sehepunkte 26 (2026), Nr. 10

Else Hartoch: The Writing Tablets of Roman Tongeren (Belgium)

The volume results from a multi-disciplinary research project led by Else Hartoch of the Gallo-Romeins Museum in Tongeren. It is devoted to a study of 85 Roman wax-tablet fragments and related wooden finds recovered in the city of Tongeren in the Belgian province of Limburg.

The tablets add welcome evidence to what is already known of Roman Tongeren from other sources, e.g., that it was called Atuatuca Tungrorum and founded ca. 10 BC as the caput civitatis of the Tungri within the province of Germania; that during the Batavian revolt in AD 69/70 it was burned down and later rebuilt on a larger scale; that in the 2nd century, possibly under Trajan, it gained the status of municipium. The finds come from two separate caches, a larger group found in the 1930s in a vast urban waste dump on the slope of Broekberg in the northwest of the Roman town and a smaller group excavated in 2013 in a fill of a well in Beukenbergweg, about 300 m southwest of the Broekberg sites. All the tablets are wooden wax tablets inscribed with a sharp stylus, but the finds differ in format between the two sites. Tablets found in Broekberg seem to derive from triptycha, a format connected to a senatus consultum of AD 61/2 stipulating that tablets inscribed with legal documents were to be in the form of a triptych and sealed and bound in a certain way to prevent fraud. All tablets in Broekberg appear to have been intentionally broken, presumably to render them unusable as legal documents.

Tablets found in Beukenbergweg seem to be of a single-tablet format inscribed on one side. Only 7 of them have traces of writing, but these include one of the most interesting pieces, an apparent draft of an inscription honoring Caracalla, which is datable to AD 207, its text presumably intended for inscribing in stone (Cat. no. 31).

Texts from both sites deal with various legal acts including financial transactions (Cat. no. 1, text 1, refers to usura, 'interest', paid on a specific day and in the presence of lictores), a public religious ceremony involving vigiles (Cat. no. 1, text 2), and an apparent acquisition of supplies by a decemvir (Cat. no. 6, text 2). A few tablets seem to relate to legal rights of veterans (Cat. nos 7, 32, and 33). It is worth stressing that all of the tablets are public in character and likely from records kept in the municipal tabularium. There are no texts of a private banking or commercial nature, nor of civil or military correspondence, types of texts attested in tablets elsewhere, especially in Vindonissa and Vindolanda.

The book comprises 4 parts, each with multiple chapters. The focus of Part I is on material aspects. It includes a chapter on deciphering the texts and some of the challenges encountered. It also introduces the terminology for describing triptycha, in which the authors follow Speidel for the Vindonissa tablets.[1] The chapter on wood used for production of the tablets reveals that 81 of 83 examined fragments were identified as silver fir (Abies alba). The preference for silver fir could be explained by the properties of the wood, which is soft and straight-grained and thus easy to split into thin boards, while its pale color provides good contrast for writing in black wax. There was, however, no local source for this wood: While silver fir is very common in the mountainous areas of Central Europe, the species does not occur in NW Europe, and notably not in Belgium. Despite this, as the authors convincingly propose, the tablets were probably locally produced, with the wood coming not from imported tree trunks (there is evidence that fir trunks were floated down the Rhine for construction projects) but rather recycled from imported silver-fir casks used to transport wine or other products.

Not surprisingly, fragments of writing tablets were found along with writing styli, made, where it was determinable, of boxwood (Buxus sempervirens), which is characterized by extreme hardness and density. There was also one ink pen made of soft silver fir wood and furnished with a copper alloy nib (Cat. no. 121). Similar to the so-called 'Vindolanda type' pens[2], it must have been used to write in ink as in Vindolanda, although no inked tablets have thus far been found in Tongeren.

Further chapters of Part I present results of three types of scientific analysis performed on the tablets, which included Multi-Light Reflectance (MLR) imaging; images of 12 tablets produced by MLR technology are available online. Two other studies proved less successful, even if not for the lack of trying: A gas chromatography-mass spectrometry analysis of the wax residue revealed that the ancient remains were inadvertently contaminated by the application of paraffin in the 1930s, which was used as a means to stabilize the wood, while the radiocarbon dating employed on 10 tablets yielded too wide a chronological frame of 50 BC-AD 540 to be useful (the difficulty stems from the 'old wood' effect caused by the fact that Abies alba can reach an age of 500 years).

Part II is devoted to the historical and archaeological context of the tablets. It contains a chapter on the use of writing tablets in Greek and Roman antiquity, with a discussion of iconographical and literary evidence and a survey of the Latin nomenclature associated with writing tablets. A chapter on the archaeology of Atuatuca Tungrorum focuses on the building history of the Roman town and some of its most significant archaeological finds; this is followed by a detailed presentation of the immediate archaeological context and history of discovery of the tablets, with particular attention paid to records of the earlier cache of finds in Broekberg. The last chapter examines a painting found during the excavation of a Roman domus under the Basilica of Our Lady of Tongeren that presents a man carrying a set of writing tablets, whose beard and hairstyle suggest a date in the Antonine period. The discussion is accompanied by other depictions of writing tablets from Roman Gaul, including one from Évreux which shows a child writing with a stylus on a tablet.

Part III is a catalogue of all tablets and related wooden objects found in Tongeren, the first section of which presents 37 tablets with traces of writing or symbols, with text, translation, commentary, and interpretation by Jürgen Blänsdorf and Markus Scholz.

Part IV, Reflexions, offers a chapter interpreting the tablets as evidence for public institutions, broadly understood. The authors, Marie-Thérese Raepsaet-Charlier and Georges Raepsaet, base their discussion on readings that at times diverge from those presented in the catalogue, in which case they provide their text and translation in a footnote. As a result, the catalogue texts of Blänsdorf and Scholz serve as an editio princeps, while those in the Reflexions section become something like a re-edition or alternative edition. This unusual arrangement is extended to the index of personal names which combines the readings of both editions, which are distinguished by roman type font for those of Blänsdorf and Scholz and italics for those of Raepsaet-Charlier and Raepsaet. Even if unconventional, the editorial decision to present both editions under one cover certainly has its advantages, but it should perhaps have been more clearly articulated in the introduction to the volume.

Notes:

[1] Michael Alexander Speidel: Die römischen Schreibtafeln von Vindonissa - Lateinische Texte des militärischen Alltags und ihre geschichtliche Bedeutung, Brugg 1996.

[2] Anna Willi: Manual of Roman Everyday Writing Volume 2: Writing Equipment, Nottingham 2021, esp. 38-41.