Woodblock printing matured in Tang-dynasty China between the seventh and ninth centuries, carving a whole page in reverse onto a block to be inked and pressed onto paper; the Diamond Sutra of 868 is the earliest surviving dated printed book. Paper-making, perfected in China centuries earlier, spread westward through the Islamic world — notably after the eighth century — and reached Europe by the later Middle Ages. Together cheap paper and block printing allowed texts to be reproduced far more readily than by hand-copying. They underpinned a great expansion of written documents.
Cheap, reproducible text supported the expanding bureaucracies, law codes, registers and treatises through which states recorded ownership, taxed populations and administered land and growing cities.