From Clay to Print
How writing went from counting bread and beer, through the alphabet and the Bible's first translations, to a press in Mainz
Writing did not begin with poems or scripture. The earliest known writing kept accounts. This story follows one line from those accounts to a printed Bible about 4,700 years later, by way of an alphabet, the oldest surviving copies, two translations and a press.
It is one line among many. Writing in Asia is not thought to come from Sumer, and movable type came first in China and Korea. Belief is told here as belief and scholarship as scholarship, and where a step rests on one tradition or one scholar, the story says so. A connection is not evidence of influence.
c. 3200 BCE
Two dots. A clay tablet in Uruk, about 3200 BCE. A printed Bible in Mainz, about 1455. Some 4,700 years lie between them, and every step of the way between can be checked.
c. 3200 BCE
Bread and beer. Around 3200 BCE the temple estates of Uruk, in today’s Iraq, needed to keep accounts. Scribes drew signs on clay to track rations of bread and beer. The earliest known writing was bookkeeping.
c. 1800 BCE
Letters. Signs at Serabit el-Khadim, an Egyptian mining site in Sinai, are often taken as the start of the alphabet, made by Semitic speakers. Scholars date them from the nineteenth century BCE to after 1500 BCE. The date is still disputed.
c. 1000 BCE
By sea. The oldest surviving Phoenician inscription is the Ahiram epitaph at Byblos, from the eleventh century BCE. Phoenician traders spread the script across the Mediterranean, and Greeks adopted it. Early Hebrew writing varies little from the same family of alphabets.
The tradition’s account. Who wrote the Torah, the first five books of the Bible? According to Jewish tradition, Moses did, having received them from God on Mount Sinai. The text itself says that Moses wrote down the law.
The scholars’ account. Modern source criticism reads the same books as woven from older documents, from about the tenth to the sixth century BCE, as Christine Hayes of Yale sums it up. Scholars still differ on the sources and dates. Neither account is stated here as fact.
c. 100 BCE
The oldest copies. The Dead Sea Scrolls, found near Qumran, date from the third century BCE to the first century CE. They hold every book of the Hebrew Bible but Esther. Many of the biblical scrolls closely resemble the text in use today, and some differ.
c. 250 BCE
Into Greek. The Letter of Aristeas tells how the king of Egypt sent to Jerusalem for six elders from every tribe, and how they put the Jewish law into Greek in seventy-two days. This translation is known as the Septuagint.
c. 250 BCE
What the language shows. Encyclopaedia Britannica calls the Letter of Aristeas unreliable. Analysis of the Greek places the Torah’s translation near the middle of the third century BCE, and the rest of the Old Testament in the second.
386
Into Latin. In 382 Pope Damasus asked Jerome for one acceptable Latin Bible. Settled in Bethlehem by 386, Jerome turned from the Greek to the Hebrew and finished his Old Testament by the end of 405. His Latin became known as the Vulgate.
1455
Into type. Around 1455 in Mainz, Johannes Gutenberg printed Jerome’s Latin with movable metal type. Counts of the edition differ: Cornell’s library says about 200 copies, the Library of Congress at least 120 on paper and perhaps 40 on vellum.
1455
First elsewhere. Gutenberg’s type was not the first. Movable type and paper began in China, and the oldest surviving book printed that way came from Korea. According to Robert Lechêne, a small alphabet of abstract signs made such type simpler to use in Europe.
1534
And after. Within fifty years of Gutenberg’s page, more than ten million printed books had been produced. In 1534 Martin Luther’s complete Bible was printed at Wittenberg, and its printer is said to have sold over 100,000 copies in forty years.
1534
One line. This line shows the order of the story, not a road anyone walked. Two of its steps rest on one scholar’s account each, and every step shows its proof. A connection is not evidence of influence.
The same road, link by link, is in the route story from the rise of cities in Mesopotamia to the Bible.