Wax Tablet - Use in Antiquity

Use in Antiquity

The first appearance of writing tablets in written Greek appears in Homer— an Homeric example in which writing is referred to — in the narrated tale of Bellerophon (Iliad vi.155–203) which introduces the trope of the "fatal" or "Bellerophontic" letter, with its message sealed within the folded tablets: "Kill the bearer of this". Other examples of early writing survived through Parallel Lives of Plutarch and Hyginus (Fabulae):

In Plutarch's "Theseus", the women of Cyprus tried to comfort Ariadne; they brought her a forged "love letter" purporting written by Theseus. Plutarch goes on to describe how Theseus erected a pillar on the Isthmus of Corinth, which bears an inscription of two lines. One towards the East, i.e. towards Attica reading:

τάδ᾽ οὐχὶ Πελοπόννησος, ἀλλ᾽ Ἰωνία "Here is not Peloponnesus, but Ionia"

and the one towards the West, i.e. towards the Peloponnese:

τάδ᾽ ἐστὶ Πελοπόννησος, οὐκ Ἰωνία "Here is Peloponnesus, not Ionia".

Hyginus recounts of a letter presumably sent to Palamedes from Priam but in fact written by Odysseus. Before the decipherment of Linear B by Michael Ventris, the written tablets in the Iliad were considered an anachronism. The earliest surviving exemplar of a boxwood writing tablet with an ivory hinge was among the finds recovered from the 14th c. BCE Uluburun Shipwreck near Kaş in Turkey in 1986. This find further confirmed that the reference to writing tablets in Homer was far from anachronistic.

The Greeks probably started using the folding pair of wax tablets, along with the leather scroll in the mid-eighth century BCE. Liddell & Scott, 1925 edition gives the etymology of the word for the writing-tablet, deltos (δέλτος), from the letter delta (Δ) based on ancient Greek and Roman authors and scripts, due to the shape of tablets to account for it. An alternative theory holds that it has retained its Semitic designation, daltu, which originally signified "door" but was being used for writing tablets in Ugarit in the thirteenth century BCE. In Hebrew the term evolved into daleth.

In the first millennium BCE writing tablets were in use in Mesopotamia as well as Syria and Palestine. A carved stone panel dating to between 640-615 BCE that was excavated from the South-West Palace of the Assyrian ruler Sennacherib, at Nineveh in Iraq (British Museum, ME 124955) depicts two figures, one clearly clasping a scroll and the other bearing what is thought to be an open diptych. Berthe van Regemorter identified a similar figure in the Neo-Hittite Stela of Tarhunpiyas (Musée du Louvre, AO 1922.), dating to the late 8th century BCE, who is seen holding what may be a form of tablature with a unique button closure. Writing tablets of ivory were found in the ruins of Sargon's palace in Nimrud. Margaret Howard surmised that these tablets might have once been connected together using an ingenious hinging system with cut pieces of leather resembling the letter “H” inserted into slots along the edges to form a concertina structure.