Paper or Ink?

[Alatriste]

Yesterday I was playing a bit with Civ IV and suddenly I had an idea: the invention of paper is usually considered a great breakthrough, one of the biggest advances of the Egyptian and Chinese civilizations, but... what about ink?

Even if you have no paper ink is very useful, and you can write with it on other materials than paper. But paper without ink is useful almost exclusively for flying kites... and dull indeed would those kites be without ink!

[Viking]

Squid or Cuttlefish ink was used for writing before the invention of synthetic ink.

[Jaron]

Owned.

[Monoriu]

Yesterday I was playing a bit with Civ IV and suddenly I had an idea: the invention of paper is usually considered a great breakthrough, one of the biggest advances of the Egyptian and Chinese civilizations, but... what about ink?

Even if you have no paper ink is very useful, and you can write with it on other materials than paper. But paper without ink is useful almost exclusively for flying kites... and dull indeed would those kites be without ink!

Well, even without ink you can sorta write using paper.  As long as you have a knife, you can sorta cut out different shapes, representing words and such.

[Alatriste]

Squid or Cuttlefish ink was used for writing before the invention of synthetic ink.

That's not so easy... making ink is quite more complex than catching some squids and squeezing them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ink

But anyway my question is: Aren't we wrong when we assign far more importance to the invention of paper? Ink predates paper (a quick Wiki search gives an astounding number of years between ink - 12th century BC - and paper - 2th century CE - both in China) and it's at the very least equally important.

[Monoriu]

I think paper is the greater limitation of the two.  As you found, ink was invented much earlier than paper.  So paper was the limiting factor that prevented writing on a large scale. 

I also think that there are a great variety of substances that can serve the purpose of ink.  Not so for paper.  As a last resort, you can always write with your blood 

[Viking]

Squid or Cuttlefish ink was used for writing before the invention of synthetic ink.

That's not so easy... making ink is quite more complex than catching some squids and squeezing them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ink

But anyway my question is: Aren't we wrong when we assign far more importance to the invention of paper? Ink predates paper (a quick Wiki search gives an astounding number of years between ink - 12th century BC - and paper - 2th century CE - both in China) and it's at the very least equally important.

http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-Harvest-Squid-Ink/

A medium for writing is probably much older as we see from cave painting. Body, cave and wall art were all coloured and painted on. So Ink equivalents probably predated paper by thousands of years.

But still, squid ink was harvested and used for writing.

[Brazen]

The Atlanteans used squid ink directly from specially trained squid then passed their arcane knowledge on to our ancestors.

[Josquius]

There are all sorts of ink substitutes as Mono mentioned.
For how long have people being dying clothes? Eons... And yeah, cave paintings.

Civ is a game, it  goes for the coolness factor. Who cares that apparently mundane invention was actually a big world changer, it just doesn't look so cool as gunpowder or construction (wtf?).

[Malthus]

Pigments for painting or dyeing were probably one of the earliest investions.

[Josephus]

Civ IV was probably not meant to inititiate deep historical discussions.

Unlike, say, EU2

[DontSayBanana]

Pigment markings > paper.  Paper made records portable, but pigmentation allowed easier recording in more places.

[Malthus]

From a "Civ" perspective, it makes no sense to have "pigments" as a tech, because they certainly predate any organized civilization by a considerable degree.

It would be like having "invent fire" or "stone tools" as a tech.

[Ed Anger]

While you are inventing "ink", my chariot horde is raping your cities.

[DontSayBanana]

I was talking about from a RL history standpoint, BTW- I've never actually played any of the Civ games.