Signs of Civilisation

With the invention of printing, reading books moved from being an act only performed by priests and aristocrats into an individual, even private, activity. As long as texts were read out loud only by an educated elite there was no need for punctuation to mark pauses, full stops or questions. So punctuation - the full stop, the comma, the exclamation mark, the question mark and the semicolon - helped shape modern-day Europe as we know it. How punctuation changed history.