Printing is thousands of years older than Gutenberg's press
Gutenberg usually gets the credit, but printing began more than five thousand years before him, with Sumerian cylinder seals rolled across clay. China printed a dated book in 868, invented movable type in the eleventh century, and Korea produced a metal-type book decades before Gutenberg's Bible. Even older are hand stencils sprayed onto cave walls.
The idea of repeating an image is ancient. Stencilled handprints, made by blowing pigment around a hand pressed to rock, date back more than 35,000 years in Asia and Europe. By the fourth millennium BCE, Proto-Elamite and Sumerian scribes used cylinder seals to certify documents on clay. Akkadian rulers stamped a few bricks in each temple with their name so builders did not have to carve inscriptions by hand; a stamp of Naram-Sin names him as builder of a temple to Inanna.
Religion drove much of the next step. Indian Buddhism taught that copying and preserving scripture earned great merit, and the fourth-century master Asanga ranked copying as the first of ten essential practices. That devotion encouraged stamps for printing short prayers on clay, with surviving examples from at least the seventh century. In China, seals go back to the Shang dynasty, and texts from the Northern dynasties mention wooden seals carrying up to 120 characters.
Woodblock printing of texts on paper arose in Tang China by the seventh century and spread to Korea and Japan. The Diamond Sutra, printed on 11 May 868, is the earliest surviving book with an exact date. The artisan Bi Sheng invented movable type during the Song dynasty in the eleventh century, though woodblocks stayed more popular. Metal type printed codes on paper money by 1161, and in 1377 Korea produced the Jikji, the oldest surviving book printed with movable metal type.
Europe used woodblocks until the mid-fifteenth century, when Johannes Gutenberg adapted existing mechanical presses and devised a way to mass-produce metal type. His press and Bible launched an affordable publishing trade across Renaissance Europe. Stencils lingered too, colouring black-and-white woodcuts and especially playing cards long after other prints stayed monochrome.
Source: History of printing
