Archaeologists have unearthed Roman writing boards in London. The Museum of London Archeology (MOLA) reported this this summer. The handwritten documents are the oldest to date found in Britain.
The Romans used wooden planks smeared with wax in the same way we use paper today:for notes, bills, correspondence and legal texts. But also just for scribbles like:'Give this to Junius, the cooper, opposite the house of Catullus'. The washbasins, as they are called, were the size of an iPad. Until recently, 19 had been found in London. Now 405 pieces have been added, of which 87 have been deciphered. They provide a new perspective on life in the early decades of Roman Britain at the beginning of our era.
English youtube video from Bloomberg about the found washbasins.
Construction site in London
The writing boards were excavated on Queen Victoria Street, the financial heart of London, where a new office complex for financial services provider Bloomberg is to be built. Archaeological research was first carried out in the enormous construction pit. The archaeological excavation site is 1.2 hectares in size. The excavations unearthed thousands of artifacts, from leather shoes to jewels, and therefore written documents, which record the names and addresses of the earliest Londoners.
The excavations were completed in 2014 and now the Museum of London Archeology published a book on the findings. It contains translations of all 87 readable washbasins, placed in the historical context. They are called Bloomberg tablets got.
Oldest reference
On the washbasins are, among other things, the names of about a hundred people from that time with their profession. This varies from coopers (craftsmen who made vats or wooden barrels), brewers, judges and soldiers. There are names of slaves and freedmen. The whole gives a nice picture of the composition of the London population at that time. It mainly consisted of businessmen and soldiers, many of whom came from Gaul and the Rhine area. The great historian Tacitus described London as a center of trade. Now there is proof of trade contracts and payslips.
An important find is also the oldest reference to the city of London, dated between 65 and 80 AD. This makes it older than the reference in the Annals from Tacitus. Writing boards have also been found that seem to have been practiced with numbers and the letters of the alphabet. Those are the first documents that point to a school at that time.
Beeswax
The 2000-year-old washbasins are in fact wooden frames that were filled with blackened beeswax. In it was written with a scribe, which was of iron, bronze or ivory. The wax has decayed over time, but the stylus left marks in the wood below, which have now been partially deciphered. That is not easy, because often words were also deleted in order to write others over them.
Dr Roger Tomlin of Wolfson College (University of Oxford) is a retired classical scholar and expert in written Latin. In order to decipher the 87 writing boards, he photographed the tablets with special light, which made the relief extra visible. After that, it sometimes took him a week to decipher the text. He drew on his encyclopaedic knowledge of Roman Britain and his experience in reading and reconstructing Latin texts from fragmentary remains.
Kept in clay
It is a miracle that the washbasins have been preserved, because wood usually does not survive in the ground. But because they lay in the wet clay of a river (the Walbrook, a river that was very important in Roman times, but was vaulted in the Middle Ages), they have been preserved in perfect condition. The clay prevented oxygen from getting to it. After they were excavated, the washbasins were carefully cleaned and freeze-dried.
In the fall of 2017, seven hundred objects from the excavation will be exhibited in the new Bloomberg building.
Sources:
- Roger S.O. Tomlin. 2016, Roman London's first voices:writing tablets from the Bloomberg excavations, 2010-14. MOLA Monograph Series 72, 309 pp.; ISBN 978-1-907586-40-8
- Oldest hand written documents released (MOLA)
- Bloomberg tablets roman notepads London (Science News)
- Ancient Roman IOUs Found Beneath Bloomberg's New London HQ (National Geographic)