Even the ancient Romans used standardized notepads – knowledge

A few years ago, workers building the Autostrada Pompeii – Salerno came across a buried house. It belonged to an ancient estate now known as Agro Murecine; as it turned out, an important notary or civil servant once lived there. Inside the house, archaeologists discovered two wicker baskets with neatly stacked wax tablets, all Roman documents, in sediments from the nearby Sarnus river. The tablets have long been documented and their inscriptions deciphered, they are unique evidence of the legal history of the Romans. But they reveal even more. Specialists for conservation and restoration at the Technical University of Cologne and the Università degli Studi di Napoli L’Orientale have now examined the panels themselves technically and chemically – and found evidence of an ancient stationery industry.

At that time, the researchers recovered 242 panels from the mud: thin, rectangular wooden panels covered with a fine layer of wax. Many were once bound together with leather straps or hinges into double or even triple panels. “They were the Romans’ everyday notepads,” says Robert Fuchs of Cologne Technical University.

It is thanks to a famous catastrophe that they survived. Apparently, the legal documents from the wicker baskets, including sales contracts, loans and auction deeds, were about to be brought to Pompeii from the town of Stabiae on the Gulf of Naples when Mount Vesuvius erupted and its plumes of ash engulfed the entire region. The messengers apparently stopped 600 meters from Pompeii and tried to bring the documents to safety in an estate. The property and with it the wicker baskets sank into the ash – and then over the centuries into the mud of the nearby river.

“Everything points to a standardized procedure.”

For the excavators, this was initially a stroke of luck. The damp sand preserved the tablets, even the writing was still legible after almost two thousand years when Italian archaeologists recovered and photographed the rare pieces in 1959. But then things went wrong, the panels were dried too quickly in the sun or in a vacuum chamber and preserved with epoxy resin and other synthetic resins. “It wasn’t a good idea,” says Fuchs. “The wax layer shrank, became brittle and flaked off in many places.” When the chemist and conservator examined them, most of the panels stored in hanging files were in a sorry state. Many had the last bit of wax peeled off.

Open detailed view

Fuchs and his colleagues were able to examine around twenty wax tablets as part of a project supported by the Gerda Henkel Foundation, and they were also able to examine the composition of the remains of wax that had crumbled off. Fuchs says that for a long time such tablets were only evaluated for their content, i.e. for the written words. He was now investigating the design of the tablets and the layers of wax for the first time. “It is very striking that the panels were almost all the same size,” says Fuchs. Many of the writing utensils measure nine by 13 centimetres.

It’s not the only similarity. The slabs of Murecine are usually two to three millimeters thick, only the edges are slightly higher. The panels are made of one piece, the wood comes from European spruces, which are often found in the mountains of Italy. Specialists apparently chiseled out the recesses for the wax from the wood. “The technique reminds me of the production of wooden shingles. These are still manufactured today with a thickness of just a few millimeters,” says Fuchs. “Everything points to a standardized procedure.”

Another indication speaks for an industrial production of the panels. Liquid wax was not poured into their indentations, as was long suspected. “It looks as if thin wax foils were pressed into these frames,” says Fuchs. The insoles are only half a millimeter thick. His argument for this thesis: There is no overflowing wax at the edge, as one would expect when pouring in soft wax directly. Instead, sharp cuts are evident. So the ancient Romans could have cut off the insert sheets from larger strips of wax.

Open detailed view

In order to produce such writable wax foils, manual experience was required, which was not work for amateurs. The Greek doctor Dioscurides, living in a Roman province and one of the founders of pharmacy, described a kind of preparation instruction in the first century AD: “Boil the beeswax with baking soda, put the bottom of a pot, which you have previously cooled with cold water, in melt the wax and lift off again, take the thin slices off the ground and pull them onto a string”. Then hang them in the sun to bleach them during the day and moisten them again and again. The thin foils for the “standard wax tablets” were probably made in the same way, but the Romans also mixed in charcoal or bone charcoal and ochre. According to Fuchs’ research, the Romans may not only have used pure wax. “We didn’t find beeswax in Murecine, but a mixture of resin, alkanes and fatty acids,” says Fuchs. However, it is not certain whether the preservation with modern resins has falsified the result.

Notepads with short pens were obviously a hit

Fuchs also included stili, thin pins found in Pompeii, in his considerations. Frescoes from Pompeii show the writing implements. With these rather short pins made of bone or bronze, the scribes pressed their words into the wax. The ends were not pointed, but rather rounded. This enabled the scribes to jot down their texts on the tablets more quickly. The rounded ends dug into the surface only an average of 0.3 millimeters deep, as Fuchs found out by analyzing the layers of wax. Only when you pressed harder did the tips penetrate the thin layer of wax. In a few panels, such as charred specimens from Pompeii itself, traces of writing can be found in the wood. It is further evidence that the layers of wax were very thin.

The overall package of antique notepads with the small pens was apparently a success story. The use of the wax tablets, which had already been used in Mesopotamia and Greece, reached a new dimension. On the tablets, which weighed just a few grams, everything that arose in everyday life was written down in Latin and a kind of shorthand, similar to today’s shorthand. Only very special notes were later transferred to valuable papyrus, which was probably not available to many.

The wax tablets were evidently a convenient and handy medium. Ancient texts describe, for example, how the Roman scholar Pliny the Elder in the port of Misenum, where as prefect he was in charge of the Roman fleet stationed not far from Vesuvius, had notes from the texts of old authors read to him by a slave while walking. He then dictated manuscript drafts for his encyclopedia “Naturalis historia”https://www.sueddeutsche.de/wissen/ to a second slave can write down,” says Fuchs. “But with a stylus in such a thin layer, it might have worked.” The rounded pins do not get caught in the wax.

By the first century AD, tablets of standardized dimensions were widespread throughout the Roman Empire. Everywhere people wrote their notes on simple, thin and light wooden tablets; they were mass-produced items for notary clerks on Vesuvius as well as, for example, for a soldier on Hadrian’s Wall. Nearby, in Fort Vindolanda, archaeologists discovered a total of 25 of these tablets in 2017, complementing older finds. For example, the soldier Masclus wrote to his superior that more beer was needed at the border post. On a second board he asked for leave.

And in London, then Londinium, construction workers encountered 405 wooden panels during excavation work for the Bloomberg building, which opened in 2017 in the heart of the city. These so-called Bloomberg panels are similar in size to the Murecine panels, measuring 11 by 14 centimeters. So there seems to have been something of an empire-wide size norm for notepads. Most of them deal with business matters, the texts document, for example, the transport of groceries. And a tablet, dated January 8, 57 AD, is the oldest financial document from today’s financial metropolis of London.