The Greatest Treasure

      The TV show Meet the Anscestors had a special episode (yah, it was on BBC Television... a favorite cable channel of mine...) called "Our Top Ten Treasures"--British experts voted on the most important treasures found in Britain. Among the top ten treasures  was a chess set from around 1150 A.D., a solid ceremonial gold cape from 1900-1600 B.C., and a gold cup from about 1700-1500 B.C. 



 Some of the Vindolanda Tablets--Britain's Greatest Treasure

   
    The Greatest treasure, however, was the Vindolanda Tablets--they are estimated to have been written in the late first century A.D. They are considered the oldest surviving handwritten documents in Britain. They are wooden tablets with ink on them. They were made from birch, alder, and oak--there are nearly 500 of these, though most of them are broken and somewhat indecipherable.

      So, basically, I just want to highlight some of the most interesting tablets found in the Vindalonda Tablets and what we learn from them.

The Roman Calendar

Epigraphy: the study of inscriptions, found on buildings, altars, bricks, plaques or tablets of various materials, tiles, mosaics, pottery--anything you can think of that people write on

From the first three centuries of the Roman Republic (500-200 B.C.), relatively few inscriptions survive. There is no way of knowing what type of role and how big writing/inscribing things played in Romans' lives at that time, but we can assume that what we do have only represents a small fraction of what they used. Ancient literature we have today refers to other works of literature and inscriptions that no longer exist, so it's easy to imagine that we have a limited portion of what ancient people had.

"An impressive variety of texts," however, has survived from the centuries that followed (200-100 B.C.)1 . We have many more inscriptions from this particular time period in the Roman Republic, including calendars!