Making a Roman Wax Tablet: Writing Like a Roman

When we think about Roman artifacts, it's usually the big things that get our attention. Helmets, swords, shields, armor, and pottery tend to dominate museum displays and living history camps. But sometimes the simplest objects give us the best connection to the people who actually lived two thousand years ago. One of my favorites is the Roman wax writing tablet. At first glance, there really isn't much to it. It's essentially a small wooden board with the center carved away, leaving a shallow recess surrounded by a raised wooden frame. That recess was filled with darkened beeswax, and a pointed stylus was used to scratch words into the surface. Simple as it sounds, tablets like these carried everything from accounts and military business to legal agreements and personal messages. They were essentially the Roman equivalent of a reusable notebook, and making one today is a surprisingly easy way to understand how Romans communicated.

Start With a Piece of Wood

The first thing you'll need is a relatively thin piece of wood. Original Roman tablets vary considerably in size and construction, so there isn't one universal set of measurements that has to be followed. Archaeological examples from London and Vindolanda show rectangular wooden tablets with a raised border surrounding a recessed writing area. Some were single tablets, while others could be tied together as pairs or sets, protecting the writing when they were closed. To reproduce one, start by marking a border around the outside of your piece of wood. From there, the center needs to be carefully carved out, leaving a shallow depression while keeping the outer frame intact. You don't need to make the recess particularly deep. The purpose isn't to create a tray full of wax. You only need enough depth for a thin writing surface while leaving the wooden border slightly higher than the wax. If you're doing this entirely by hand, carving the recess is probably the most time-consuming part of the project, but that's also part of the experience. Once you begin working the wood yourself, you start appreciating how much effort went into something we might otherwise dismiss as an everyday object.

Now Comes the Wax

Once the wooden tablet is carved and smoothed, it's time to make the writing surface. For a living history reproduction, beeswax is the place to start. The literary evidence specifically identifies beeswax with writing tablets, and analysis of Roman examples supports its use. Roman wax wasn't necessarily left its natural yellow color, either. Most writing wax appears to have been deliberately darkened. That contrast was important. When a stylus scratched through the dark surface, the lighter material beneath became visible, making the writing easier to read. For a reproduction, you can gently melt beeswax and mix in a small amount of finely powdered charcoal or carbon black. Modern black artist's pigment can also give you the effect you're looking for, although finely ground charcoal or soot brings you closer to the ancient materials described by Roman authors. (To make the wax a little more forgiving for continued use, a small amount of olive oil can be mixed in too making the wax a little softer and less crumbly). This isn't just speculation. Vitruvius and Pliny the Elder both describe the production of atramentum, a black carbon pigment made using soot from burned resin and other materials. Ovid even refers directly to wax being poured into prepared tablets. Archaeological study of the London writing tablets likewise indicates that beeswax was commonly blackened with carbon pigment. Once the pigment is thoroughly mixed into the melted wax, carefully pour a thin layer into the recessed portion of the tablet and allow it to cool.

Now you have a Roman notebook.

Writing With a Stylus

Instead of a pen, a wax tablet was written on with a stylus, usually a narrow pointed instrument of metal, bone, or another hard material. The pointed end scratched letters into the wax. Many styli had a flattened opposite end that could be used to smooth the wax again when you wanted to erase something. That's what made the tablet so useful. Write your message, read it, smooth the surface, and use the tablet again. Ovid gives us a wonderful glimpse of this everyday practice in his Amores. He describes sending messages on wax tablets and even complains about receiving an unwelcome response on one. Elsewhere he refers to wax being poured onto prepared tablets. These casual references are important because they show that wax tablets weren't unusual pieces of specialized equipment. They were simply part of everyday Roman life.

The Tablets That Survived

This is where the story gets really interesting. At Vindolanda, the Roman fort just south of Hadrian's Wall, archaeologists have recovered two different kinds of writing tablets. The famous Vindolanda letters were mostly written in ink on extremely thin pieces of wood, almost like wooden postcards. These preserve military reports, supply requests, accounts, invitations, and personal correspondence from people living along Rome's northern frontier around AD 100. The British Museum notes that more than 1,800 wooden tablets are now known from the site. But Vindolanda has also produced more than 340 wax stylus tablets. These are thicker pieces of wood with recessed areas that originally held wax. In most cases the wax disappeared long ago, but sometimes the writer pressed hard enough with the stylus to scratch the wood underneath. Modern imaging techniques can then help scholars recover traces of writing that haven't been read for nearly two thousand years. Even more remarkably, one recently studied Vindolanda stylus tablet preserves part of a deed of sale for an enslaved person, showing that these seemingly simple objects could carry important legal transactions as well as everyday notes.

London's Wooden Paper Trail

Some of our best evidence for wax tablets comes from Roman London. Excavations at the Bloomberg site uncovered 405 wax writing tablets, largely dating to the first century AD. More than eighty readable texts reveal an incredibly busy young city filled with merchants, soldiers, freedmen, enslaved people, craftsmen, and government officials. One document records a financial transaction dated January 8, AD 57, while another records an agreement from AD 62 involving the transportation of twenty loads of provisions from Verulamium, modern St Albans, to London. These aren't grand speeches written by emperors. They're business records and everyday documents left behind by ordinary people trying to get things done.

That's what makes them so valuable.

A Simple Project With a Big Story

Making a wax tablet isn't particularly difficult. You need a piece of wood, some basic carving tools, beeswax, a little carbon pigment, and a stylus. But once it's finished, you have something much more useful than another object sitting on a display table. Hand it to a visitor, and have them write their name in Latin. Let a student scratch a message into the wax and then erase it with the back of the stylus. Suddenly you're not simply explaining Roman literacy anymore. You're letting someone experience the same basic technology used by people at Vindolanda and Londinium nearly two thousand years ago and that's exactly what I love about living history. Sometimes it isn't the armor or the sword that creates the strongest connection with the past.

Sometimes it's a small piece of wood, a little beeswax, and someone's name scratched into it.

Legio XIIII, Protinus!