[Gormo]

This is begging the question in a way, though. Why didn't the Romans have the printing press? Like the hot-air balloon, the concept of printing is clear and simple, and the technological prerequisites are minimal - you just need metallurgy, which the Romans had in abundance.

The printing press ended up being developed in a culture that was in many ways less technically sophisticated than the Romans'.

[EdiX]

I vaguely remember that this has to do with more with the paper than with printing technology, the paper being very expensive until recently.

[katovatzschyn]

I cannot find the source but I remember the same also. As well, "printing press like" techniques were used early in clay pot design and marking, again can't find source, which is the essence of the idea. Only it could not expand to the scale required of modern printing press standards.

[gwern]

> Like the hot-air balloon, the concept of printing is clear and simple, and the technological prerequisites are minimal - you just need metallurgy, which the Romans had in abundance.

More details: the Antithykera Mechanism would seem to imply that the Romans had the metallurgy.

Interestingly, they or their predecessors also may have had the basic idea of block printing or movable type printing. The Phaistos Disc (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaistos_Disc) from ancient Crete is a disc of fired clay onto which various symbols have been 'stamped'.

Set the symbols into a frame or carve them into a flat wooden block, and keep using clay as your printing material... Not as good as Chinese paper or Egyptian papyrus, but still better than scribes.