Suck it, Gutenberg: World’s oldest metal movable type found in Korea
Filed under: South Korea
Topics covered : Bad Historians, Race Relations
And so it continues: The march back through human history toward a rewrite that includes more major players from the Far East. The Chinese already get grudging credit for pasta, fireworks, paper-making and a gazillion other things we take for granted. It makes sense — a thousand years before the Vikings, the Orient was already populated in a relative state of civility. (Hey, I said relative.) When my forebears were still shitting in pigskin bags, ancestral Japanese had no doubt already installed automatic flushing and warmed seats on their buckets.
Now, it’s Gutenberg who can suck it. No one disputes that printing presses were in use for centuries before the German bookmaker whipped up his famous Bibles. But he’s widely credited with first using metal movable type — not clay or wood — in a commercial manner. (Movable type is what made the printing press such a nifty thing.) Now a Korean professor claims to have original pieces of metal type that predate Gutenberg by at least one century.
From Chosun Ilbo:
A Korean academic said Wednesday he has found the world’s oldest movable metal print, which predates what is believed to be the world’s oldest book printed using movable metal type, “Jikji Simche Yojeol” from 1377. The newly found letters are possibly 138 years older.
Prof. Nam Kwon-heui of Kyungpook National University said, “After analyzing around 100 movable metal letters that were in the private collection of a Korean, we have confirmed that 12 of them were made in the early 13th century”…
The only other movable metal type presumed to date back to the Koryo Kingdom is in the National Museum of Korea and the Kaesong Museum of History, which have one sample each. The type used to print the “Jikji” has yet to be discovered. The “Jikji,” an anthology of the teachings of the Buddha for meditation, is held by the National Library of France since the country looted them during a botched invasion in the late Chosun Dynasty.
According to the article, the type’s current owner bought them 10 years ago, possibly from a Japanese collector who smuggled them out of Korea during WWII. How they ended up back on the peninsula wasn’t made clear. If other experts confirm professor Nam’s conclusion, we can expect a more thorough provenance to be announced.
What does this mean for world history? Probably nothing. It’s not as if the Scottish were willing to give up golf when the Chinese laid claim to that, too. I’m an old-school print guy, and even I don’t really care. I’m just waiting for someone to confirm Gavin Menzies‘ theory that the Chinese discovered American in 1421. That I can totally believe.
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