Someone mentioned farther up the thread the potential offered by an earlier discovery of printing, which returns me to an earlier WI -- the introduction of the concept of printing in the first century CE from Chinese merchants who follow the Silk Road to Constantinople and/or Rome, reverse Marco Polos, if you like. Or perhaps more likely, the migration through trade of ideogram blocks themselves along the Silk Road, with some enterprising Greek or Roman realizing their potential. The resulting increase in demand for a new print medium would eventually lead to the discovery of paper, probably made first from scrap linen and papyrus in Egypt.