All language subtitles for NOVA.S47E12.A.to.Z.How.Writing.Changed.the.World.1080p.AMZN.WEB-DL.DDP.2.0.H.264-GNOME_track3_[eng]

It may have been the spark
that launched the scientific age:

a machine to make books.

Never before had it been
possible to spread knowledge

so fast and to so many people.

That's really an
information revolution.

But first came the page.

And this is the first
paper in the world.

Made from plants.

Made from animals.

I am the only traditional
master parchment maker

left in the world,
which is quite unique.

Medieval books were
not made by vegetarians.

And the final ingredient,

a bit of luck,

hidden in the shape of a letter.

This is a modular way
of writing, and in fact,

if I want to make little blocks
of metal with them, no problem,

because I'm already
there, basically.

The design has already happened.

This text here
is legible Arabic.

It shows a remarkable advance
in Arabic printing technology.

"A to Z: How Writing
Changed the World,"

right now, on "NOVA."

In the year 1448
in Mainz, Germany,

a goldsmith named
Johannes Gutenberg

was experimenting with a
lead alloy and a hand-held mold.

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.

I'm making a pen
out of a drinks can,

and it's one of my favorite pens

because it can do so
many different things,

and also because it means,

no matter where in the world
I am, I always have a pen.

There's trash everywhere...

Brody Neuenschwander is a
calligrapher and modern artist

who has studied the writing
practices of different cultures

throughout history.

Now, a pen is a
simple tool in any case.

All it is is a... point
with a reservoir,

and the reservoir holds the
ink and brings it to the point,

and you write with it.

I'm going to use my drinks-can
pen to write a short phrase

from a poem by Hopkins,
"As Kingfishers Catch Fire."

The first stroke is going
to make quite a noise,

so watch out... the A...

And flow into an S made with
a nice movement of the arm.

I can also make a very

fat and juicy stroke for the K.

This is calligraphy as art,

where legibility takes
second place to expression

and the letters can
be hard to make out.

But for most of history,

making out the letters
has been essential.

Writing is one of the
most fundamental things

that human beings do,

one of the great
motors of civilization,

and to understand how people
wrote in previous societies

helps us to understand

many of the other
aspects of the society.

But is it possible to
know how people wrote

thousands of years ago?

Brody believes that
calligraphy can help.

The one thing that's
amazing about calligraphy is,

we can go right back

to the materials and
tools of earlier times

and reproduce nearly exactly
the conditions of writing.

So, it's a sort of experimental
approach to historical research

using the real
tools and materials

that were used in earlier times.

Running a nation
has always required

some form of written
communication.

And the world's first
nation-state was Ancient Egypt,

a state which employed one
of the 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 a 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 civilization.

We remove the green parts.

All of the green cover.

We divide it into 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.

The slices now will be
more strong and more flexible

than that part, it was break.

Then we soft the
slices in fresh water.

After two weeks, we take
the slices from the water.

We arrange them between

two pieces of cotton.

This is the slices that
we have here, the slices.

In vertical and
horizontal lines like this.

One vertical, another
horizontal, without any space.

One by one and two by two till
we complete the whole sheet.

We cover them.

We put them under a
press machine for one week.

One week under 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.

As civilization spread from
Egypt across the Mediterranean,

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's 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.

Literacy was surprisingly
widespread in Rome.

It even extended to the large
enslaved population in the city,

which provided
most of the scribes

who wrote those
high-status scrolls.

But what was the
technology they used

to put ink to papyrus?

Romans used a reed pen
to write with on papyrus.

It's cut to a very fine point.

It's a fairly soft material,

and the pithy side will
absorb ink quite a bit,

so instead of having a
natural reservoir like a quill has,

it's actually the wood itself

absorbing a certain
charge of ink.

Brody sets out to copy a
letter sent from Rome to Egypt,

preserved in the desert
sand for nearly 2,000 years.

It's written in a very
simple, casual daily script.

So, I'm going to
see what it's like to...

write those letters
with this, this reed pen.

You always learn a lot
at the very first moment

that you touch the pen to
the, to the writing surface.

And what I'm seeing is that

the horizontal fibers of the
papyrus are guiding my pen.

And you wouldn't
really need to draw lines

because they're already there.

That saves you a lot of time.

And it's slippery... that's,
that is very noticeable,

just how slippery
this surface is,

so it's almost like
skating, and I find it...

I'm naturally encouraged

to write a very quick hand here.

The reed is very
light in my hands

and there's no resistance
from the, from the papyrus at all,

so I think you could have
a nice, long working day

as a Roman scribe...
as long as the light held,

you'd be able to keep churning
out your Ovids for your master.

Yes, it's amazingly
fast, really.

It's a, it's a surface
made for speed.

So, copies could be
churned out relatively quickly

by the inexpensive
labor of the enslaved.

The materials were cheap, too.

That meant that a Roman bookshop

would have something
for almost every pocket.

Spaces like this are fairly
typical for Roman shops,

a single room opening
straight onto the street.

And here's this
lovely Travertine lintel,

and you can see in it,
there's a groove here

for wooden shutters that
might close it off at night

to keep the stock secure.

For the ordinary man
and woman in the street,

booksellers were a great
place to get hold of literature

at a not exorbitant price.

So ranging from a few
coins for the cheapest book,

that's a soldier's daily wage.

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 booksellers,

there were public libraries
founded by the emperors.

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 center,

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 were 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

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'm Lee Mapley.

I am the only traditional
master parchment maker

left in the world, uh,
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.

I'll tie the skin into a frame
and it has to be stretched.

I'm re-aligning the
fibers 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.

For a thousand years,

this was the only writing
surface Europe had.

It's a piece of parchment.

Now, medieval books were
not made by vegetarians.

And you can see that
it's an animal product

because running right down
the center, this pale zone,

is the spine of the animal,

with the pelvic bones
even shown here.

Here we would fold
to make a large book,

and that's why we call
it the spine of a book.

The fact that 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.

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,

towards the, 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.

I'm working on
a really wonderful

piece of parchment here.

It's got just the right surface
to give me sharp letters

and a lot of control.

Parchment is not a material that

you would ever try
to write quickly on.

It holds the pen as you
write, so you don't skate or slip,

and it really encourages
a sort of majestic, graceful,

slow, and careful
way of writing.

When you write on parchment,

the ink as it dries

is grabbed by the fibers,
which close down and hold it.

It's almost like you're
tattooing the surface.

At the pace I'm writing
now, I could probably write,

in a really good day, two pages
of one of these great Bibles.

Certainly not more.

And eight hours a day,
that's not really possible.

It's, it's too focused,
it's too concentrated,

and in the end, it's
too tiring, so, I think that

a six-hour day
yielding two full pages

would be a very, very good day.

Where were all
these labor-intensive,

costly books being produced?

As it happens, Brody's
studio is in Bruges.

In the Middle Ages, this
city was a great center

of book production,
responsible at times

for as much as ten
percent of all the books

being made in Western Europe.

At the city archives, Brody
visits Ludo Vandamme

to try to put what he's
learned about writing

on parchment into
historical context.

What we see here

are all the members
working in book industry

in Bruges at that moment. Oh!

But that's unique.

How many members
are we talking about here?

About 50, 60 at
that moment. Okay.

Men and women. Yes.

Each workshop might have
employed a handful of scribes,

but Brody's experiment shows
that it would have taken months

for a scribe to
copy a whole book.

So, if I think we
have... 50 workshops,

each making several
books a year, that means that

the number of
books being finished

is in the hundreds in
Bruges, not in the thousands.

Is that a fair guess?

Can agree, yes. And all
of Northern Europe, then,

a few thousand, no more. Mmm.

So, there's very little
access to information

at this time in Europe.

Medieval books were
rare and precious.

I have something I
want to show you.

What is this?

This is a contract
to make a book,

a luxury book in two volumes,

for a patron, a commissioner,

and he says it will cost
20 pounds, this luxury book.

And he also says

how long it takes
him to finish the book.

Almost a year.

Any way of guessing
what 20 pounds is worth?

20 pounds at that moment,

um, let's say a modest
house in Bruges.

A middle-class house.
Oh, my goodness!

It's an astonishingly expensive
information technology.

Yeah.

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 the ancient world.

When I started my
experiments with a reed pen

on papyrus, I was astonished
with how quick it was.

Now, 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.

But what about other cultures,
further to the East, in Asia?

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 Jianing to
practice brush calligraphy

in much the same way as it has

been for thousands of years.

Brush calligraphy produced works
of art that were prized 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 second century,

and by the seventh century,

paper making was an
important Chinese industry.

Paper was key to
another Chinese invention:

woodblock printing.

Each page of text

was glued on 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 a thousand years ago,

Chinese people could
buy blank notebooks.

Such an aid to thought

would have been inconceivable
in medieval Europe,

where every single blank page

was an expensive
and scarce resource.

In a world of parchment,

many thoughts must
have gone 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.

Paper making 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,

the principal religion of
Central Asia would be Islam.

And in the captured
baggage train

of the Chinese army
were paper makers.

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.

To make mulberry bark paper,
you take the new growth of the tree,

these sticks here, and you

peel off the outer
bark, which is very thin,

you can peel it in
one pull like that.

You have a golden inside
and a rough woody outside.

You can then, as you see here,

Rukhsona, with her great
Samarkandi swordsmanship,

can with a quick
flick of the knife

peel away the brown outer skin,

and then that leaves you with

this pure inner pith,

which is the fibers
of the mulberry tree,

and they'll need to be
cooked and softened

in the next stage
of the process.

After cooking,

the mill pounds
the mulberry pith

for up to eight hours

to produce a pulp.

Added to water,

the pulp makes a thick
soup of cellulose fibers,

which are scooped up
in a rectangular sieve.

As the water flows
through the sieve,

it leaves behind a
thin mat of the fibers.

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, 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.

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 is
staying 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 paper making 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 paper making

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 Arabic numerals.

Samarkand was itself a
great center 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.

Nearby the university, Ulugh
Beg built an observatory.

It's long gone, except for
the part that was underground.

The top half of the sextant once
reached 100 feet above ground,

making it by far the largest
such instrument ever built.

Sunlight would have
illuminated the curved track,

which is marked very
precisely with degrees.

A copper ruler inserted
in one of these slots

measured 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,

this 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.

Islamic science,

and the paper it was written on,

would eventually find
its way to Europe...

Where it would help
to lay the foundations

of a scientific revolution.

This star catalogue,
published in Poland in 1690,

lists the position
of the fixed stars

as determined by
six great astronomers.

Ulugh Beg is among them.

This extraordinary frontispiece

shows the Ancient Greek
Ptolemy, Tycho Brahe...

Ulugh Beg is the one with the

long mustache in the image,

sitting at table being highly
honored in this sequence

of persons who'd had
mighty observatories

and 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 catalogs are
steadily improved as each

passes on their
findings for improvement

by their successors.

By the time this star
catalogue was published,

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
no longer lagged behind

the scholarship of
the Islamic world.

And that change had been
made possible by a revolution

in the production
of the written word,

for 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,

a goldsmith by trade,

began casting the letters of
the Latin alphabet in metal.

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 as
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 nature of the
Latin alphabet.

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 little
blocks 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 movable 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 book,

and 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 of line length... were
precisely the characteristics

of movable type.

What was a
challenge for the scribe

was straightforward
for the typesetter.

So, movable 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, to achieve

with the printing of this book

was to produce a book
by a new technique

that people would, 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, to do something
new that would seem old.

Gutenberg's strategy worked.

His printed Bible
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.

On one printing press,

you had two
people working on it,

and in one day, they
could make 2,500 prints.

That means that in,
let's say, two weeks' time,

they could print a whole
book in 1,250 copies.

And in the manuscript time,

it would take one
scribe about a year

to produce one
single copy of a text.

That's really an information
revolution at the time.

And just as paper had made
its way from the Islamic world

to Europe, printed
books were soon traveling

in the other direction, as
European printers set out

to serve Christian readers

living under Islamic 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 movable 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 modular
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 movable 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 recognizable
calligraphic Arabic hand.

It's a cliché, a wooden block.

It's not movable type.

And so it would be recognizable

to any reader of
Arabic as good Arabic.

But underneath it, you have
a completely new invention.

It is the Arabic
movable type script,

and it results from
the adaptation,

the forced adaptation, of Arabic
to the movable type environment,

making it closer to the
logic of the Latin script.

And you can see here that the

words do not stack up

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 base line that connects
the cursive letters together

is not complete
and there are gaps

between the individual letters.

The well-trained scribe

I don't think would have
recognized this as Arabic.

It was difficult for
movable 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 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 movable
type in the Muslim world,

about 200 years after
the, the Book of Hours

that we've looked at previously.

This text shows a
remarkable advance

in Arabic printing technology.

There are many more ligatures

that mimic the Arabic
calligraphic hand.

Nevertheless, unlike in Europe,

movable type failed
to capture the market,

and within 20 years, the
printer 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, well, the most
obvious difference between

the first book printed
using movable 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 it wouldn't have been a book

that everyone would
have had an interest in.

That book would
have been the Koran,

but movable 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've 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 movable type,

and that took a huge
part of the market out.

Whereas Gutenberg printed
the book, the Bible, that basically

everyone in the continent
would have wanted.

So there's an irony.

Printing took off in
Europe in large part

because Gutenberg could
produce with movable 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'd 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.