For two millennia, some 400 wooden tablets, some of them incised with writing, lay under the mud of a tributary of the Thames in London. Between 2010 and 2014 they were excavated by a Museum of London team; the writing was then decoded by papyrologist Dr Roger Tomlin, and finally published this week. What Dr Tomlin has been able to reveal are some of the very oldest documents in Britain’s history, including the earliest surviving use of the word London, from the first decade after the Roman conquest of AD43.
The tablets, which date from between AD55 and 85, were originally covered in wax, and the text – accounts, letters, memoranda – was scratched into them with a stylus. The wax could be wiped over and the tablet reused. None of the wax survives: what remain are the marks made when a writer pressed hard with the stylus, scratching into the wood behind. Sometimes there is more than one layer of scratching, creating a complex palimpsest. The tablets have been described as Roman emails, but they are more like Roman metadata.
The task that Dr Tomlin undertook was delicate, specialised, and painstaking. The incisions were made in Latin – not in the beautifully legible script of Roman inscriptions but a messy cursive. Dr Tomlin has also wrestled with unimaginably fragmentary texts, full of obliterated letters and damaged passages. His work is as much a job of reconstruction as translation – a reconstruction that requires superb linguistic skills, a vast knowledge of Roman written culture, and a generous historical empathy, not to mention highly developed skills in logic and cruciverbalism. Were it 1939, one feels he would be immediately recruited to Bletchley Park (as a crack team of classicists indeed was, including fellow papyrologist Alfred Dillwyn “Dilly” Knox, one of the most important contributors to the cracking of Enigma).
What do these documents tell us? When WH Auden wrote his poem Roman Wall Blues in 1937, material like these documents – for example, the vast cache of first-century AD letters and documents known as the Vindolanda tablets – had not yet come to light. The poet imagined a soldier stranded on Hadrian’s wall, lonely, isolated and, above all, freezing. “Over the heather the wet wind blows/ I’ve lice in my tunic and a cold in my nose.” What the London tablets tell us is something rather different. Britain was on the unruly edge of the empire, and nearly lost to Rome, indeed, during the Boudiccan revolt of AD60/61 that saw Londoners on the run or slaughtered.
But it was also busy, connected and full of people on the make. Contracts were being struck, favours asked, debts called in. Tertius was brewing his beer. Intervinaris was writing to London from the legionary base at Wroxeter in Shropshire. Florentius, a slave, was composing a letter on behalf of his master confirming that he had received the payments from the farm. Someone was noting that Crispus owed, or was owed, five denarii for beer. (The word for beer, a favourite tipple of the ancient Celts, is “cervesa”, familiar to anyone who has holidayed in Spain.) It is all deeply ordinary: no great literary flourishes. But these broken signals from the past bring us, just for a fleeting moment, close to a distant world – the world of those who ruled Britannia for 400 years of these islands’ history.
