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Michel Wal / Wikimedia Commons Posted on 10/04/2021 6:04:05 AM PDT by Red Badger
Michel Wal / Wikimedia Commons
The Vindolanda tablets (also known as Vindolanda Letters) are thin pieces of wood about the size of a modern postcard, which were used as writing paper for the Roman soldiers garrisoned at the fort of Vindolanda between AD 85 and 130. Such tablets have been found at other Roman sites, including nearby Carlisle, but not in as much abundance. In Latin texts, such as those of Pliny the Elder, these kinds of tablets are referred to as leaf tablets or sectiles or laminae—Pliny used them to keep notes for his Natural History, written in the first century AD.
The tablets are thin slivers (.5 centimeters to 3 millimeters thick) of imported spruce or larch, which for the most part measure about 10 by 15 centimers (around 4 by 6 inches). The surface of the wood was smoothed and treated so it could be used for writing. Often the tablets were scored in the center so that they could be folded and tied together for security purposes—to keep couriers from reading the contents. Longer documents were created by tying several leaves together.
Writing the Vindolanda Letters The writers of the Vindolanda documents include soldiers, officers and their wives and families who were garrisoned at Vindolanda, as well as merchants, enslaved people, and correspondents at many different cities and forts throughout the vast Roman empire, including Rome, Antioch, Athens, Carlisle, and London.
The writers wrote exclusively in Latin on the tablets, although the texts mostly lack punctuation or proper spelling; there is even some Latin shorthand which has yet to be deciphered. Some of the texts are rough drafts of letters that were later sent; others are mail received by the soldiers from their families and friends elsewhere. Some of the tablets have doodles and drawings on them.
The tablets were written on with pen and ink—over 200 pens have been recovered at Vindolanda. The most common pen nib was made of a good quality iron by a blacksmith, who sometimes embellished them with chevrons or bronze leaf or inlay, depending on the customer. The nib was typically attached to a wood holder that held a well of ink made of a mixture of carbon and gum arabic.
What Did the Romans Write? Topics covered on the tablets include letters to friends and families ("a friend sent me 50 oysters from Cordonovi, I'm sending you half" and "So that you may know that I am in good health...you most irreligious fellow who hasn't even sent me a single letter"); applications for leave ("I ask you, Lord Cerialis, that you hold me worthy for you to grant me leave"); official correspondence; "strength reports" listing the number of men present, absent or ill; inventories; supply orders; travel expense account details ("2 wagon axles, 3.5 denarii; wine-lees, 0.25 denarii"); and recipes.
One plaintive plea to the Roman emperor Hadrian himself reads: "As befits an honest man I implore Your Majesty not to allow me, an innocent man, to have been beaten with rods..." Chances are this was never sent. Added to this are quotations from famous pieces: a quote from Virgil's Aeneid is written in what some, but not all scholars interpret as a child's hand.
Finding the Tablets The recovery of over 1300 tablets at Vindolanda (to date; tablets are still being found in the ongoing excavations run by the Vindolanda Trust) is the result of serendipity: a combination of the way the fort was constructed and the geographic location of the fort.
Vindolanda was built at the place where two streams conjoin to create the Chinley Burn, which ends up in the South Tyne river. As such, the fort's occupants struggled with wet conditions for most of the four centuries or so that the Romans lived here. Because of that, the floors of the fort were carpeted with a thickish (5-30 cm) combination of mosses, bracken, and straw. Into this thick, smelly carpet were lost a number of items, including discarded shoes, textile fragments, animal bone, metal fragments, and pieces of leather: and a large number of Vindolanda tablets.
In addition, many tablets were discovered in filled-in ditches and preserved by the wet, mucky, anaerobic conditions of the environment.
Reading the Tablets The ink on many of the tablets is not visible, or not readily visible with the naked eye. Infrared photography has been used successfully to capture images of the written word.
More interestingly, the fragments of information from the tablets have been combined with other data known about Roman garrisons. For example, Tablet 183 lists an order for iron ore and objects including their prices, which Bray (2010) has used to learn about what the cost of iron was relative to other commodities, and from that identify the difficulty and utility of iron out on the edges of the far-flung Roman empire.
Resources and Further Reading:
Images, texts, and translations of some of the Vindolanda Tablets can be found at the Vindolanda Tablets Online. Many of the tablets themselves are at stored at the British Museum and visiting the Vindolanda Trust website is well worth it as well.
Birley A. 2002. Garrison Life at Vindolanda: A Band of Brothers. Stroud, Gloucestershire, UK: Tempus Publishing. 192 p.
Birley AR. 2010. The nature and significance of extramural settlement at Vindolanda and other selected sites on the Northern Frontier of Roman Britain. Unpublished PhD Thesis, School of archaeology and Ancient History, University of Leicester. 412 p.
Birley R. 1977. Vindolanda: A Roman frontier post on Hadrian's Wall. London: Thames and Hudson, Ltd. 184 p.
Bowman AK. 2003 (1994). Life and Letters on the Roman Fronteir: Vindolanda and its People. London: British Museum Press. 179 p.
Bowman AK, Thomas JD, and Tomlin RSO. 2010. The Vindolanda Writing-Tablets (Tabulae Vindolandenses IV, Part 1). Britannia 41:187-224. doi: 10.1017/S0068113X10000176
Bray L. 2010. "Horrible, Speculative, Nasty, Dangerous": Assessing the Value of Roman Iron. Britannia 41:175-185. doi:10.1017/S0068113X10000061
Carillo E, Rodriguez-Echavarria K, and Arnold D. 2007. Displaying Intangible Heritage Using ICT. Roman Everyday Life on the Frontier: Vindolanda. In: Arnold D, Niccolucci F, and Chalmers A, editors. 8th International Symposium on Virtual Reality, Archaeology and Cultural Heritage VAST
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Archaeologists Uncover Spine-tingling New Hoard of Roman Letters at Vindolanda Fort:
PLEASE SEND BEER!.......................
Good post.
In other words, the Romans were using fountain pens roughly 800 years before they were officially invented in 1827.
“Dear John...”
The Romans were way more far advanced that most people think. They were clever and inventive and very capitalistic..................
“Dear Commodus...”
Carlisle is near the western end of the wall. Woodrow Wilson’s mother was born there.
She’s older than I thought.................
If Woodrow Wilson’s mother was a Brit, how could he become POTUS?.............................
Goldsworthy 9as I remember) has written a fictional series about life and conquest survival at Vindolandia giving me a familiarization and interest in this site. I hope to hit it if I go to the Lake region and later southern Scotland borderlands.
Wilson became POTUS only because Theodore Roosevelt ran as a third-party candidate.
The museum is amazing at Vindolanda.
If you make your way over to the eastern coast, Lindisfarne is a cool place. You have to visit it before the tide comes in.
Same as any of the others: by right of being a citizen at his birth, instead of naturalized at a later date.
I.E. born on American soil, no matter the nationality of his parents, or born overseas to at least one parent who is an American citizen.
There are deluded people who claim your parents or even grandparents need to have been citizens for you to be considered a native born citizen, but they are quite wrong.
I find it amazing that literacy was so widespread. There weren’t any books to read (except in the wealthiest families) and there was no writing paper, pens, or ink to be purchased. You need to practice, practice, practice to become proficient at writing. How do you do that without plentiful pen and paper?
I never heard of writing on wood tablets before. Most fascinating!
Thanks for posting this, Red. What a great site to visit!
My son n joined the Army when The History Channel did a documentary on the letters. It was called “ Letters from the Front”. There was one letter that had the usual how are you etc. then please send money. I sent a copy to my son. Some things in life never change.
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