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1,070 writing tablets69 have survived from the ancient world—coincidentally a quantity proportional to the number of surviving bookrolls and early pa- pyrus and parchment codices.
Bookrolls having been the standard format of the book for 2000 years, the question remains why the transition from the bookroll to the codex occurred during the final centuries of the Roman Empire. The assumption, based on the existence of early Christian documents in papyrus and parchment codex form, has been that the transition from the roll to the codex was promoted by early Christians. While the evidence certainly points in this direction, other evidence, more recently considered, suggests that “romanization” may also have been a factor. Both the Greeks and the Romans used wooden tab- lets for relatively short documents such as legal documents, and papyrus rolls or bookrolls for longer documents. These tablets, sometimes coated with wax, were frequently tied together in the form of diptychs and triptychs, or if more than three tablets were tied together, polyptychs. The names for these tablets tied together are, of course, Greek. As mentioned, examples of tablets survive from ancient Greece and from the Roman Empire. From the Byzantine empire, which blended Greek, Roman and Christian traditions, examples of diptychs have survived with deluxe commemorative bindings of carved ivory. One of the oldest surviving tablets is a Greek example in bronze, with writing in Greek/Phoenician, dating from near the origin of the written Greek language, circa 800 BCE. (Schøyen Collection MS 108). This is part of the oldest surviving book in codex form, which is believed to have originally consisted of at least five tablets.70 Examples of later ancient tablets (Latin: tabulae) with holes punched for tying together, along with a set of nine tablets tied together, are illustrated in the third edition of Wil- helm Schubart’s Das Buch bei den Griechen und Roemern (1961), p. 29. That the writing on wooden tablets was often done by a stylus in wax, making the writing easily changeable or erasable, led to the reasonable assumption that
69 Meyer, Legitimacy and Law in the Roman World: Tabulae in Roman Belief and Practice (2004) 23.
70 Another tablet originally bound with the Schoyen example was published by A. Henbeck,
“The Würzburger Alphabettafel,” Würzburger Jahrbücher für Altertumswissenschaf, 12 (1986): 7-20
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