Faded Roman Wax Tablets From Belgium Reveal Hidden Lives in Tongeren

Fragment of a wooden writing tablet that has been examined.

January

/ 2026

Getting your audio player ready...

Marks cut into wood are not meant to outlast empires, but a set of Roman wax tablets from Tongeren in Belgium has done exactly that. Epigrapher Markus Scholz and colleagues have managed to read writing that seemed lost forever, preserved only as faint impressions in dried, cracked wood. The results add new names, offices, and everyday glimpses to the story of Rome’s northern provinces.

What the Tongeren tablets are, and why they’re hard to read

Roman “wax tablets” were wooden frames holding a thin layer of wax used like a reusable notepad. The wax is gone in the Tongeren material, but stylus pressure sometimes bit deep enough to leave legible grooves in the underlying wood - if you can separate handwriting from the wood grain and later cracking. In a release by Rhein-Main Universities, Scholz described the task as especially difficult because the tablets were dried out and many were reused, leaving overlapping “palimpsests” of earlier writing.

The fragments were excavated in the 1930s but misidentified as ordinary wood pieces, then largely forgotten until Else Hartoch of the Gallo-Roman Museum in Tongeren brought them back to scholarly attention in 2020. Scholz worked with Jürgen Blänsdorf, using close inspection and imaging methods such as Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) to tease out letters and words.

Roman writing tablet and stylus

Writing tablet and stylus - oldest record of a commercial transaction in the City of London. (Mx. Granger/CC0)

Contracts, “data protection,” and a future emperor

The study centers on 85 surviving fragments from two find contexts. One group came from a well near the forum and public buildings, apparently broken and dumped - possibly to prevent later reading, which researchers liken to an ancient form of “data protection.” Many of these pieces appear to have held contracts or official records, where scribes pressed hard to create durable impressions.

The second group came from a muddy depression filled with worn-out tablets and rubbish to improve drainage. Here, the texts include administrative copies, pupils’ writing exercises, and even a draft inscription for a statue of the future Emperor Caracalla, dated to 207 AD.

What the names and offices say about Roman Belgium

Only about half the fragments preserve identifiable traces of writing, but they still produced major historical signals. The texts mention a decemvir (a senior magistrate) and lictores (attendants/bodyguards of high officials), roles rarely attested so far north in the Empire. That pushes evidence for high-level Roman civic administration deeper into the provincial record than many historians would expect from this region.

The tablets also point to a culturally mixed population in Tongeren - Celtic, Roman, and Germanic names appear, along with hints that some people settled locally after military service, including veterans of the Rhine fleet. Several names appear to be previously unknown from other sources, reminding us how much of provincial society still lies outside the big literary histories.

Top image: Fragment of a wooden writing tablet (Cat. No. 32) mentioning honorably discharged fleet soldiers (classici). Source: © Gallo-Roman Museum Tongeren/RHEIN-MAIN Universities

By Gary Manners