Faeelin
Banned
Incidentally, in this period Muslim writers in Al-Andalus were using Kufic writing, which looks like this: http://arts-sciences.cua.edu/gl/ima...U101/November_30/QuranSurahCowKuficScript.jpg
Islamic Printing Press?
- Thread starter Faeelin
- Start date
Bill Cameron
Banned
Hendryk said:
Hendryk,
What proportion of the Chinese population was literate? That is, what percentage could read? The difficulty in mastering the Chinese written language; you must learn thousands of symbols instead of two dozen letters, stifled widespread literacy and thus limited the number of authors, readers, etc.
Look at the kinds of books you list; tech manuals, religious canon, etc., they are academic tomes meant for the limited numbers of the intelligentsia. On the other hand, thanks to a great proportion of literates, once printing began in Europe there was an explosion in the numbers and types of publications. The two cannot be compared.
It took twenty years to print only 130 books?!? That isn't printing, that's a public works project. Block printing - when you 'carve' an entire page at once instead of using moveable type - isn't what we're talking about here anyway. That kind of printing has been done for millennia beginning with 'chops' and 'seals' pressed into clay.
The question posed presupposes moveable type and large quantities of books.
Which didn't suit the Chinese' needs because their language was not alphabetic. Instead of molding hundreds of copies of two dozen or so letters, the Chinese had to mold thousands of individual symbols to create a moveable type for their printing presses. And then, even when the books were printed, the audience for those books was proportionally much smaller than the audience in Europe again because of the use of symbols instead of an alphabet limited the number of literates.
It doesn't matter how early they invented it or how beautiful the books they printed were. Because China had a proprtionally smaller number of literates and because the Chinese language was ill suited for the rapid printing of large quantities of books (130 in twenty years!), the Chinese could not derive the same benefits from printing that the Europeans did.
None of this means the Europeans were 'better' or the Chinese were 'worse'; indeed I'd argue for the opposite of that, but it does mean that the Europeans and Chinese were 'different'. China could not recieve the same boons the Europeans did from printing because of the structure of the Chinese language.
Bill
Hendryk
Banned
I definitely agree that learning how to read and write the Chinese language is quite difficult--I found out the hard way. But I think you overestimate the difficulty. The Western alphabet system may be easy to learn, but the fact remains that 1,000 years ago no more than 5% of the European population was literate (members of the clergy, for the most part). OTOH, during the same period in China the literacy rate was around 30%, more than enough for printing to have a social and cultural impact (also, keep in mind that 30% of the Chinese population in the 11th century equates the entire population of Europe and then some).Bill Cameron said:
More background information:
Dec 23rd 1999
From The Economist print edition
One thing above all marks out 20th-century man, and still more so woman, from most of their predecessors: they can read. How did it happen?
THE idea that a well-schooled society is a prosperous and stable society, and therefore that educating the people is a desirable goal for a nation, dates back at least to Confucius, 2,500 years ago. Yet even in China not until around the start of the current millennium did this fine sentiment begin to be put into practice, with formal education becoming available to others than a narrow elite; and only recently has education come to be seen as every human’s right—besides being, conveniently, also the key not just to harmony, good government and peace but to economic progress.
China had the makings of a fully literate society at the start of the millennium, in the good days (roughly, from 960 to 1120) of the Song dynasty. Movable type had been invented earlier, and in the Song period, with the growth of an urban society governed by a centralised bureaucracy of scholars, mass education began to take off.
The Song form of government was as important as the increasing availability of printed material in fuelling the desire for literacy. Entrance to the powerful civil service was by examination, so those wishing to enter it needed to be well schooled. Provincial towns and their rising merchant class, desiring to have some influence on the central bureaucracy, were keen to ensure that a steady stream of locals won places within it. Municipalities were allowed to retain some of the taxes they collected on the centre’s behalf. So local leaders had both the motive and the means to set up schools.
Around 1000, reckons Merle Goldman, professor of Chinese history at Boston University, perhaps 30% of the 100m or so Chinese may have been literate to some degree. The school curriculum included such things as calligraphy, painting and, of course, the works of Confucius.
In Japan from 1603, the start of the Edo period, an age of increasing prosperity and literacy under a strong central government, this sort of liberal education was on offer only to the ruling samurai. Commoners received a more basic, “three Rs†type of schooling, and usually had to pay for it. But at least, in increasing numbers, they received some sort of education. By the end of the Edo period in 1868, even tiny fishing villages had schools. Japan’s overall literacy rate is believed to have been close to that of England, where, following the rapid expansion of Sunday schools in the mid-19th century, more than three-quarters of children were learning to read the Bible, if not much else.
By this stage other nations, near and far, had begun to overtake China in the move to mass literacy. If China’s rate of educational progress had been maintained, it would by now have reached unimaginable heights of sophistication. In fact it has a literacy rate of about 80%, while upstart regional neighbours such as Japan and South Korea have near 100%. Unfortunately for China, in about 1200 Mongol invaders began to move in, and—although some assimilated—they had priorities other than education. Elements of China’s ancient school system did survive until the 19th century, but the momentum had by then long been lost.
This is a bit of a bumped thread, but I don't think it's especially bad, plus this thread could be interesting..
Let's say that our inventor discovers the printing press while working on something else, makes some prints that end up somehow catching the eye of an enterprising merchant or someone else who manages to find a good use for it, the powerful scribes mentioned earlier try to stop it, but they are too late and the printing press is spreading across Al-Andalus. How does this affect the Ummayyad Caliphate there, and what wider affects does it have on the Islamic World and the World in general? Will the pope ban the Bible being printed by the "heretic invention"?
Interesting, that writing looks like it could work well for printing purposes, though I'm no Arabic expert.Faeelin said:
Let's say that our inventor discovers the printing press while working on something else, makes some prints that end up somehow catching the eye of an enterprising merchant or someone else who manages to find a good use for it, the powerful scribes mentioned earlier try to stop it, but they are too late and the printing press is spreading across Al-Andalus. How does this affect the Ummayyad Caliphate there, and what wider affects does it have on the Islamic World and the World in general? Will the pope ban the Bible being printed by the "heretic invention"?
Abdul Hadi Pasha
Banned
Faeelin said:
It doesn't matter - it wouldn't look that way to the scribes. It is not illegal in Islam to print anything, even the Koran - the laws were just to make the scribes happy. Plus, the idea of mass-produced literature was scary to absolutist regimes. For religious texts, particularly the Koran, printing plates would have to be laboriously examined by qualified theologians for accuracy, but that should be enough.
I don't know what a previous poster meant about Andalus not being the Ottomans, but the first printing presses had a lot of troubles because or pressure from the powerful scribal guilds, who also ran the bureaucracy, and because they were used to mass print objectional texts.
Although most Arabic scripts really don't lend themselves toward printing, I'm sure one could have been developed that was - it must be possible, since the Ottomans had numerous newspapers from the 1840s, as well as rapidly increasing book printing - including the Koran.
Abdul Hadi Pasha said:
There were actual laws against printing? How early did these appear? I think perhaps a home-grown printing press might not arouse nearly so much trouble as an imported "Western" gadget.
Abdul Hadi Pasha
Banned
Matt Quinn said:
The first printing presses in Istanbul were opened by Ottoman Christians. It's not so much a law as the Sultan saying, "close". Ottomans before 1876 had the sole right of obeying the Padishah without question.
Interestingly, the 1876 Constitution guaranteed a totally free press, which was a huge disaster, as the immature press had no sense of responsibility and integrity and printed every vile rumor that they came across. Aparently, it's better to start of your press with some censorship.
Abdul Hadi Pasha said:
Well, I was thinking about during the time of the Ummayyad Caliphate in Spain. I wondered how there could be laws against printing machines when such things did not exist.
The laws were not against printing machines per se, but rather required that any copies of a document be authenticated by the original author or another certified philosopher. This was the reason my History of Science class gave as to why Islamic writers produced so few copies of their work, relative to their reprinting of the Greeks.
Abdul Hadi Pasha
Banned
Abdul Hadi Pasha said:
I was wrong here - I've come across way more info on this topic since. The first printing presses in Istanbul were introduced by Jews, not Christians, in 1493.
Also, Grimm was repeating the standard line about why Muslims are so inferior. This was the fate of a single print house, not the entire printing industry - if you look at Western printers, their histories were turbulent, involved lots of closings for political reasons, and were generally short-lived.
As far as the Koran goes, nobody is going to want a piece-of-shit printed copy when they can have a unique and beautiful caligraphic copy.
George Carty
Banned
Abdul Hadi Pasha said:
On the contrary it does point to a serious disadvantage with the Islamic world at the time - because it was monolithic, one reactionary Sultan could hold progress back for decades. This was not possible in the West as no Western kingdom since Charlemagne held such a dominant position. Note that the Islamic world's "Golden Age" happened during a period of political fragmentation.
China - another monolithic empire - fell behind the West for much the same reason.
Abdul Hadi Pasha
Banned
Faeelin said:
Go take a look at a hand written copy of the Koran and tell me a 15th c printing press could give you anything approaching it. Arabic calligraphy is pretty amazing. For instance, this tughra or monogram of the Sultan says "The Ever Victorious Mahmud Khan, son of Abdul Hamid"
Abdul Hadi Pasha
Banned
George Carty said:
Sultans did not shut down all printing everywhere, just a specific house that offended them. Since most printers were Christians or Jews, this was not usually an issue. It is true, though, that a universal empire can hold back progress more effectively than fragmentary states.
Abdul Hadi Pasha said:
technically, not a problem. Take a look at some of the early prints. The quality is awesome. The problem is, it is going to be fiendishly expensive and will play hob with interchangeability.
The real advantage of the printing press lay in pquickly reproducing the utilitarian. Gutenberg printed a Bible, and it ruined him. The moneymakers were government forms (I kid ye not). Other printers quickly figured out that earnings were to be had through Donatus and his ilk, not Scripture. Spo I suspect a Muslim printing press would start with grammars, primers, simple books of instruction and basic government texts, then move on to the kind of quotidian book you can now get a market for. The 'Description of Familiar Foods' is surely unobjectionable to any prince or ulema. Politics start much later when the business is established.
Abdul Hadi Pasha
Banned
Not a problem? Here's a couple of pages from a pretty ordinary Koran - I'd like to see a printing press handle this. Even if it could be done, it would probably be more expensive than doing it by hand, and in any case, printed copies wouldn't be unique:
carlton_bach said:
George Carty
Banned
Abdul Hadi Pasha said:
I think carlton_bach was suggesting that the Koran should not be printed, only secular books...
Abdul Hadi Pasha said:
All colored parts would have to be put in by hand, of course, and the interlinked calligraphy could be engraved, but as I said, it would not be a technical challenge for a Renaissance printer worth his salt. I say again, incunabula can be of incredibly high quality. The problem is, of course, that a print edition would be frightfully expensive, quite possibly more expensive than a handmade one (unless you can get a very large print run). The big issue with this kind of book is the decoration, not the calligraphy, and you can't print colored decoration and miniatures until the 19th century anyway. That means it would still have to be made by a team of printer, illuminator and rubricator, just like late medieval high-end prints were. Print just replaces 'blackletter' calligraphy.