The use of round "cylinder seals" for rolling an impression into clay tablets goes back to early Mesopotamian civilization before 3,000 BC, where they are the most common works of art to survive, and feature complex and beautiful images.
In both Egypt and China, the use of small stamps for seals preceded the use of larger blocks. In Egypt, Europe and India, the printing of cloth certainly preceded the printing of paper or papyrus; this was probably also the case in China. The process is essentially the same - in Europe special presentation impressions of prints were often printed on silk until at least the seventeenth century.
Block printing is a technique for printing text, images or patterns used widely throughout East Asia both as a method of printing on textiles and later, under the influence of Buddhism, on paper. As a method of printing on cloth, the earliest surviving examples from China date to about 220, and from Egypt to the 4th century.[1] Ukiyo-e is the best known type of Japanese woodblock art print. Most European uses of the technique on paper are covered by the art term woodcut, except for the block-books produced mainly in the fifteenth century.
Some types of printing can trace their roots to the use of stencils. Stenciling in 2,700 BC was very different. They used color from plants and flowers such as indigo (which extracts blue).
They were used to color cloth for a very long time; the technique probably reached its peak of sophistication in Katazome and other techniques used on silks for clothes during the Edo period in Japan.
In Europe, from about 1450 they were very commonly used to color old master prints printed in black and white, usually woodcuts. This was especially the case with playing-cards, which continued to be coloured by stencil long after most other subjects for prints were left in black and white.
