Ancient "notebook"
The making of a wax tablet from beeswax
Find chiselled beechwood and fill it with wax! This is the way a Roman wax tablet was made. Of course, the real making of an ancient writing tool is not quite that easy … The images show how the writing tablets are produced in a complex sequence.
The Roman wax tablet (lat. tabula cerata) usually has a rectangular shape, and the hollowed central field of the wooden tablet is filled with coloured beeswax. Romans wrote into the soot-coloured wax with a stylus (lat. stilus), carving letters with the pointed end of the stylus into the wax. The lighter wood then shone through the scratches, so that the writing could be clearly read. We owe to this fact a huge number of Latin inscriptions on the insides of the tablets, inscriptions that resulted from erroneously carving too deep into the wax. The wax could be smoothed using the back end of the stylus to write again on its surface.
Our ancient forefathers often bound several writing tablets into a booklet, resulting in a diptychon (two tablets) or a polyptichon (several tablets). A special writing tablet, the polyptycha, was also called a codex by the Romans. Romans and Greeks used the wax writing tablets for notes (lat. pugillares), letters and even contracts (lat. contractus) – even sealing their contents.
Wax tablets were also used for practising writing during school lessons, because the text could always be erased with the flattened back of the stylus. From this originates, by the way, the term 'tabula rasa': 'erased tablet'.
