WAX TABLETS. – A writing material of common use widely adopted by the ancients and sporadically up to almost modern times: they served especially for accounts, letters, notes, school exercises, and also for contracts and wills. They consisted of thin wooden or ivory slabs, rectangular in shape, bordered at the edges, into whose hollowed interior molten wax mixed with pitch was poured; once cooled, writing was done by incising it with a stylus. Covered on one or both sides, they could be simple or bound together (by means of ties or metal rings), in two, three, four or more tablets (diptycha, triptycha, polyptycha).
Among the wooden wax tablets preserved from antiquity, the two largest groups are represented by the Dacian tablets (found in Transylvania, in the mines of Vespastak, between 1788 and 1855) and the Pompeian ones (discovered in 1875 during the excavation of the house of the banker L. Caecilius Iucundus): but very important, both from a paleographic and a juridical point of view, are also those from Herculaneum, from Egypt (among these one now in Geneva, containing the text of *Ps. 91*: cf. J. Nicole, *Textes grecs inédits de la collection papyrologique de Genève*, Geneva 1909, no. 6), and from Tunisia. Among the ivory tablets, the consular diptychs deserve particular attention; richly carved on their outer faces, these were given by consuls and magistrates to friends upon taking office; used for liturgical purposes, especially as book covers for sacred texts in the Middle Ages and at the beginning of the modern era, they have come down to us in considerable numbers.