IOUs, a note to a brewer, and the earliest handwritten document known from Britain — these are among the 405, nearly 2,000-year-old Roman waxed writing tablets archaeologists have unearthed and ...

Luisa Duarte, a conservator for the Museum of London, holds a piece of wood with the Roman alphabet written on it in London on June 1, 2016 Luisa Duarte, a conservator for the Museum of London, holds ...

Fragment of a Neo-Assyrian tablet preserving wax, in the British Museum. (The Trustees of the British Museum) The writing boards excavated from Nimrud (modern Iraq) represent the first material ...

Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story: Roman officials in modern-day Belgium once tossed old wooden frames used for wax writing tablets into a well to make sure nobody could read what was ...

(CNN) At first glance they appear to be ordinary planks of wood marked with random scratches. But archeologists say they're some of the oldest handwritten documents ever found in Britain -- and they ...

Wax tablets were among the oldest writing media, and scientists have recently uncovered the secrets of their technology. In Ancient Rome, if you needed to write a letter, you wouldn't reach for ...

Molten wax was applied to tablets using a spatula (right), and a decorated stylus (left) was used to inscribe text in it.(Courtesy © MOLA) The largest and most ...

Katy has a BA in Humanities and Philosophy, with over 20 years of experience in online and print publishing. She was named the Association of British Science Writers' Editor of the Year in 2023. Katy ...