The unusual sharpness of the inscription letters has long led epigraphists to believe that they were not carved by hand into the clay.
The typographic character of the inscription was demonstrated in a systematic examination of the text body by the typesetter and linguist Herbert Brekle. His findings confirm that the text was produced with a printing method similar to that of the Phaistos Disc: The 17-line text was created by pressing individual, pre-formed stamps (probably made of wood) into the soft clay in a way that, for each letter which occurred more than once, the same letter stamp was re-used, thereby producing identical imprints throughout the text.
Thus, the essential criterion for typographic text production was met: repeated use of identical types for a single character. In applying this technique, it is not relevant that the Prüfening inscription was made by stamping letters into the clay and not − as later practiced by Gutenberg − by printing on paper since neither the technical execution nor the print medium defines movable type printing but rather the criterion of type identity.
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