An early fourth-century tablet in Later Roman Cursive

[Roman inked wooden tablet]. Contract between Crescentius and Ianuarius.

€ 45.000,00

A wooden tablet from Roman North Africa, containing part of a contract between two individuals from the early fourth century AD. Written in ink on a reused wax tablet, this represents a rare survival of an original Roman document written in everyday script. The writing is in the Later Roman Cursive of the early fourth century, seemingly still with some older letter-forms, offering a glimpse into Roman Cursive in a transitional stage.

The text is formulated according to established legal practices and employs customary phrasing. The matter at hand is an issue of land-ownership between two men named Crescentius and Ianuarius. The authority of the local seniores (elders) plays an important role, and the agreement is stated to have been entered into at Goretianum, an estate (fundus) testified in other documents and located in the Byzacena province of Roman North Africa, roughly equivalent to the south of modern Tunisia.

The script is a slanting Later Roman Cursive, written fluidly, becoming more compact as the space dictates. In this period, early in the fourth century, some letters from Older Roman Cursive had not yet totally disappeared, especially from more official usage: the G and the R in "Goretiano" at the end of the text maintain their older, more majuscule forms. As the fourth century continued, these too would disappear from cursive usage. This document thus attests to Roman Cursive in a state of transition.

Although by the fourth century Older Roman Cursive had largely fallen out of use, it retained higher status due to its continued employment by the imperial chancery. This lent it a greater authority in legal texts: and so to maintain a monopoly on the legal power it conferred, its use was forbidden by all lesser chanceries in 376.

Tablets were an indispensable part of life in the Roman Empire: the recess could be filled with wax to be used for notes or letters and then rubbed out and reused. As the contract recorded here was meant to be a more lasting document, the wax was dispensed with and the writing was executed with ink directly on the wood, but still making use of the recess on the obverse as a margin for the text.

Wood was a common medium for letters and documents in some regions of the Roman Empire, but few have survived into the modern day. Famous examples include the Vindolanda Letters from Hadrian's Wall in northern England from the late first century AD, while closer geographically are the Albertini Tablets from Algeria, which preserve a number of agricultural contracts from the years 493-496, during the period of the post-Roman Vandal kingdom in North Africa.

This document stands in the temporal middle-point between these two collections, and consequently bears witness to a script which is somewhere between the two. The nature of the contents and find location in North Africa make the Albertini Tablets a ready analogy, and this example furthermore provides us with evidence of a longer tradition of legal documents on wood in Roman and post-Roman North Africa.

A witness to Roman script and documentary tradition in a period of transformation.