Although relief, or raised designs cut into wood, was used by the Mesopotamians to impress images into clay as early as 3000 b.c., the first examples of wood carvings being used as repeatable stamps date only to the sixth century a.d., when the practice was used by Egyptians, Chinese, and Europeans. Woodcut stamps featuring images of the Buddha found in Turkestan have been dated before 800 a.d. In Europe, the large-scale use of woodcut as a means of printing and artistic expression only began with advances in paper production in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Playing cards made from woodcuts first appeared in the late fourteenth century. In the fifteenth century, a number of artists helped to make woodcut one of the most widespread and distinctive forms of medieval art. Typically, the medieval artist drew a full paper sketch of the artwork, which was then actually cut...