The world's oldest dated printed book is a Buddhist scroll from 868 CE
Six centuries before Gutenberg, a Chinese woodblock-printed Diamond Sutra carried a precise date: 11 May 868.
The oldest printed book in the world that carries a date is the Diamond Sutra, a core Buddhist scripture. Its colophon records that it was “reverently made for universal free distribution” on a day equivalent to 11 May 868 CE - making it the earliest dated, printed book known.
It was produced by woodblock printing: text and images carved in relief, inked, and pressed onto paper. Seven sheets were pasted together to form a scroll about 16 feet long, with a finely cut frontispiece of the Buddha.
The date, 11 May 868, makes this the earliest, dated, printed book in the world.
The scroll lay sealed in a cave near Dunhuang on the Silk Road until around 1900, when a vast hidden library was rediscovered. Today it is held at the British Library - a printed book that predates the Gutenberg Bible by roughly six centuries.
Sources & references
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