At first sight, hardly anything connects these technologies. Wax boards are made of a beeswax-based paste poured into a wooden frame, paper and pencil of plant fibers and graphite, and a modern tablet of electronic components. From a functional perspective, however, they share a fundamental characteristic: they all allow writing without ink, and the erasing and re-inscribing of written text as much as is desired.

In other words, they are all excellent technology for situations requiring frequent correction of or addition to texts, especially if working outdoors. In the case of wax boards, this is achieved by using a stylus to scratch (or impress) marks in a layer of beeswax, most commonly mixed with a mineral pigment (and sometimes further additives) in order to optimize its mechanical and optical properties. The marks can be erased simply by passing a spatula over them (hence the phrase ‘wiping the slate clean’), thereby allowing for immediate re-inscription of the surface. It is no coincidence, therefore, that, throughout history, wax boards and paper and pencil have been the privileged media particularly in schools, bureaucracy, commerce, and the process of literary creation – precisely the contexts where tablet computers are most used today.

Sappho fresco from Pompeii. Sappho holds a stylus and four waxed boards. Ca. 55-79 CE.

While many are familiar with the so-called Sappho from a Pompeii fresco, not everybody knows that wax boards were born in Mesopotamia and count among the great inventions of the cuneiform world. Indeed, the earliest attestations of the use of writing boards are found in Sumerian cuneiform tablets dating back to the Ur III period in the later third millennium BCE.

The invention of wax boards was likely triggered by two factors that represent advantages of wax over clay, namely the possibility of adding text to an existing document over an extended period of time, and the ease of transport over long distances. One of the earliest excavated examples was from the Late Bronze Age Ulu Burun shipwreck off the southwest coast of Turkey and wax tablets were later used widely in the Greek and Roman world. Egyptian examples even preserve writing exercises while in Europe, they were used until the beginning of the 19th century!

A Greek writing exercise from Egypt, 2nd century AD: Image Details

Wax boards enjoyed growing popularity in the cuneiform cultures of Mesopotamia, Anatolia, and the Levant, with a peak during the first millennium BCE in the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian periods. They were used for a range of different text genres, both documentary and literary, and were inscribed primarily in cuneiform script, secondarily for linear scripts like Anatolian hieroglyphs and Aramaic. The boards were of variable dimensions, and often multiple “leaves” were assembled into board-books, to be considered as the precursor of the modern book.

The boards from the Palace of Sennacherib at Nimrud represent the only example where a portion of the inscribed wax layer is preserved. It consists of beeswax compounded with ca. 25% orpiment (As₂S₃, arsenic sulfide), which gives the paste a wonderful golden colour. Neo-Babylonian temple accounts, on the other hand, suggest that in everyday boards beeswax was mixed with yellow ochre (Akkadian kalû). Overall, a high degree of variability has to be assumed for wax paste technology in the ancient Near East, similar to what is observed for later periods, intended to adjust for color, texture, and ambient temperature.

Since wedges are produced simply by impressing a squared tip into a moist surface, the same stylus can be used to write cuneiform both on clay and wax. Still, iconographical sources reveal a curious difference in the appearance and handling of the styli connected with wax boards as compared to those used for clay tablets. While both are of rectangular or trapezoidal shape, styli for wax boards display what resembles a longitudinal line or groove, whereas styli for clay tablets do not. Since both kinds of styli are intended for cuneiform script, the difference must be related to the use of wax as opposed to clay as writing surface. The groove may have been for the release of a pigment, a substance preventing the stylus from sticking to the wax, or a substance that softened the wax while impressing wedges.

The “grooved stylus” in the belt of king Assurbanipal and in writing scenes from Neo-Assyrian wall panels at Nineveh (BM 124876 & BM 124956, © The Trustees of the British Museum; Glasgow, Burrell Collection 28.33).

These hypotheses become even more stimulating when one considers a letter to Assurbanipal written by the scholars of Babylon in response to the king’s request for scholarly cuneiform texts. Here a reference to date syrup, ghee, and pressed sesame oil is found in fragmentary context following the mention of “seventy-two writing-boards of sissoo-wood.” Intriguingly, the ingredients are intended for “soaking” writing styli in a kettle. Are we to imagine a scribe repeatedly dipping the stylus in the oily mixture while writing? If so, what purpose did the substance serve and is it related to the above-mentioned “groove”?

Mixing ingredients to obtain the ideal wax paste for cuneiform script, and a look at the results (Cuneiform Lab at the Martin von Wagner Museum of Würzburg University, Dec 2016, photo by Miron Sevastre).

In our “WoW! Writing on Wax” project, we investigated the technology of wax boards with an interdisciplinary approach involving Assyriology, Chemistry, and Chemistry Teaching. The analysis of the philological and archaeological evidence has been combined with experimental reconstructions as well as with the development of two pedagogical programs for sixth-grade schoolchildren. By acting as researchers, the children experience important aspects of science, such as the need for preliminary exploration of the method, the difficulties of matching hypothesis and experiment, the importance of accuracy in documentation, but also – and most importantly – the fun of discovery!

It turned out that while any stylus with a squared tip is suited for impressing wedges, under certain conditions of temperature and composition of the wax paste the use of an oil-based release agent is necessary in order to prevent the stylus from sticking to the wax surface and disrupting the contours of the wedges. This practice, to which the above-mentioned Babylonian letter seemingly hints, may have triggered the custom of engraving lines (or patterns) on wax-related styli in order to increase the fingers’ grip on the shaft, and even possibly of carving a groove to optimize the flow of the release agent. And what about the puzzling iconography of the “grooved stylus”? Perhaps it is nothing more than a clever motif, symbolizing a wax diptych in profile view.

A number of bronze styli with pointed tip and a spatula at the back end, recovered in various Bronze Age sites in Anatolia, show that Anatolian hieroglyphs were used besides cuneiform on wax boards in the Hittite empire. An analogous situation must have been in place in the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian empires with the parallel use of cuneiform and the Aramaic alphabet both on clay and wax. By that time, wax boards had been in use for more than one thousand years, still their fortunes had just begun. Via the Arameans they reached the Mediterranean and eventually spread over the entire Western world – the Greek word for “wax tablet,” δέλτος, is a loanword from Phoenician, ultimately deriving from the Akkadian word daltu “door” used as a metaphor to indicate the leaf of a waxed board book.”

Michele Cammarosano is post-doc at the Philipps-Universität Marburg. Katja Weirauch is lecturer for Chemistry teaching at the Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg.

Further reading:

Michele Cammarosano, Katja Weirauch, Feline Maruhn, Gert Jendritzki, Patrick Kohl, “They Wrote on Wax. Wax Boards in the Ancient Near East”, Mesopotamia LIV (2019), 121-180. PDF available at https://osf.io/v58ze/

Georgios Boudalis, The codex and crafts in late antiquity, New York City: Bard Graduate Center, 2018.

“WoW! Writing on Wax” project website: https://osf.io/urpuf/wiki/home/

How to Write Cuneiform: https://cuneiform.neocities.org/CWT/howtowritecuneiform.html

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