Archaeologists have discovered a large collection of Roman waxed writing tablets — including the oldest handwritten document ever found in Britain — at a construction site in London.
Bloomberg tablet 30: ‘I ask you in your own interest not to appear shabby,’ dated to CE 43-53. Image credit: Museum of London Archaeology.
According to Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA), a total of 405 writing tablets were unearthed on London’s Queen Victoria street – the site of a new European headquarters for Bloomberg.
“Romans used waxed writing tablets like paper, for note-taking and accounts, for correspondence and for legal documents,” the archaeologists said.
“Made of wood, recesses in the rectangular tablets were originally filled with blackened beeswax, with text inscribed into the wax with styluses.”
“Although the wax hasn’t survived, the writing occasionally went through the wax to mark the wood.”
Dr. Roger S.O. Tomlin from Wolfson College at the University of Oxford deciphered and interpreted 87 Bloomberg tablets.
Alongside photography with raking light and microscopic analysis, Dr. Tomlin used his knowledge of Roman Britain and experience of reading and reconstructing Roman incised texts from their fragmentary remains.
The preservation of the tablets is in itself remarkable, as wood rarely survives when buried in the ground.
The wet mud of the Walbrook, a river that dominated the area in the Roman period but is now buried, stopped oxygen from decaying the wooden tablets, preserving them in excellent condition.
Highlights from the Bloomberg collection include:
(i) the earliest reference to Londinium (London), dated to CE 65-80 – half a century before Roman historian Tacitus cites London in his Annals;
Bloomberg tablet 6: ‘Londinio Mogontio,’ meaning ‘In London, to Mognotius,’ dated to CE 65-80. Image credit: Museum of London Archaeology.
(ii) the earliest dated handwritten document known from Britain — a financial document of 8 January CE 57;
(iii) a tablet archaeologically dated to CE 43-53, the first decade of Roman rule in Britain;
(iv) evidence of someone practicing writing the alphabet and numerals, perhaps the first evidence for a school in Britain;
(v) new evidence for Julius Classicus, a figure later known to history as a leader of the Batavian revolt, revealed to be the prefect of the Sixth Cohort of Nervians in the first decades of Roman London;
(vi) a contract from 21 October CE 62 to bring ‘twenty loads of provisions’ from Verulamium to London by 13 November, a year after the Boudican Revolt, the tablet reveals precious details of the rapid recovery of Roman London;
(vii) names of nearly 100 people, from a cooper, brewer and judge, to soldiers, slaves and freedmen (the names reveal early London was inhabited by businessmen and soldiers, most likely from Gaul and the Rhineland).
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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
