Vindolanda tablets
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The Vindolanda tablets are some of the oldest surviving handwritten documents in Britain (antedated by the Bloomberg tablets from Roman London). They are a rich source of information about life on the northern frontier of
Roman Britain Roman Britain was the territory that became the Roman province of ''Britannia'' after the Roman conquest of Britain, consisting of a large part of the island of Great Britain. The occupation lasted from AD 43 to AD 410. Julius Caes ...
. Written on fragments of thin, postcard-sized wooden leaf-tablets with carbon-based ink, the tablets date to the 1st and 2nd centuries AD (roughly contemporary with
Hadrian's Wall Hadrian's Wall (, also known as the ''Roman Wall'', Picts' Wall, or ''Vallum Aelium'' in Latin) is a former defensive fortification of the Roman province of Roman Britain, Britannia, begun in AD 122 in the reign of the Emperor Hadrian. Ru ...
). Although similar records on
papyrus Papyrus ( ) is a material similar to thick paper that was used in ancient times as a writing surface. It was made from the pith of the papyrus plant, ''Cyperus papyrus'', a wetland sedge. ''Papyrus'' (plural: ''papyri'' or ''papyruses'') can a ...
were known from elsewhere in the
Roman Empire The Roman Empire ruled the Mediterranean and much of Europe, Western Asia and North Africa. The Roman people, Romans conquered most of this during the Roman Republic, Republic, and it was ruled by emperors following Octavian's assumption of ...
, wooden tablets with ink text had not been recovered until 1973, when archaeologist Robin Birley, his attention being drawn by student excavator Keith Liddell, discovered some at the site of
Vindolanda Vindolanda was a Roman auxiliary fort ('' castrum'') just south of Hadrian's Wall in northern England, which it pre-dated. Archaeological excavations of the site show it was under Roman occupation from roughly 85 AD to 370 AD. Located near th ...
, a Roman fort in northern England. The documents record official military matters as well as personal messages to and from members of the garrison of Vindolanda, their families, and their slaves. Highlights of the tablets include an invitation to a birthday party held in about 100, which is perhaps the oldest surviving document written in Latin by a woman. The excavated tablets are nearly all held at the
British Museum The British Museum is a Museum, public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works is the largest in the world. It documents the story of human cu ...
, but arrangements have been made for some to be displayed at Vindolanda. As of 2023, more than 1,700 tablets have been discovered.


Description

The wooden tablets found at Vindolanda were the first known surviving examples of the use of ink letters in the Roman period. The use of ink tablets was documented in contemporary records;
Herodian Herodian or Herodianus () of Syria, sometimes referred to as "Herodian of Antioch" (c. 170 – c. 240), was a minor Roman civil servant who wrote a colourful history in Greek titled ''History of the Empire from the Death of Marcus'' (τῆς με ...
in the 3rd century describes "a writing-tablet of the kind that were made from lime-wood, cut into thin sheets and folded face-to-face by being bent". The Vindolanda tablets are made from birch, alder and oak that grew locally—in contrast to stylus tablets, another type of writing tablet used in Roman Britain, which were imported and made from non-native wood. The tablets are thick with a typical size being (the size of a modern postcard). They were scored down the middle and folded to form diptychs with ink writing on the inner faces, the ink being carbon,
gum arabic Gum arabic (gum acacia, gum sudani, Senegal gum and by other names) () is a tree gum exuded by two species of '' Acacia sensu lato:'' '' Senegalia senegal,'' and '' Vachellia seyal.'' However, the term "gum arabic" does not indicate a partic ...
and water. Nearly 500 tablets were excavated in the 1970s and 1980s. First discovered in March 1973, the tablets were initially thought to be wood shavings until one of the excavators found two stuck together and peeled them apart to discover writing on the inside. They were taken to the epigraphist Richard Wright, but rapid oxygenation of the wood meant that they were black and unreadable by the time he was able to view them. They were sent to Alison Rutherford at Newcastle University Medical School for multi-spectrum photography, which led to infrared photographs showing the scripts for researchers for the first time. The results were disappointing as the scripts were initially indecipherable. However, Alan Bowman at Manchester University and David Thomas at Durham University analysed the previously unknown form of cursive script and were able to produce transcriptions.


Chronology

Vindolanda fort was garrisoned before the construction of Hadrian's Wall, and most of the tablets are slightly older than the wall, which was begun in 122. The original director of excavations Robin Birley identified five periods of occupation and expansion: # , first fort constructed. # , fort enlargement. # , further fort enlargements. # , hiatus and reoccupation. # , the period when Hadrian's Wall was constructed The tablets were produced in periods 2 and 3 (), with the majority written before 102. They were used for official notes about the Vindolanda camp business and personal affairs of the officers and households. The largest group is correspondence of Flavius Cerialis, prefect of the ninth cohort of Batavians and that of his wife, Sulpicia Lepidina. Some correspondence may relate to civilian traders and contractors; for example Octavian, the writer of Tablet 343, is an entrepreneur dealing in wheat, hides and sinews, but this does not prove him to be a civilian.


Transcription

The tablets are written in forms of
Roman cursive Roman cursive (or Latin cursive) is a form of handwriting (or a script) used in ancient Rome and to some extent into the Middle Ages. It is customarily divided into old (or ancient) cursive and new cursive. Old Roman cursive Old Roman cur ...
script, considered to be the forerunner of joined-up writing, which varies in style by author. With few exceptions, they have been classified as old Roman cursive. The cursive writing from Vindolanda differs greatly from the Latin capitals used for inscriptions. The script is derived from the capital writing of the late 1st century BC and the 1st century AD. The text rarely shows the unusual or distorted letter forms or the extravagant ligatures to be found in Greek papyri of the same period. Additional challenges for transcription are the use of abbreviations such as "" for ''homines'' (men) or "" for ''
consularis ''Consularis'' is a Latin adjective indicating something pertaining to the position or rank of consul. In Ancient Rome it was also used as a noun (plural ''consulares'') to designate those senators who had held the office of consul or attained con ...
'' (consular), and the arbitrary division of words at the end of lines for space reasons such as "" (letters) being split between the "" and the rest of the word. The ink is often badly faded or survives as little more than a blur, so that in some instances transcription is not possible. In most cases infrared photographs of the tablets provide a far more legible version of what was written than visual inspection. However, the photographs contain marks which appear similar to writing but which certainly are not letters; additionally, they contain a great many lines, dots and other dark marks which may or may not be writing. Consequently, the published transcriptions have often had to be interpreted subjectively in deciding which marks should be regarded as writing.


Contents

The tablets contain various letters of correspondence. For instance, the cavalry decurion Masculus wrote a letter to prefect Flavius Cerialis inquiring about the instructions for his men for the following day, including a polite request for more beer to be sent to the garrison (which had entirely consumed its previous stock of beer).Mike Ibeji (16 November 2012).
Vindolanda
" BBC History. Accessed 6 October 2016.
The documents provide information about various roles performed by the men at the fort, such as a keeper of the bath-house, shoe-makers, construction workers, medical doctors, maintainers of wagons and
kiln A kiln is a thermally insulated chamber, a type of oven, that produces temperatures sufficient to complete some process, such as hardening, drying, or Chemical Changes, chemical changes. Kilns have been used for millennia to turn objects m ...
s, and those put on
plaster Plaster is a building material used for the protective or decorative coating of walls and ceilings and for moulding and casting decorative elements. In English, "plaster" usually means a material used for the interiors of buildings, while "re ...
ing duty. One of the tablets confirms that Roman soldiers wore underpants (''subligaculum''), and also testifies to a high degree of literacy in the
Roman army The Roman army () served ancient Rome and the Roman people, enduring through the Roman Kingdom (753–509 BC), the Roman Republic (509–27 BC), and the Roman Empire (27 BC–AD 1453), including the Western Roman Empire (collapsed Fall of the W ...
. The best-known document is perhaps Tablet 291, written around 100 by Claudia Severa, the wife of the commander of a nearby fort, to Sulpicia Lepidina, inviting her to a birthday party. The invitation is one of the earliest known examples of writing in Latin by a woman. * * There are two handwriting styles in the tablet, with the majority of the text written in a professional hand (thought to be the household scribe) and with closing greetings personally added by Claudia Severa (on the lower right hand side of the tablet). There are only scant references to the indigenous
Celtic Britons The Britons ( *''Pritanī'', , ), also known as Celtic Britons or Ancient Britons, were the Celtic people who inhabited Great Britain from at least the British Iron Age until the High Middle Ages, at which point they diverged into the Welsh, ...
. Until the discovery of the tablets, historians could only speculate on whether the Romans had a nickname for the Britons. ''Brittunculi'' (diminutive of ''Britto''; hence 'little Britons'), found on one of the Vindolanda tablets, is now known to be a derogatory, or patronising, term used by the Roman garrisons that were based in Northern Britain to describe the locals.


Comparison to other sites

Wooden tablets have been found at 20 Roman settlements in Britain. However, most of those sites did not yield the type of tablet found at Vindolanda, but rather "stylus tablets", marked with pointed metal styli. A significant number of ink tablets have been identified at
Carlisle Carlisle ( , ; from ) is a city in the Cumberland district of Cumbria, England. Carlisle's early history is marked by the establishment of a settlement called Luguvalium to serve forts along Hadrian's Wall in Roman Britain. Due to its pro ...
(also on Hadrian's Wall). The fact that letters were sent to and from places on Hadrian's Wall and further afield ( Catterick,
York York is a cathedral city in North Yorkshire, England, with Roman Britain, Roman origins, sited at the confluence of the rivers River Ouse, Yorkshire, Ouse and River Foss, Foss. It has many historic buildings and other structures, such as a Yor ...
, and London) raises the question of why more letters have been found at Vindolanda than other sites, but it is not possible to give a definitive answer. The anaerobic conditions found at Vindolanda are not unique, and identical deposits have been found in parts of London. One possibility, given the fragile condition of the tablets found at Vindolanda, is that archaeologists excavating other Roman sites have overlooked evidence of writing in ink.


Imaging

In 1973, the tablets were photographed by Susan M. Blackshaw in the British Museum, using infrared sensitive cameras and, more comprehensively, in 1990 at Vindolanda, by Alison Rutherford. The tablets were scanned again using improved techniques in 2000–2001 with a Kodak Wratten 87C infra-red filter. The photographs are taken in infrared to enhance the faded ink against the wood of the tablets, or to distinguish between ink and dirt, to make the writing more visible. In 2002, the tablet images were used as part of a research programme to extend the use of the GRAVA iterative computer vision system, to aid the transcription of the Vindolanda tablets through a series of processes modelled on the best practice of papyrologists, and to provide the images in an
XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing data. It defines a set of rules for encoding electronic document, documents in a format that is both human-readable and Machine-r ...
marked up format, identifying the likely placement of characters and words with their transcription. In 2010, a collaboration between Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents at
University of Oxford The University of Oxford is a collegiate university, collegiate research university in Oxford, England. There is evidence of teaching as early as 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the List of oldest un ...
, the
British Museum The British Museum is a Museum, public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works is the largest in the world. It documents the story of human cu ...
, and the Archaeological Computing Research Group at
University of Southampton The University of Southampton (abbreviated as ''Soton'' in post-nominal letters) is a public university, public research university in Southampton, England. Southampton is a founding member of the Russell Group of research-intensive universit ...
, used polynomial texture mapping on several hundreds of the original tablets for detailed recording and edge detection. The images, at a resolution suitable for web page display, and text of the tablets from ''Tab. Vindol. II'' were published on-line.Se
Vindolanda Tablets Online
The digitization and online database project was a collaboration between the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents and the Academic Computing Development Team at the
University of Oxford The University of Oxford is a collegiate university, collegiate research university in Oxford, England. There is evidence of teaching as early as 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the List of oldest un ...
with the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the
Arts and Humanities Research Board The arts or creative arts are a vast range of human practices involving creative expression, storytelling, and cultural participation. The arts encompass diverse and plural modes of thought, deeds, and existence in an extensive range of me ...
. The project directors were Alan Bowman, Charles Crowther and John Pearce. See http://vindolanda.csad.ox.ac.uk/about.shtml
Tablets from both ''Tab. Vindol. II'' and ''Tab. Vindol. III'' were published in 2010.Se
Vindolanda Tablets Online II
. The Vindolanda Tablets were encoded with
EpiDoc EpiDoc is an international community that produces guidelines and tools for encoding in TEI XML scholarly and educational editions of ancient documents, especially inscriptions and papyri. The EpiDoc Guidelines were originally proposed as a reco ...
TEI (
Text Encoding Initiative The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) is a text-centric community of practice in the academic field of digital humanities, operating continuously since the 1980s. The community currently runs a mailing list, meetings and conference series, and ma ...
) for Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents at the
University of Oxford The University of Oxford is a collegiate university, collegiate research university in Oxford, England. There is evidence of teaching as early as 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the List of oldest un ...
as a part of the eSAD ( e-Science and Ancient Documents) project. Se


Exhibition and impact

The tablets are held at the British Museum, where a selection of them is on display in its Roman Britain gallery (Room 49). The tablets featured in the list of British archaeological finds selected by experts at the British Museum for the 2003
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'' Our Top Ten Treasures''. Viewers were invited to vote for their favourite, and the tablets came top of the poll. The Vindolanda Museum, run by the Vindolanda Trust, has funding so that a selection of tablets on loan from the British Museum can be displayed at the site where they were found. The Vindolanda Museum put nine of the tablets on display in 2011. This loan of items to a regional museum is in line with British Museum's current policy of encouraging loans both internationally and nationally (as part of its Partnership UK scheme).


See also

* Bath curse tablets * Bloomberg tablets


Notes


References


Sources

* * * * * * * *


External links


Item record
at the British Museum, number P&EE 1989 6-2 74.
Vindolanda Tablets Online
online catalogue of Vindolanda Tablets by CSAD, University of Oxford
Vindolanda Tablets Online II
, updated catalogue of Vindolanda Tablets by CSAD, University of Oxford
Vindolanda Tablets at RIB Online
digital editions of every Vindolanda Tablet published to date. {{DEFAULTSORT:Vindolanda Tablets 1st-century inscriptions 2nd-century inscriptions 1st century in Roman Britain 2nd century in Roman Britain 1973 archaeological discoveries Archaeological discoveries in the United Kingdom Romano-British objects in the British Museum History of Northumberland Palaeography Latin inscriptions in the United Kingdom Stanegate