WI: A Greek printing press

A scene occurs in 400 B.C. Athens. It's the aftermath of a severe rainstorm, hurling tiles all over the floor and damaging temples. The mud has dried, and ir's time to repair.
An architect is salvaging some of the scenes and inscriptions that fell over the dried mud, when something caugths his attention: The inscriptions have been copied on it.
He starts to wonder if he can replicate the process on clay, and succeeds. He starts a business using this knowledge. (probably he sold the idea of mass producing government edicts to inform the citizens)

A century or so later, someone wonders if it is possible to use ink on papyrus instead of clay, and creates a printing press as we know it. Fifty years later, someone else comes up with the idea of a moveable type press.

What would happen?
Could the greeks have developed sometjing like Guthenberg's press?
How would this have changed the world?
 
Some more books from that era making it to the present day (books on the art of war by Pyrrhus of Epirus pretty please?) due to mass-production and less need for animals skins to be wiped off and written on. The dark ages are seen as more illuminated from the beginning. The Catholic Church either ruthlessly controls the Printing Press (if the church still exists) or faces openness from the very beginning and takes advantage of the tools (reformation-like occurrence still happens eventually, probably sooner than OTL). The renaissance might be an even bigger step forward (or renaissance analog).
 
Wikipedia has a partial list of lost works here.

The ones that I personally would have loved to read include:

Sulpicius Alexander's Historia, concerning the history of the Germanic tribes
Pliny the Elder's History of the German Wars
Several works by Claudius -- an Etruscan history and dictionary, a Carthaginian history and a history of the reign of Augustus
Aristarchus of Samos' astronomy book outlining his heliocentric theory

There also was a Greek historian who traveled with Hannibal's army and wrote a lost history of the Second Punic War from the Carthaginian side.
 
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if the printing press gets invented paper could be European invention rather than chinese

Otl, paper was invented quite a while before the printing press.

Ja. I dont think the printing press will get far with clay, papyrus or parchment as the printed surface.

I think you need paper FIRST. So paper ca. 400bc, printing press ca. 200 bc?

It could make a huge difference. Or it could not make much.
 
It's not like papyrus was this precious, hoarded object. It was farmed intensively in Egypt and exported for use throughout the mediterranean.

And papyrus does not really like cooler and moister climates. Parchment might work, but then when you look at the amount of calves that were need to make one Gutenberg bible (170), well you get the point.
 
Some sort of textile could do the job, maybe?

Linen paper is the most likely imho. That could also lead to some sort of pulping machine run bye water, but, if they did not doe this for grain, grapes and olives it don`t really know why they should for paper.
 
I also think that a big stamp basically is what you would get as a press, they doe not really have the metallurgy for moveable type. This could also be based of the Roman olive/grape press (and there are some theories that this is one of the the things Gutenberg based his press of, and since we doe not really know what his press looked like..)
 
Otl, paper was invented quite a while before the printing press.

Ja. I dont think the printing press will get far with clay, papyrus or parchment as the printed surface.

I think you need paper FIRST. So paper ca. 400bc, printing press ca. 200 bc?

It could make a huge difference. Or it could not make much.

Except paper was hideously expensive, take for example a 10th century bible: it would take around 300 baby calf heads to get all the vellum needed in addition to several years of a monk's time. It took them a long time, with a lot of built up market demand from the Renaissance and influence from the Arabs to pull this off.

I also think that a big stamp basically is what you would get as a press, they doe not really have the metallurgy for moveable type. This could also be based of the Roman olive/grape press (and there are some theories that this is one of the the things Gutenberg based his press of, and since we doe not really know what his press looked like..)

But there's the problems of quality: you needed types small ,strong , and durable enough to repeatedly print small letters all at the same time they needed to be interchangeable unless you are planning on printing only one page of writing for the rest of the production run. Wooden prints wear out too fast, stone prints aren't malleable enough in addition to being brittle, and bronze isn't strong enough. A

It's incredibly hard to pull this off without fine metal works, even harder to justify this when there are plenty of educated slaves available, even harder to see the need for this when menial labor was seen as something only befitting slaves and thus not needing improvement as it was not the occupation of any proper man.

It took Gutenberg; a professional goldsmith 20 years to get a prototype built upon centuries of accumulated knowledge, this along with converging advances in inks and paper. Athens needs more than an accident.
 
A basic rag or linen paper(something you can make anywhere that is nice and cheap and holds up to handling better than papyrus) would go farther anyways.
 
More reliable slaves doing what exactly?

I don't understand the slaves argument, in all honesty.

Why go to the trouble of making high grade metal and fine metal work and developing new ink that is more viscous to print when you can just buy literate slaves to do the work without development costs or mechanical breakdowns. Not to mention that the Greeks would have to advance metallurgy by a thousands years or so.
 
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