Vindolanda Tablets

The Vindolanda Tablets originate from the Roman fort of Vindolanda, which was situated South of Hadrian's Wall.1 A garrison occupied the fort of Vindolanda from the first century AD to the eventual abandonment of the Northern British frontier over three centuries later. The tablets themselves were written on postcard-size sheets of Birch, Alder and Oak. Each tablet was then folded and scored down the middle to form diptychs. Writing was recorded on the inner sides of these diptychs using an ink made up of Carbon, Gum Arabic and Water.2 The Vindolanda Tablets were originally thought to be wood shaving, but then were opened to reveal text on the inner faces. Tablet 155: Tablet 155 is a military report which shows the number of 'immunes' employed in the Roman workshops. The tablet itself shows that on the 25th of April, 343 men in total were employed; 12 men were employed as builders for a bath-house and 18 for lead related occupations. The others were either employed as shoemakers, plasterers, in the hospital, alongside wagons, in the kilns, with tents, clay, or rubble. We can assume that a 'Tribuni Angusticlavii' or a career officer (who served many of the important administrative tasks of the Legion, but still served in a full tactical command function during engagements.3) either received or sent this communication. Tablet 164: Tablet 164 only contains six lines of text, which describe the fighting style of the native Britons at the time. The brevity of the tablet leads to the possibility of a larger text of which this tablet is part of. The best assumption is that Tablet 164 is a military memorandum written by an exploratores (speculatores) scouting the surroundings of the fort. This memorandum would then in turn be passed on to a commanding officer or 'Legatus Legionis' Though this could just be a draft of a note written for a successor by a commanding officer. 1

This paper provides an overview of the Roman military correspondence on papyrus, ostrakon and tablet.The first part presents the four main corpora of Roman official military letters (the Vindolanda tablets, the ostraka from the Eastern Desert of Egypt, the Dura Europos papyri and the ostraka from BuNjem) and the second one deals about the mail management and transportation on the basis of epistolary documentation. A final section collects the main official letters dealing about military topics.

Когда я писал эту небольшую статью, я не знал, что, оказывается, первым написал о сходстве (и различиях) между древнерусскими берестяными грамотами и скандинавскими руническими стержнями А.А. Зализняк (Зализняк А.А. Бытовая письменность в древней Руси и в средневековой Скандинавии // Славянские языки в зеркале неславянского окружения: Тезисы междунар. конф., 20–22 февраля 1996 г., Москва. М., 1996. С. 21–24). Благодарю А.А. Гиппиуса за эту историографическую подсказку.
The paper is an attempt at search of material to be compared with the Old Rus (mainly Novgorodian) birchbark documents of the 11th-15th centuries. It is looked for among large complexes of everyday documents found by archaeologists, such as texts from Uruk, Vindolanda, or Bergen. It is argued that neither mass documents of the Roman Empire (from Vindolanda and so on), nor clay tablets from Ancient Near East are ananogies in strict sense. In the former case we deal with a much more advanced stage of the proliferation of writing. In the latter case the administrative function of writing is much more developed than in early Rus, but it is practically the only function, while the Rus already in the 11th centure used writing for a variety of purposes. The only close analogy, thus, are the everyday runic texts from Scandinavia (runesticks of Bergen and simiar texts from other Scandinavian sites).