A wax tablet (cera) is a tablet made of wood and covered with a layer of wax. It was used as a reusable and portable writing surface in Antiquity and throughout the Middle Ages. Cicero's letters make passing reference to their use, and some examples of wax-tablets have been preserved in waterlogged deposits in the Roman fort at Vindolanda on Hadrian's Wall. Medieval wax tablet books are on display in several European museums.
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Technology and applications
Writing was performed with a pointed instrument, a stylus. Writing by engraving in wax required the application of much more pressure and traction than would be necessary on parchment or paper, and the scribe had to lift the stylus in order to change the direction of the stroke. Therefor the stylus could not be applied with the same degree of dexterity as a pen. A straight-edged, spatula-like implement (often placed on the opposite end of the stylus tip) would be used in a razor-like fashion to serve as an eraser. The entire slate could be erased by warming it to about 50 °C and smoothening the surface before next use. The modern expression, of "a clean slate" is related to the Latin expression "tabula rasa".
Wax tablets were used for a variety of purposes, from students' or secretaries' notes to recording business accounts. Early forms of shorthand were used too.
Use in antiquity
The first appearance of writing tablets in written Greek appears in Homer— one Homeric example[1] in which writing is referred to — in the narrated tale of Bellerophon (Iliad vi.155–203) which introduces the trope of the "fatal letter", with its message sealed within the folded tablets: "Kill the bearer of this". The written tablets are an anachronism in a narrative of an event that is meant to have transpired generations before the Trojan War, and incidentally help date the earliest possible recension of the epic that we read to the mid-eighth century.
The Greeks started using the folding pair of wax tablets, along with the leather scroll in the mid-eighth century. Their word for the writing-tablet, deltos (δέλτος), is derived from the letter delta (Δ) due to the old shape of tablets[2]. An alternative theory holds that it has retained its Semitic designation, daltu, which originally signified "door" but was being used for writing tablets in Ugarit in the thirteenth century BCE (Burkert 1992:30). In Hebrew the term evolved into daleth. Writing tablets were in use in Mesopotamia as well as Syria and Palestine: "the find of one exemplar in the fourteenth-century wreck at Ulu Burun near Kaş, Turkey, is considered sensational, even if no trace of the writing for which it was used is preserved." (Burkert 1992:30) Writing tablets of ivory have appeared in the ruins of Sargon's palace in Nimrud and, in the form of richly carved ivory diptychs deriving from the consular diptychs, remained a traditional Roman elite gift on the occasion of accession to high office into Byzantine times.
Use in medieval to modern times
A remarkable example of a wax tablet book are the servitude records which the hospital of Austria's oldest city, Enns, established in 1500. Ten wooden plates, sized 375 x 207 mm and arranged in a 90 mm stack, are each divided into two halves along their long axis. The annual payables due are written on parchment or paper glued to the left sides. Payables received were recorded for deduction (and subsequently erased) on the respective right sides, which are covered with brownish-black writing wax. The material is based on beeswax, and contains 5-10% plant oils and carbon pigments; its melting point is about 65 °C.[3] This volume is the continuation of an earlier one, which was begun in 1447.
Wax tablets were used for high-volume business records of transient importance until the 19th century. For instance, the salt mining authority at Schwäbisch Hall employed wax records until 1812.[4] The fish market in Rouen used them even until the 1860s, where their construction and use has been well documented in 1849.[5]
References
- ^ Hyginus also recounts a letter presumably sent to
Palamedes from Priam but in fact written by Odysseus (Hyginus. Fabulae, 105). - ^ Εntry δέλτος (deltos) at Liddell & Scott
- ^ Wilflingseder, F., 1964. Die Urbare des Ennser Bürgerspitals aus den Jahren 1447 und 1500. Biblos 13, 134-45
- ^ Büll, R., 1977. Wachs als Beschreib- und Siegelstoff. Wachstafeln und ihre Verwendung. In: Das große Buch vom Wachs. Vol. 2, 785-894
- ^ Lalou E., 1992. Inventaire des tablettes médiévales et présentation genérale. In: Les Tablettes à écrire de l'Antiquité à l'Epoque Moderne, pp. 233-288; esp. p. 280 and Fig. 13
- Burkert, Walter, 1992.The Orientalizing Revolution: Near Eastern Influences on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Age (Harvard University Press), pp 29ff.
- Galling, K., 1971. "Tafel, Buch und Blatt" in Near Eastern Studies in Honour of W.F. Albright (Baltimore), pp 207-23
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