Wax Tablets

WAX TABLETS. - A writing material in common use, widely adopted by the ancients and sporadically down to almost our own day: they served above all for accounts, letters, notes, school exercises, and also for contracts and wills. They consisted of small rectangular boards of wood or ivory, bordered at the edges, into whose recess molten wax mixed with pitch was poured, on which, once it had cooled, one wrote by incising it with the stylus. Coated with wax on one or both sides, they could be single or joined together (by means of a binding or metal rings), in sets of two, three, four and more tablets (diptycha, triptycha, polyptycha).

Among the wooden wax tablets preserved for us from antiquity, the two most substantial groups are represented by the Dacian tablets (found in Transylvania, in the mines of Verespatak, between 1788 and 1855) and by those from Pompeii (discovered in 1875 in the excavation of the house of the banker L. Caecilius Iucundus): but those of Herculaneum, of Egypt (among them 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 of Tunisia are also very important, both from the paleographic and from the juridical point of view. Among the ivory tablets, the consular diptychs deserve particular mention, richly carved on their outer faces, which consuls and magistrates gave to their friends when they entered office; put to liturgical use, above all as covers of sacred books in the Middle Ages and at the beginning of the modern era, they have come down to us in considerable number.

Renzo Frattrolo