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Roman wax tablet with three styli (modern reproduction)

A wax tablet (tabula) is a tablet made of wood and covered with a layer of wax. It was used as a reusable and portable writing surface in Antiquity and throughout the Middle Ages. Cicero's letters make passing reference to their use, and some examples of wax-tablets have been preserved in waterlogged deposits in the Roman fort at Vindolanda on Hadrian's Wall. Medieval wax tablet books are on display in several European museums.

Writing was performed with a pointed instrument, a stylus. A straight-edged implement would be used in a razor-like fashion to re-smoothen the surface, before next use. The modern expression, of "a clean slate" is related to the Latin expression "tabula rasa".

Wax tablets were used for a variety of purposes, from students' or secretaries' notes to recording business accounts. Early forms of shorthand were used too.

Roman scribe with his stylus and tablets on his tomb stele at Flavia Solva in Noricum

The first appearance of writing tablets in written Greek appears in Homer— the single 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 letter", with its message sealed within the folded tablets: "Kill the bearer of this". The written tablets are an anachronism in a narrative of an event that is meant to have transpired generations before the Trojan War, and incidentally help date the earliest possible recension of the epic that we read to the mid-eighth century.

The Greeks inherited the folding pair of wax tablets, along with the leather scroll and the Phoenician alphabet, in the mid-eighth century. Their word for the tablet, deltos, has even retained its Semitic designation, daltu, which originally signified "door" but was being used for writing tablets in Ugarit in the thirteenth century BCE (Burkert 1992:30). In Hebrew the term evolved into daleth. Writing tablets were in use in Mesopotamia as well as Syria and Palestine: "the find of one exemplar in the fourteenth-century wreck at Ulu Burun near Kaş, Turkey, is considered sensational, even if no trace of the writing for which it was used is preserved." (Burkert 1992:30) Writing tablets of ivory have appeared in the ruins of Sargon's palace in Nimrud and were also in use in medieval times, as a sort of practical luxury articles.

A remarkable example of a wax tablet book are the servitude records which the hospital of Austria's oldest city, Enns, established in 1500. Ten wooden plates, sized 375 x 207 mm and arranged in a 90 mm stack, are each divided into two halves along their long axis. The annual payables due are written on parchment or paper glued to the left sides. Payables received were recorded for deduction (and subsequently erased) on the respective right sides, which are covered with brownish-black writing wax. The material is based on beeswax, and contains 5-10% plant oils and carbon pigments; its melting point is about 65 °C. This volume is the continuation of an earlier one, which was begun in 1447.

Wax tablets were used for high-volume business records of transient importance until the 19th century. For instance, the salt mining authority at Schwäbisch Hall employed wax records until 1812, and the fish market in Rouen used them until the 1860s.^{citation needed}

References

• Burkert, Walter, 1992.The Orientalizing Revolution: Near Eastern Influences on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Age (Harvard University Press), pp 29ff.
• Galling, K., 1971. "Tafel, Buch und Blatt" in Near Eastern Studies in Honour of W.F. Albright (Baltimore), pp 207-23.
• Wilflingseder, F., 1964. "Die Urbare des Ennser Bürgerspitals aus den Jahren 1447 und 1500." Biblos 13, 134-45.
• Büll, R., 1977. "Das große Buch vom Wachs." Vol. 2, 785-894

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