A foundational element in the development of written language: the only known complete pair

[Roman inked wooden tablets]. Roman inked wooden tablets: contract for a sale of land.

€ 165.000,00

One of the earliest extant documents in world history to be written in ink, and the only example of its kind joined and identified as complete: a pair of wooden tablets containing a contract for the sale of land in the Roman province of Africa during the reign of Emperor Diocletian.

These tablets come from a trove discovered in Northern Africa some time before 1950, probably comprising a few dozen specimens. They did not form an archive preserved for its contents, but rather were stored away to be washed and re-used. While most of the tablets in the trove would originally have formed diptychs or even triptychs (of two or three pieces) to make up a complete document, the disorganised state in which they were found and the difficulties of legibility prevented early collectors from identifying matching items, and they were dispersed in the later 20th and early 21st century. Only recently have classical scholars been able to study a number of these tablets in more depth, and their investigation is already providing important new insights into everyday history in the Roman provinces, but also, more specifically, into prevailing levels of literacy and legal knowledge among the less educated classes living there.

Like all pieces in the original trove, this document was drawn up somewhere in the border area of the Roman provinces of Numidia and Byzacena (now, roughly eastern Tunisia). Written in formulaic legal language, it states that one Bassilia purchases a piece of land from the seller Augentianus for 9,000 denarii, as witnessed by Iulius Aequirius. The cursive script is often quite perfunctory, without punctuation or spaces, and the interpretation of many words is uncertain.

New Roman cursive counts as the first true cursive script with minuscules. Succeeding the earlier, unsophisticated Old Roman cursive in the 3rd century, the style was quickly adopted as the daily script of the later Roman Empire and was used widely beyond the official chanceries: not simply a stylistic variation, it is a foundational element in the development of written language in Western Europe and the ultimate precursor of all subsequent medieval minuscules, including our own lower-case alphabet.

Roman writing tablets were a crucial medium of communication in antiquity. Typically made from oblong pieces of wood pieces, they usually had a wax surface that was inscribed with a stylus. While the vast majority of ancient writing tablets is lost, examples of such wax slates ("tabulae ceratae") were discovered in Pompeii, and between 2010 and 2013 a significant collection was unearthed in London's financial district, dating from 50 to 80 CE.

Inked tablets, by contrast, are vastly more uncommon than wax examples. A trove of such remarkable slates was discovered in the fort of Vindolanda, south of Hadrian's Wall; each tablet is approximately the size of a modern postcard, and similarly thin. These specimens, now in the British Museum, are considered the earliest known surviving instances of ink-written letters from the Roman era.

The ink tablets at hand, however, represent a third group, the rarest of them all. The closest counterparts are the "Tabulae Albertini", cedar wooden tablets which are larger and thicker than those from Vindolanda. Written in Northern Africa in the late 5th century CE, they were discovered in the region of Tébessa, Algeria, in 1928. The present tablets, however, are nearly two centuries older, and although they have been reused, the recessed areas never held any wax. No traces from earlier writing with a stylus are evident, so the previous text was probably washed off - a common practice with the ink tablets.

In his Historia Naturalis (book 35, §25), Pliny gives a classic account of "atramentum" ("ink", or literally, "blacking"), describing it as a mineral "made from soot in various forms, as (for instance) of burnt rosin or pitch ... The ink of the very best quality is made from the smoke of torches. An inferior article is made from the soot of furnaces and bath-house chimneys. Some manufacturers employ the dried lees of wine ... Polygnotus and Micon, celebrated painters at Athens, made their black paint from burnt grape-vines ... The dyers make theirs from the dark crust that gradually accumulates on brass-kettles. Ink is made also from torches (pine-knots), and from charcoal pounded fine in mortars ... Book-writers' ink has gum mixed with it, weaver's ink is made up with glue. Ink whose materials have been liquified by the agency of an acid is erased with great difficulty".