An early fourth-century Roman tablet in a transitional Roman Cursive

[Roman inked wooden tablet]. Contract between Maianus and Silvanus.

€ 65,000.00

A wooden tablet from Roman North Africa, containing 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. This tablet is furthermore notable for representing Later Roman Cursive in a variety of forms: the text on the obverse is written more formally and retains some characteristics of Older Roman Cursive, while the reverse has a more flowing script alongside the signatures of five witnesses, all with an individual hand. Overall, this document represents a fascinating witness to everyday Roman writing at a time of transition.

The agreement between Maianus and one Silvanus is recorded with customary legal formulae and said to have been enacted and witnessed at a place called Titiunum (here in the locative form, "Titiuni"). Titiunum is seemingly otherwise unattested, but lay somewhere in the Byzacena province of Roman North Africa, roughly corresponding to the south of modern Tunisia. Maianus was born c. 280 AD and is still attested by c. 360 AD, which places this document clearly in the earlier fourth century, an impression confirmed by the script.

The writing on the obverse is in a transitional form of Later Roman Cursive which retains, or mimics, some letter forms from Older Roman Cursive: notably the N with a cross-bar rather than one resembling a lower-case n, and a B with a bow to the left. 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. Here the scribe, writing before this change, has attempted to give the main text something of an air of the older script, while writing on the reverse in a noticeably more informal and fluid style, with the letter forms ligatured more closely together. The slant in the obverse script is a characteristic shared with the proto-minuscule forms which were developing at the same time, which would ultimately give rise to uncial and half-uncial, the first Western European bookhands.

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. Tablets were commonly joined together in diptychs, and this example is pierced through to allow for such binding. 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 transactional 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 remarkable witness to Roman script and documentary tradition in a period of transformation.