Page 136 - Virtual Research Lab flip book

tabulae were used primarily for temporary jottings or note-taking rather than permanent or important documents:
Ultimately, as its etymology indicates, the codex book evolved from wooden tablets, often with wax-filled compartments, used in ancient Rome for more or less ephemeral jottings and figur- ings. A group of such tablets, tied or hinged together, was known as a caudex / codex, a word originally indicating a tree trunk or block of wood (and, in Terence, a blockhead). At some stage be- fore the Christian era folded parchments (membranae) came to be used for the same ephemeral purposes, and then were eventually adopted for permanent storage of written matter, even literary texts; and by the third century A.D. the term “codex” had be- come assimilated also to these non-wooden objects (Needham, Twelve Centuries of Bookbindings 400-1600 [1979], p. 4).
The assumption that the Romans used tabulae primarily for temporary jottings or notes seems to have influenced efforts to understand elements of this transition in the form and function of the book. Yet examples of tabulae used for legal documents have survived. A diptych dated 198 CE in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, “contains the appointment of a guardian for a woman by the prefect of Egypt. The main body of the text inscribed on the wax is in Latin, followed by a subscription written in Greek by an aman- uensis on behalf of the woman, who was illiterate. On the outside there are copies of these sections and a list of the names of seven witnesses, all written in ink directly on the wood. The diptych was originally tied shut and sealed with the seals of the witnesses to prevent tampering with the inner text, the authenticated version, while the exterior text remained available for con- sultation” (R. W. Hunt, The Survival of the Classics [1975], no. 32.) The use of seven witnesses attesting to the validity of the written document may reflect the continuation of the tradition originating with the first written contracts in fourth century Greece (discussed in section 2.B), in which oral witnesses to a written agreement were given weight equal to or greater than the written agreement itself.
136