Vindolanda tablets

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The Vindolanda tablets are a complex of finds from the Vindolanda fort , a former Roman military camp , the crew of which was used for security and surveillance tasks in the hinterland of Hadrian's Wall in Great Britain . The wooden tablets were used as writing material and, at the time of their discovery, were the oldest surviving handwritten documents in Great Britain (they were replaced by the Bloomberg tablets in 2010 ).

The documents record, among other things, official military affairs, but also personal messages between the soldiers and their families and slaves. Payments made to the Principia are mentioned, grain deliveries are confirmed, groceries such as wine and goat's milk are mentioned, beer is requested, shoe purchases are accounted for and items of clothing are ordered. The request for a recommendation to a superior has also been received. The surviving daily reports and a description of British combat tactics are also of great importance. Almost all of the unearthed tablets are in the British Museum , few are in Vindolanda itself. In 2010, 752 tablets were translated and published, but some are still being found in Vindolanda.

Manufacture and use

Blackboard No. 343, Letter from Octavius ​​to Candidus about grain supplies

In the course of several excavation campaigns from 1973 onwards, over a thousand mostly fragmented wooden tablets containing letters of various kinds written in Latin were recovered . They offer papyrology and palaeography valuable information on ancient writing and the development of Latin cursive , classical philology and Latin linguistics for the development of colloquial Latin , so-called Vulgar Latin , and the history of the Roman army , everyday and provincial history . There are files from everyday military service in the garrison that contain lists of provisions and troop movements, but combat operations are also reported. In addition, there are over a hundred official service letters and private correspondence from individual soldiers. Other letters belong in the vicinity of the camp village and come from traders and soldiers' wives. The tables, first published from 1983 onwards, cover the period between 85 and 130 AD. The focus is on the years 92 and 103 AD, when the 9th Batavian cohort was stationed here. Perhaps their commanders had all the documents that had become useless destroyed before they left for the Dacian War in AD 105.

The thin tablets are relatively standardized and have an average size of around 20 × 9 centimeters. Mostly made of alder wood , more rarely from birch , they are written in ink . If more than one tablet was necessary to accommodate what was to be written , two ( diptych ) or more ( polyptych ) of them were combined into a fanfold , as is usual with the more widespread wax tablets . Books of this kind have survived in some other cases, even as carriers of literary texts. When discovered, the writing usually faded immediately. In order to make them legible again, the tablets first had to be soaked in alcohol and ether for preservation and then photographed in infrared light. Alan K. Bowman noted that the texts were in italics . This could only be deciphered with the help of specialists such as the papyrologist J. David Thomas , as the letter shapes - especially those that occur frequently such as s , p , t , i - were almost indistinguishable.

In addition to the wooden tablets, the remains of wax tablets (Tabula cerata) were found during the excavations, the remains of which can be found throughout the Roman Empire. The wax had already passed in Vindolanda, so that only scratch marks from the stylus were left on the wooden base of the tablets. It is a great challenge to decipher these scratch marks.

Cohors IX Batavorum

The Cohors IX Batavorum is documented by several boards for the Vindolanda location. Table II / 155 shows that on April 25 of an indefinite year 343 men of the unit were assigned to work in a fabrica ; among them were 12 shoemakers and 18 construction workers for the bathhouse.

Cohors I Tungrorum

An interesting document is a strength report of the Cohors I Tungrorum milliaria (1st double cohort of the Tungrians , 1000 men) from May 18th in an unspecified year at the end of the first century AD. It gives an insight into the everyday life of a Roman auxiliary unit. The total strength of the troops under the command of the cohort prefect (Praefectus cohortis) Julius Verecundus is given in the file as 752 men including their officers, with 456 soldiers assigned to various commands. Thus there were still 296 men under a centurion in Vindolanda, of which around ten percent (31 soldiers) were written unfit for duty: 15 were sick (aegri) , six were wounded (volnerati) and ten suffered from eye infections (lippientes) . Even at full strength, the cohort had only six centurions. Of the externally assigned men, 46 had been handed over to a certain Ferox (officio Ferocis) as guard riders for the governor (singulares legati) . The person with the cognomen Ferox remains in the dark, but they must have held an important, high-ranking position. At least two personalities of this time are nicknamed Ferox: C. Pompeius Ferox Licianus (alias Ferox Licianus?), A courtier and garden owner at the time of Emperor Domitian (81–96) and Cn. Pompey Ferox, suffect consul of the year 98, who may be the same as the named person. He and Ti. Julius Ferox, consul-designate of the year 99, whom Pliny praised in the highest tones, could be identical to the Ferox present in Britain. 337 other members of the Tungrian cohort were posted to Coria ( Corbridge ) with two or three centurions , and one centurion was staying in Londinium ( London ). The tasks of the other absent soldiers, who were on their way to units of 6, 9, 11 and 45 men, can no longer be determined. The number of soldiers in this cohort, which deviates from the classic scheme, suggests that they have just been increased from a simple cohort Cohors quingennaria (500 men) to a double cohort Cohors milliaria (1000 men). Another interpretation calls into question the classic image of the "one castle - one unit" theory.

Edition

  • Alan K. Bowman , David Thomas: Vindolanda. The Latin writing tablets. (Britannia monograph series 4). Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies, London 1983, ISBN 0-907764-02-9
  • Alan Bowman, David Thomas, The Vindolanda Writing Tablets (tabulae Vindolandenses II). British Museum Press, London 1994, ISBN 0-7141-2300-5
  • Alan K. Bowman, John David Thomas: The Vindolanda writing-tablets. (= tabulae Vindolandenses III), British Museum Press, London 2003, ISBN 0-7141-2249-1 .

literature

  • Alan K. Bowman: Life and letters on the Roman frontier: Vindolanda and its people. British Museum Press, London 1998, ISBN 0-415-92024-8 .
  • Alan K. Bowman: The Roman Writing Tablets from Vindolanda. British Museum, London 1983, ISBN 0-7141-1373-5 .
  • Anthony R. Birley : Vindolanda: The everyday life in a border fortress in Britain at the beginning of the 2nd century AD. In: Wilhelm G. Busse (Ed.): Castle and palace as places to live in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. (= Studia Humaniora. Volume 26). Düsseldorf 1995, pp. 9-18.
  • Anthony R. Birley: A band of brothers: equestrian officers in the Vindolanda tablets. In: Electrum. 5, 2000, pp. 11-30.
  • Anthony R. Birley: Vindolanda: Notes on some new writing-tablets. In: Journal of Papyrology and Epigraphy . 88, 1991, pp. 87-102.
  • Anthony R. Birley, Robin Birley: Vindolanda: four new writing tablets. In: Journal of Papyrology and Epigraphy. 100, 1994, pp. 431-446.
  • Anthony R. Birley: Vindolanda: new writing-tablets 1986–1989 In: Roman Frontier Studies. 1989 (1991), pp. 16-20.
  • Anthony R. Birley: Vindolanda: New excavations 1985–1986. In: Hermann Vetters , Manfred Kandler (ed.): Files of the 14th International Limes Congress 1986 in Carnuntum. Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna 1990, ISBN 3-7001-1695-0 , pp. 333-340.
  • Anthony R. Birley: The Vindolanda tablets. In: Minerva 1.2, 1990, pp. 8-11.
  • Kasper Grønlund Evers: The Vindolanda Tablets and the Ancient Economy. Archaeopress, Oxford 2006, ISBN 978-1-4073-0842-5 .
  • Melissa Terras: Image to Interpretation: An Intelligent System to Aid Historians in Reading the Vindolanda Texts. Oxford University Press 2006, ISBN 9780199204557 .

Web links

Commons : Vindolanda panels  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Maev Kennedy: cache of Roman letters discovered at Hadrian's Wall. In: The Guardian . July 10, 2017, accessed September 5, 2018 .
  2. ↑ Vindolanda tablets online, No. 343.
  3. ^ Johann Kramer: Vulgar Latin everyday documents on papyri, ostraka, tablets and inscriptions. de Gruyter, Berlin 2007. ISBN 978-3-11-020224-3 . P. 48.
  4. ↑ See Lajos Berkes, Enno Giele , Michael R. Ott with the assistance of Joachim Friedrich Quack : Holz . In: Michael Ott, Thomas Meier u. Rebecca Sauer (Hrsg.): Materiale Textkulturen. Concepts - materials - practices (=  material text cultures ). tape 1 . De Gruyter, Berlin / Boston / Munich 2015, ISBN 978-3-11-037128-4 , pp. 383-395, esp. 384-387 .
  5. ↑ Hartmut Galsterer: Vindolanda . In: Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde 11, de Gruyter, Berlin 2006. ISBN 3-11-018387-0 . P. 424.
  6. ^ The Roman Army: Military Units. Vindolanda Tablets Online, accessed March 13, 2017 .
  7. ↑ Vindolanda tablets online, No. 154.
  8. ↑ Oliver Stoll : Between integration and demarcation: The religion of the Roman army in the Middle East. Studies on the relationship between the army and civilian population in Roman Syria and neighboring areas. Scripta Mercaturae, St. Katharinen 2001. ISBN 3-89590-116-4 . P. 93.
  9. ↑ a b Konrad Stauner: The official written system of the Roman army from Augustus to Gallienus (27 BC-268 AD). An examination of the structure, function and importance of the official military administrative documentation and its writers. Habelt, Bonn 2004. ISBN 978-3-7749-3270-8 . P. 89.
  10. ^ Alan K. Bowman: Life and Letters on the Roman Frontier. Vindolanda and its People. Routledge, New York 1998. ISBN 0415920256 . P. 22.
  11. ^ Alan K. Bowman, John David Thomas: The Vindolanda writing tablets. (= tabulae Vindolandenses 3), British Museum Press, London 2003, ISBN 0714122491 . P. 96.
  12. ^ Lawrence Richardson Jr .: A New Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome. Hopkins, Baltimore, London 1992. ISBN 0-8018-4300-6 . P. 204.
  13. ↑ Monika Frass : Ancient Roman Gardens. Social and economic functions of the Horti Romani. (Graz contributions, Supplement 10), Berger & Söhne, Horn, Vienna 2006. p. 356.
  14. ^ Anthony R. Birley: Officers of the Second Augustan Legion in Britain. In: Richard J. Brewer: The Second Augustan Legion and the Roman Military Machine. National Museum of Wales, Cardiff 2002. ISBN 0-7200-0514-0 . P. 107.
  15. ^ Alan K. Bowman, John David Thomas: The Vindolanda writing tablets. (= tabulae Vindolandenses 3), British Museum Press, London 2003, ISBN 0714122491 . P. 93; Alan K. Bowman: Life and Letters on the Roman Frontier. Vindolanda and its People. Routledge, New York 1998. ISBN 0415920256 . P. 23.