IOUs, a note to a brewer, and the earliest handwritten document known from Britain — these are among the 405, nearly 2,000-year-old Roman waxed writing tablets archaeologists have unearthed and ...

Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story: Experts have deciphered writings etched on two batches of ancient Roman wooden wax tablets that were previously unreadable. The tablets were tossed ...

Luisa Duarte, a conservator for the Museum of London, holds a piece of wood with the Roman alphabet written on it in London on June 1, 2016 Archaeologists have found London’s earliest handwritten ...

At first glance they appear to be ordinary planks of wood marked with random scratches. But archeologists say they’re some of the oldest handwritten documents ever found in Britain – and they include ...

Fragment of a Neo-Assyrian tablet preserving wax, in the British Museum. (The Trustees of the British Museum) The writing boards excavated from Nimrud (modern Iraq) represent the first material ...

Molten wax was applied to tablets using a spatula (right), and a decorated stylus (left) was used to inscribe text in it.(Courtesy © MOLA) The largest and most ...

LONDON — The writing’s on the wall, we’re told. Whether it was Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press in the 15th century, the invention of the typewriter 300 years later, or the emoji of today’s ...

Wax tablets were among the oldest writing media, and scientists have recently uncovered the secrets of their technology. In Ancient Rome, if you needed to write a letter, you wouldn't reach for ...

Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story: Roman officials in modern-day Belgium once tossed old wooden frames used for wax writing tablets into a well to make sure nobody could read what was ...