The publishing industry is a major institution in our everyday world, but how do we quantify when the processes that led to its development started happening? We would have to go back in time to the age of the first humans and the development of language. But publishing, at its heart, is the distribution of text for public readership. Thus, we should contextualize the industry with an examination of the development of the written language. As the first characters were carved into clay tablets in ancient Sumer, writing truly began. In the following sections, we will break down the early history of writing, the invention of the printing press, and seminal moments in publishing history, like the invention of the pdf.