Did they have to rewrite it every time? I mean it’s a fairly close date. How come such a basic and useful tool invented so late? Was it just in the west, was it invented earlier or later in Asia? Were there any other common methods? Thanks.
Yes, they were done by hand. Printing was invented much earlier in China, but a huge advantage written Chinese has over European languages is that it's based on characters rather than alphabets, making printing far more straightforward. In the West, of course, it had to wait for moveable type, as well as cheap paper (another Chinese invention) to replace expensive parchment and vellum.