One Thousand and One Conjectures

Nearly everything quantitative about ordinary pre-print writing comes from three preservation flukes — the dry rubbish mounds of Oxyrhynchus, the waterlogged fort at Vindolanda, and the anaerobic clay under Novgorod's streets. These are different climates, centuries, empires, and languages, so if everyday…

Vindolanda's fame rests on its ink leaf-tablets, but the excavations also recovered stylus tablets — wax-coated boards for legal and financial writing — in comparable or greater numbers, and they remain overwhelmingly undeciphered because the wax is gone and only stray scratches…

A wax tablet was designed to be erased, so what survives as legible stylus scratches on the wood beneath is text that was pressed hard, written last, or never smoothed over — which should systematically favor final, formal, legal acts over the…

Vindolanda's letters are often narrated as the frontier's lifeline to distant homes, but their address lines and contents sketch a different geometry: correspondence should be dominated by short-hop traffic among neighboring garrisons and supply nodes along the Stanegate corridor — an intra-military…

The roughly 130 lead prayers from the sacred spring at Bath are often imagined as furious bathers scratching their own maledictions, but the tablets' palaeography permits a head count of hands, and hands are the tell: personal writing predicts nearly as many…

A striking fraction of British curse tablets carry pseudo-writing — rows of writing-like marks by people who could not write but knew the god required a document. Pseudo-writing is the purest evidence that the form of writing had social force independent of…