink will run along it,
so I'm going to avoid actually making the mark into the line.
Ooh, that's a nice skin. Why? What makes it a nice skin?
Oh, just the way the pen feels,
when you write in the textured, velvety surface.
Mm.
It grabs it just the right way,
just enough resistance, so that you know exactly what you're doing.
The surface of the parchment has a sort of velvety nap to it.
Very fine, but it's enough to grab the ink,
and as it's drawing,
the fibres close in and hold the ink tightly.
It sounds a little bit odd, but, in a way, I'm almost tattooing
this parchment.Well, it is skin.
It's skin, and the ink is going into the surface.
This is why medieval books last so long, why the letters stay
so sharp and clear, for centuries and centuries.
I mean, look how sharp it is. Oh, and so neat!
Yes. Well, I mean...And regular.
Yeah, well, that's a little bit me...Of course!
THEY CHUCKLE
..but it really is also the materials.
I mean, they just encourage this wonderful...
..sort of stately pace of writing.
Yes.
You see, it's slow. Yes, it's slow.Right?
How many pages do you think you could do in a day?
Well, it depends on the number of words on the page,
but let's say one of the great Bibles, which has two columns,
of 30 or so lines each,
one or two of those pages a day would be a very good day's work.
Two pages a day?
So, if we're talking about a book - say, 250, 300 pages long -
that's a year's worth of writing? Something like that,
and usually split up among a team of people,
but if one person were doing it, yeah, it would take him a year
to do a large book, certainly.
Whereas you were talking about producing an Ovid within a week.
Yes, well, it's a shorter text than the Bible,
but let's just put it in other terms.
I think that writing on papyrus with a reed
is three or four times faster
than writing with a quill on parchment.
As it happens, Brody's studio is in the middle of Bruges.
In the Middle Ages, this city was a great centre of book production,
responsible for a large fraction of all the books being made
in Western Europe.
I went to the town hall to visit the city archivist, Ludo Vandamme,
to try to put what I'd learned about writing on parchment
into historical context.
So, what have you here in the box?
Huh!
Oh, we have animal remains.
Yes, clearly!No way!
Let's take this account.
1307.1307, and...
But that's quite clearly...Yes. ..a product of an animal, isn't it?
Yes.
Why have they left behind the hide like that?
I have no idea.You don't know?No.
When we have a look into the manuscript...Yes.
..it's an account, an account of the city of Bruges, 1307.
Which language?Then we see that this parchment is a better quality.
Oh, much finer.Look, here.
So nice, white, beige... Very white, very fine.
Fine.
Parchment was rather expensive,
so what's remarkable in this account,
we see that the city of Bruges...
..paid...
I think here we have it,
yeah, here,
"Fronchine, Fronchine",
that's vellum, that's parchment.
So, for all the parchment used by the city administration
for this year...1307.
..they paid £14, which was a huge amount of money.
So...So the council spent £14 on parchment alone.
On parchment, yes.
Well, you see, it's the highest amount we see here,
in this column...Right.
£4,
£8, and a huge amount,
£14, and it's parchment. Parchment, mm.
The city government may have been spending a small fortune on it,
but most of the parchment used in Bruges went to
the extensive book industry -
and here, too, the archives contain fascinating detail.
So what's this one?
This is a very unique register,
because it's the register of the Guild of St John,
and St John is the guild with all the people
who are working in the book industry in Bruges at this moment.
So we have a snapshot, one year, 1472...1472.
..of the whole book production in Bruges?Yes.
Amazing.That we have, yeah.
And Bruges is THE centre in Europe at this time, for books.
Bruges is the centre, so we see here a lot of different professions.
Yeah.Here we have a certain Haas,
and he was parchment maker.Yes.
We have book binders, eliminators,
there are scribes, etc,
the whole book production is here in this register.
And there were a lot of women, too,
and that's especially for Bruges and Flanders at that moment,
who ran their own shop.
So these are running workshops? Running workshops, yeah.Excellent.
And how many workshops do you think we have?
If you have a look here, we have 50 workshops.Right.
But we can say about one workshop producing, let's say,
20 books a year.OK.
So 50-ish workshops, we're talking about 1,000 books.
1,000, I think, that's a maximum.
The maximum is 1,000 a year in Bruges,
and Bruges is the biggest centre of production in Europe
at this time, right?Yes.
That's not a lot of books.
It's not a lot, no. It isn't.
Judging by this evidence, it seems that total European book production
in the Middle Ages could not have been more than a few thousand
volumes a year,
something like one book for every 10,000 Europeans.
So books were rare and expensive.
Ludo showed me a contract for one particularly deluxe example.
It is for a nobleman, a huge book,
two volumes, 600 folios,
decorated, eliminated,
the top 1% produced in Bruges,
still conserved in Paris...Oh!
..and what will it cost?
It cost, er...
..here we see,
vingt livres - this is French - £20.
So, one book, two volumes, £20.
Do we have an idea of what that actually means?
Yes, yes, yes... What could it buy in Bruges?
We have an idea.
When you, in this time, you want to buy a house in Bruges,
you can buy a house for £20.
Let's say a middle class house... But still a house.A house.
So the choice is a book or a house?Yes.
Well, he chose the book, this nobleman.Nobleman.Yes.
Money to burn.There's no question.
He chose for the book.
The libraries of Bruges still have examples
of the sort of book that cost as much as a house.
This is the absolute luxury manuscript.
You couldn't get anything more precious, more expensive
and more prestigious than this.
I'm looking at gold, which would have had to have been beaten
into thin sheets to be applied to the page.
I'm looking at blue, which actually came all the way from Afghanistan.
I'm looking at malachite green brought from Central Europe.
It is an 800-page book which represents 400 animals.
400 animals in a very agrarian economy.
Books like this represent a pinnacle of medieval art.
But they also represent a limitation on literacy and scholarship
compared to the broad literary culture of ancient Rome.
When I started my experiments with a reed pen on papyrus,
I was astonished with how quick it was.
First of all, papyrus was a cheap writing material.
That means that books were accessible to a certain segment
of the population in Greek and Roman times.
I think we could almost say that the Middle Ages
is that period when papyrus is no longer used,
no longer available, and parchment becomes the writing surface.
What do we gain from it?
This world of beautiful illuminated manuscripts?
What do we lose? A broader reading culture.
So the shift from antiquity to the Middle Ages
is the shift from papyrus to parchment
and the shift from a wide literate public to a very small one.
Very interesting to see how writing materials and techniques
can have such an immense influence on cultural development.
That's the story in Europe, but in Asia, too,
history has been shaped by the process of putting words on a page.
In China, a rich literary and artistic tradition developed...
..based on a distinctive pictorial script
and a unique writing technology.
The key components of that technology
are traditionally known as the four treasures of the study.
First is paper.
Then the brush.
And the calligrapher needs an ink stone on which to grind her ink,
which comes in the form of a stick of solid pigment.
The four treasures allow Wang Xiaoning
to practise brush calligraphy in much the same way as it has been
for thousands of years.
Brush calligraphy produced works of art that were reprised in China
every bit as much as illuminated manuscripts were in Europe.
But in a medieval manuscript,
the art is in the decoration around the text.
The nature of the Latin alphabet and the characteristics of parchment
produced letters that were regular and repetitive.
But in Chinese brush calligraphy, the art is in the brushwork
that produces the characters themselves.
And that is made possible by the nature of the writing surface.
Paper was invented in China in the 2nd century AD.
And by the 7th century, papermaking was an important Chinese industry.
Paper was key to another Chinese invention.
Wood block printing.
Each handwritten page of text was glued to a wooden block
and then the characters were carved out by a skilled craftsman.
This step was laborious and expensive.
But once the wood block was produced,
it was quick and cheap to print from...
..thanks to paper that was absorbent, flexible and inexpensive.
And because Chinese paper didn't tear easily,
it was a simple matter to stitch the pages together into a book.
Indeed, paper was so plentiful that, even 1,000 years ago,
Chinese people could buy blank notebooks.
It would have been inconceivable to a European from the Middle Ages
to have something like this where you can record your thoughts.
In Europe, every single blank page was an expensive
and scarce resource.
In a world of parchment, many thoughts go unrecorded.
A source of pride, but also a state secret.
For 600 years, only the Chinese knew how to make paper.
But nothing can be kept hidden forever.
This is the Meros Paper Mill near Samarkand,
a key city on the Silk Road between China and the Mediterranean.
In the Middle Ages,
there were hundreds of such water-powered paper mills
operating in the region, churning out paper
for the Islamic Empire of the Abbasid Caliphs.
Papermaking had come to Samarkand as the result of a battle.
In 751, the westward expansion of the Tang dynasty
was checked by Arab forces at the River Talas.
It was a defeat that ensured that to this day
Central Asia would be part of the Muslim world.
And in the captured baggage train of the Chinese army were papermakers.
The secret was out.
How to turn the bark of the mulberry tree
into the seemingly humble material
that was the foundation of Chinese culture and power.
I could watch this forever. Her hands...It's mesmerized.
She just does it so quickly and efficiently.
And you can imagine how important that would have been
because this is being done in hundreds of workshops
by thousands of people to produce this unbelievable quantity of paper.
It starts like this.
To make the paper from mulberry tree,
you cut the spring growth.
That's these thin sticks.
And you can peel it off. Look. Try it.Yeah.Comes off easily.
That's very satisfying.
Yes.
But it gives you the inner pith, which is what you want,
still attached to the outer bark. The harder bark, yeah.
So, to get rid of that, that strip is soaked in water for several days
and that softens it and expands it, opening up the fibres.Yeah.
You get this rather slimy...But squidgy.Squidgy piece of bark.
So now Roxanne, great swordswoman that she is,
can go over this with her sharp knife,
scrape off this brown outer side...Yes.
..trim away any imperfections that she finds
which would otherwise be little brown flecks in the paper.Right.
And then the resulting...
..product is this golden-coloured,
inner...Soft...pith.
These fibres...Are very fibrous. ..will be the paper.
Wonderful.
The mulberry pith is cooked for a while...
..and then the mill pounds it for up to eight hours...
..to produce a pulp.
Added to water,
the pulp makes a thick soup of cellulose fibres,
which are scooped up in a rectangular sieve.
As the water flows through the sieve,
it leaves behind a thin mat of the fibres.
This is pressed between pieces of cotton
to form a single sheet of paper...
..which can later be hung up to dry.
Then the Islamic papermakers added a new step to the Chinese process.
They polished each sheet...
..to produce a smooth writing surface.
The preparation of paper for Islamic calligraphy is quite a process
and the reason is that they use a reed pen,
as the ancient Romans did, but it's cut to a wide point
and that wide point is going to be pushed from right to left
to make the long strokes of Arabic calligraphy.
And therefore you cannot have any unevennesses
or any roughnesses in the paper.
So, I've never used it.
I'm very interested to see how it feels to...
..to guide a reed pen
across this polished paper surface.
The first thing I notice is that the...
..strokes need to be made pretty slowly
because if I'm going fast, the ink is pulling back.
It's a matter of finding the right speed and pressure.
That's really fascinating.
At the beginning, I was going too fast and the ink was pulling back,
but I've found the speed that this paper is demanding
and now my ink stained just where I put it.
What we have here with Islamic paper is something that's cheap
but very sophisticated, very finely manicured and tailored
to making extremely graceful calligraphy.
In Samarkand during the Middle Ages, the papermaking industry
was on a surprisingly impressive scale.
There were perhaps as many as 400 paper mills operating in this region
in the Middle Ages, all the way to the 18th century,
supplying paper to the entire Islamic world.
The production of a factory like this
would have been several thousand sheets a day,
and if you take that times 400, we have millions of sheets of paper
being made every day.
This was the paper that supplied the entire Islamic world
with the basis for its intellectual, religious and cultural life.
And that intellectual life was rich indeed.
The five centuries that followed the beginning of papermaking
in Samarkand came to be known as the Islamic Golden Age.
The arts and sciences flourished.
Islamic scholars made discoveries in geology, biology, medicine
and especially mathematics.
They gave us the words algebra and algorithm,
and we still count using an Arabic number system.
Samarkand was, itself, a great centre of scholarship.
In Registan Square,
three great Islamic universities face each other.
They are covered in monumental Arabic calligraphy...
..praising God and extolling the virtues of learning.
The oldest of the three universities was founded by Ulugh Beg,
ruler of Samarkand in the 15th century.
But today, Ulugh Beg is famous not as a prince, but as an astronomer.
Not far from Registan Square, Ulugh Beg built his pride and joy -
the greatest observatory the world had ever seen.
Unfortunately, it did not survive him
except for the part that was underground.
The top half of the sextant once reached 30 metres above ground,
making it by far the largest such instrument ever built.
Sunlight passing through a controlled opening
would have illuminated the curved track,
which is marked very precisely with degrees.
A copper ruler inserted in one of these slots
added precision by measuring the fraction of a degree
called the minutes of arc.
Ulugh Beg used the sextant to measure the height of the sun
at noon each day.
At midsummer and midwinter, these measurements allowed him
to determine the length of the solar year.
The scientific observations being made here
were far in advance of anything happening in Europe at the time.
In fact, eventually, Islamic science travelled all the way to Europe...
..where it would help to lay the foundations
of a scientific revolution.
This style catalogue, published by a Polish astronomer,
lists the position of the fixed stars
as determined by six great observers.
Among them is Ulug Beighi.
This extraordinary frontispiece shows the ancient Greek Ptolemy,
Tycho Brahe,
Ulug Beighi,
he's the one with the long, Oriental moustache
in the image, sitting at table, being highly honoured
in this sequence of persons who have mighty observatories,
made observations of the fixed stars.
So you've got a succession, on each side, of astronomers and the idea
in this image is that the catalogues are steadily improved as each passes
on their findings for improvement by their successors.
By the time this book was published in 1690, the ancient view
of the heavens had been radically transformed by the discoveries
of astronomers like Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler and Isaac Newton.
They were all Europeans.
Proof, that by the 17th century, European intellectual life was every
bit as sophisticated as the scholarship of the Islamic world.
But that change was only possible because of two developments
in the production of the written word.
First, these pages are made of paper,
which arrived in Europe via Muslim Spain.
Even more significant,
this is a printed book.
The impact of printing in the Western world is comparable
in scope, in all areas of learning,
to the impact, in the Islamic world,
of the use of paper.
Printing would eventually spread the written word to every level
of European society.
But how did this radical new technology find a market
in a world where books were a luxury for the very rich?
The European printing revolution
began in the German town of Mainz in 1448...
..when Johannes Gutenberg
began casting the letters of the Latin alphabet in metal.
These little type pieces spelled the end of the Middle Ages
and helped to usher in the modern world,
but they could only do so because of a lucky accident.
The letters of the Latin alphabet just happened to be the right shape.
Gutenberg was looking for a way to produce multiple copies
of the same text in a much faster way than scribes could copy texts
in the manuscript period.
Gutenberg's idea was to speed up the process of putting words
on a page by replacing the scribe with a machine.
The secret of Gutenberg's printing press was his ability to mass
produce multiple copies, in metal, of each individual letter.
And in this, he had a hidden advantage.
The letters of the Latin alphabet are really very simple shapes
and when you write them in the way they would have been written
at the time printing was invented,
all the letters are very clearly separate.
This is a modular way of writing, and, in fact, if I want to make
a little box of metal with them, no problem, because I'm already,
I'm already there, basically.
The design has already happened.
These simple, block like letters can become blocks of metal
and can be printed.
But it's easy for us to forget
what a big risk Gutenberg was taking.
To set up his print shop took capital,
capital which would have to be repaid.
And so it was vital that the first book he printed turn a profit.
Well, this is one of the really great treasures
of Lambeth Palace Library.
It's a copy of the
Vulgate Bible printed by Johannes Gutenberg in Mainz
in the mid 1450s.
So it's a copy of the first substantial printed book
to be produced in the West, with moveable type.
The people who bought books in the 15th century
were a small and elite group of rich individuals and institutions.
Every book they had ever seen was a manuscript and they had a clear
idea of what a book should look like.
What people would have really prized in the manuscript,
would have thought marked it out as a manuscript of high quality
was the regularity of the text and of the letter forms,
the evenness of the inking,
the contrast between the white of the page
and the black of the text.
Those qualities, regularity of letter forms and line length,
were precisely the characteristics of moveable type.
What was the challenge for the scribe was relatively
straightforward for the typesetter.
So moveable type could produce a printed book that matched
the quality of the manuscripts
that readers were used to looking at and buying.
And Gutenberg didn't stop there.
He printed on parchment and had the printed text
illuminated by hand.
The impression of a manuscript is so complete
that, for hundreds of years,
the librarians at Lambeth Palace were fooled.
And until the early 19th century, it was thought to be a manuscript.
It was catalogued as a manuscript, and I think Gutenberg
would have been delighted by our confusion,
because what he was trying to achieve with the printing
of this book was to produce a book by a new technique that people
would think was just as good as the manuscripts that they were used
to buying and reading.
So what he was trying to do was to do something new
that would seem old.
Gutenberg's strategy worked.
His printed Bibles sold with ease.
He soon had imitators, and within a few decades, there were hundreds
of printing presses operating in Europe,
manufacturing books on an unprecedented scale.
It's difficult to overstate the transformative effect
that workshops like this had on Europe.
Just one of these printing presses could produce more books in two
weeks than the entire scribal industry of Bruges could produce
in a year.
The price of books plummeted.
What had cost pounds now cost shillings.
And so there was an enormous expansion in the reading public.
All sorts of new books with new ideas start being written
to satisfy this new market.
Europe would no longer be the intellectual laggard.
But what would be the impact of moveable type beyond Europe?
Printed books were soon travelling east
as European printers sought to serve Christian readers
living under Muslim rule in the Ottoman Empire.
It looks quite humble, but this is a rather rare and precious specimen.
This is the first Arabic book printed with moveable type.
It was printed in 1514, in Fano, Italy.
And this here is a Book of Hours, printed in Arabic.
But the manuscript tradition in the Islamic world
was very different from that in Europe.
Instead of a modulus script of separate letters,
Arabic was written in a cursive style, in which the letters
in a word are all connected.
These connections are obligatory, and readers would never have seen
Arabic written any other way.
You see, the Arabic script is much more than simply a cursive script
that connects letters together.
In fact, it's words that stack and are interwoven across the line.
There, it is not simply a sequence of words, but some words
might be higher and lower.
The ends of words might weave into the beginnings of others.
And all of that is incredibly difficult to reproduce
with moveable type.
These difficulties are readily apparent
in the printed Book of Hours.
You can see that we have two forms of the Arabic
script on a single page.
The first form is a recognisable, calligraphic Arabic hand.
It's a cliche, a wooden block.
It's not moveable type.
And so, it would be recognisable to any reader of Arabic
as good Arabic.
But underneath it, you have a completely new invention.
It is the Arabic moveable type script
and it results from the adaptation,
a forced adaptation of Arabic to the moveable type environment,
making it closer to the logic of the Latin script.
And you can see here that the words do not stack upon each other
like the calligraphic hand.
The letters are all on one basic line,
and you can even see, if you look closely, that the baseline
that connects the cursive letters together is not complete,
and there are gaps between the individual letters.
Though well transcribed,
I don't think would have recognised this as Arabic.
It was difficult for moveable type to reproduce the look of an Arabic
manuscript, and that made it hard to compete
with the well-established local book trade.
So, although Ottoman printers were soon printing in the Hebrew
and Armenian alphabets,
it was more than two centuries before the first Arabic print shop
was established in Istanbul in 1727.
What we have here is the first Arabic book,
printed with moveable type, in the Muslim world,
about 200 years after the Book of Hours that we've looked
at previously.
This text shows a remarkable advance
in Arabic printing technology,
where there are many more ligatures that mimic
the Arabic calligraphic hand.
Nevertheless, unlike in Europe,
moveable type failed to capture the market,
and within 20 years, the print shop was out of business.
After a short stint, basically printing technology died off,
and so we can wonder why did printing never really take off?
And while the most obvious difference between the first book
printed using moveable type in the Muslim world
and the Gutenberg Bible, is the book's contents.
This is a dictionary.
This would have had a much more limited audience.
It wouldn't have been consumed by everyone and wouldn't
have been a book that everyone would have had an interest in.
That book would have been the Koran, but moveable type,
although improved, was still not good enough to reproduce
the calligraphy of the holy book.
If you could have had affordable and mass-produced Korans,
I think you would have had a huge market for that.
The trouble is, they had to meet a certain quality.
You could not print a Koran like this.
This does not reproduce a manuscript, it does not reproduce
the format of the Koran that the faithful were used to seeing.
So the most widely read and widely appreciated Arabic book
was never printed using moveable type.
And that took a huge part of the market out, whereas Gutenberg
printed the book, the Bible, that, basically, everyone on
the continent would have wanted.
So there's an irony.
Printing took off in Europe in large part because Gutenberg
could produce, with moveable type, a book that looked
as if it had been written by hand.
And that was possible because he was printing the Latin alphabet.
If he had been trying to print a different script,
he might never have succeeded.
That simple fact lies behind a thousand fold increase
in the availability of information,
an explosion of ideas
that led directly to the European scientific revolution,
the Industrial Revolution that followed,
and the world we live in today.
Pen and paper, ink and alphabet.
These things are so familiar as to be almost invisible.
But these are world altering technologies.
Our history has been shaped
by the shape of the letters we write
and the means we use to write them.
Remember THAT next time you pick up a pencil!