The Romans ruled their empire with this marvel

There is a beautiful story about spies and their secret messages in ancient times. 480 BC A Greek named Demaratos lived at the court of the Persian king Xerxes in Susa. He found out when the ruler was planning the large-scale invasion of Greece. To warn his countrymen, he resorted to a ruse.

He took a wax tablet, scraped off the wax, and wrote on the wood of the tablet what Xerxes was about to do. Then he poured wax over the writing again so that the guards on the streets could not discover the message. The tablet arrived safely in Sparta, where at first no one could make any sense of it. Only the wife of King Leonidas (who was soon to fall at Thermopylae) recognized the trick.

The episode that has survived in the work of the Greek historian Herodotus is probably an insertion by someone else. Although its veracity is questionable, it highlights a subject that was so ubiquitous in antiquity that contemporaries seldom felt the need to address it. We are talking about the writing tablet coated with wax, which could be written on quickly and smoothed out just as quickly.

Anyone with rudimentary writing skills had them, and there were far more people in the ancient world than in medieval Europe. Writing tablets were the basis of ancient communication. The fact that they play no role in contemporary Latin and Greek lessons is not only due to their banality. Due to their volatile materials, hardly any intact specimens have survived, but mostly only fragments.

There is another reason why ancient writing tablets have so far played a shadowy existence. "Philologists are primarily interested in the content of the texts, hardly in the material on which they are handed down," says Robert Fuchs. The emeritus of the Technical University of Cologne can afford this statement, as he is not only a trained chemist, but also an Egyptologist. As director of the Institute for Conservation and Restoration Science, Fuchs developed the basis for the non-destructive analysis of works of art. Since 2022, together with his Italian colleague Michele Cammarosano from the University of Naples L'Orientale and supported by the Gerda Henkel Foundation, he has been studying writing tablets that have come down to us from the Roman Empire.

Like so many objects from everyday life in antiquity, the find owes its existence to the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, to which Pompeii and Herculaneum fell victim. In 1959, while working on the road in Murecine, a few hundred meters from the Stabian city gate of Pompeii, archaeologists salvaged two wicker baskets in which 185 tabulae or pugillares with a total of 242 individual panels were assembled. Since these were covered by the mud of the Sarnus river as a result of the catastrophe, they were in excellent condition and largely still wore their wax layer.

They were photographed, partly highlighted in white for better reading, and then left to dry in the archives of the Archaeological Park of Pompei. "They shrank so much that most of the wax layer flaked off and was lost," Fuchs complains. Trying to preserve the panels with synthetic resin didn't do them much good either. Since they were stored in hanging registers, the last remains of wax threatened to flake off.

After all, Fuchs and Cammarosano were able to identify 20 panels that are suitable for further analysis. They unearthed amazing details. It was noticeable that many pieces are not only the same size – nine x 13 centimeters – but also the same depth. Fuchs concludes from this that apparently prefabricated wax tablets were placed in the indentations and cut off on the left and right with a knife and fitted. To do this, the wooden tablets must have been made in a "standardized" process in defined sizes - indications of "industrial production" in series, which suggests the enormous importance of the tabulae in everyday life in the Roman Empire.

The following numbers speak for the quality of this manufacturing process: the spruce wood was only one to two millimeters thick, the depression for the writing material varied by 0.5 millimeters, the layer of tree or beeswax was probably only one to two millimeters thick have. This offered the advantage that the surface could be slightly smoothed after writing and thus reused.

For this purpose, the Romans used styli with an oval-round tip, which had a kind of knot or spatula at the other end. These stili were made of bronze or bone. The scientists included 43 of these antique pens, which were used to write from left to right, in their investigations. "Despite being ten centimeters short, they fit surprisingly well in the hand," says Fuchs. "You don't have to exert a lot of pressure to be able to write quickly and fluently." The engraved writing only needs a depth of 0.2 millimeters to be clearly recognizable. To erase it, it is sufficient to sweep over it with the round, thicker end of the stilus.

Slight elevations, which can be seen on murals in Pompeii and Herculaneum, also speak for the everyday suitability of panels. They were probably intended to prevent contact and possible sticking together when the individual pieces were bound together in a book. Because the tabulae were not only used for cursory notes, but also recorded lists for trade, for accounts and even diplomas or contracts and their implementation regulations or other important contents that were not intended for the day.

The Italian epigraphist Giuseppe Camodeca published the texts in 1999 on the basis of photographs taken of their inscriptions after the Murecine tablets had been recovered. Thereafter, an unexpectedly large percentage are official files that appear to have been bound together to be taken to some agency or archive. The eruption of Vesuvius abruptly ended the company.

The valuable content once again proves the importance of the simple wax tablets for the administration of the empire. Daily correspondence was largely handled with them, while the much more expensive papyrus or parchment was reserved for literary or political texts, stone or wood for official announcements.

A biographical sketch by the polymath Pliny the Elder (ca. 23–79 AD) shows how the Romans used their tabulae. When he read one of the 500 or so works in a library that he said he had studied for his 37-volume "Natural History," some of his companions had to read the text to him, while others had to dictate his excerpts.

Pliny also reports that under the reign of Emperor Tiberius (reigned AD 14–37), there was such a shortage of papyrus that officials had to take charge of its distribution, "otherwise all life would have been confused." Wax tablets, on the other hand, were available in abundance, simple ones for the common people, luxurious ones with an attached stylus for the better society.

The poet Ovid (43 BC–17 AD) explained what she sometimes did with it: “Wax, in smoothed tablets, should go ahead as a messenger … Let it be carried to her as a flattering sound and words that put you in love and don’t be stingy with it Bitten und Belehnn.” No wonder the author entrusted this gallant tip to a work entitled The Art of Love.

In the wrong environment, however, a plaque could also have fatal consequences. According to the historian Suetonius, Emperor Augustus (reigned 31 BC–14 AD) suspected an assassination attempt and committed torture and sentenced to death.

The ubiquity of the wax tablets is also an important indication of the level of literacy in antiquity. Michele Cammarosano was able to show that this writing instrument was already in use from the 3rd millennium BC. in the Mesopotamian empires. But dealing with the complicated cuneiform writing was reserved for only a few professional scribes at the time.

Since the development of alphabets in the early 1st millennium B.C. BC, who managed with a few dozen characters, large groups learned to read and write. Already the Greek Homer tells in the late 8th century BC. B.C. in his "Iliad" of "pernicious signs scratched into a folded tablet", although it is unclear whether this already had a wax coating. The rise of Aramaic to the administrative language of the Assyrian and later the Persian world empire can also be explained by its ease of use in day-to-day business.

In Rome, at least a basic knowledge of reading and writing Latin and/or Greek was part of the basic equipment of the people. A good half of the Murecine tablets bear Greek letters. But for elementary messages, the broad mass of the population used a writing material that was available in large quantities: walls of buildings or walls. Pompeii again offers interesting illustrative material with almost 10,000 graffiti. By far the most important subject area was sex and advertising for one of the many relevant establishments in the city: It's about "futuere", slumbering, which in today's parlance is more accurately translated as "to fuck".

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