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TabulaRasa

About

Background

The written word is rightly celebrated for its ability to transcend centuries and millennia, surviving human lives and generations… Yet by its very nature, writing is also ephemeral: whatever can be written can also be erased. An inscription on stone can be chiselled away to make space for a new one, ink can be washed off, notes taken in pencil on a slip of paper can be rubbed out with an eraser, and so on. Today, digital media allow for new forms of deletion and rewriting, often with the added possibility of preserving previous versions and retrieving them when needed.

All societies that have used writing – from ancient Mesopotamia to the present – have needed to recycle writing supports; in other words, to erase and rewrite, whether on clay tablets, sheets of papyrus, parchment, or an iPad. The advantage offered by the ability to recycle writing supports is particularly significant in the context of what we might define as ‘ephemeral writings’: those occasions in which a text is written with the awareness that it will soon be obsolete.

Among the most typical contexts of ephemeral writing are writing exercises: we might think of the notebooks we used in primary school, filled with exercises whose purpose lay in the very act of doing them, and which immediately lost their reason for existence. Today we can afford to throw away the notebook, since paper is inexpensive – but this was not the case when paper was still a rare and valuable commodity, nor is it the case today in many parts of the world.
Other comparable and recurrent contexts across different societies include note-taking (think of the draft version of a school essay), ledgers that must be regularly updated, and today, the dozens of SMS and WhatsApp messages that quickly become superfluous and are deleted over time to prevent them from clogging up our smartphone’s memory.

Captions

From L: Ivory memorandum book with silver clasp, acquired by Katherine Bigelow in 1819, from England, 9 x 4.5 x 1.3 cm, Boston, MA, Museum of Fine Arts, accession no. 52.1306; A wax book from Halle (Saale), used for accounting purposes in a saltwork context, 17th c. CE, wood, wax mixture, and leather, 20 x 41 x 15 cm; photograph: Stadtarchiv Halle; A senior student of the tsangaya of Bagadawa (Kano, Nigeria) writing on an allon sha (talismanic wooden tablet); photograph: Dahir Lawan Mu’az.

In the long history of writing, different cultures have employed a wide range of solutions to make writing supports easily rewritable, allowing ephemeral texts to be inscribed on them again and again. Among the paradigmatic writing technologies in this regard are clay tablets, used in the ancient Near East and Aegean civilizations (including the Minoans and Mycenaeans), and wax tablets, invented in Mesopotamia in the third millennium BCE, later adopted by the Phoenicians, Greeks, and Romans, and eventually becoming one of the main supports for writing in Europe until the mass spread of paper and graphite pencils in the early modern period.

Clay tablets and wax tablets are paradigmatic as ‘rewritable manuscripts’ because they represent reusable writing technologies that require no addition or removal of material from the support itself: raw clay simply needs to be moistened to erase the impressed or incised text and reuse the surface, while wax, thanks to its malleability, can be smoothed with a spatula and immediately rewritten. We all likely have in mind the iconic image of the so-called Sappho, depicted in a pensive pose with a wax tablet in her hand and a stylus resting on her lips, in the famous fresco from Pompeii now housed in the National Archaeological Museum of Naples.

The material properties of the various writing supports used over time for ephemeral texts – and the writing technologies associated with them – played a crucial role in shaping key aspects of the cultures in which they were employed: the development of letterforms and individual handwriting, the practices by which scholars composed and recorded their works, the systems for managing accounting and bookkeeping… All of this, and much more, is deeply connected to the types of writing supports these societies had at their disposal and to how those supports functioned – how letters were impressed, incised, or drawn; what kinds of styli, pens, and brushes were used; how they were held; in what ways written content could be erased and the writing surface reused. Yet many of these material and technological properties remain unknown in crucial respects, and their role and impact on their respective cultures is still not fully understood or appreciated.

TabulaRasa aims to explore how erasable writing technologies – particularly those based on clay and wax – actually worked in practice, how they related to other media, and how their technical and material characteristics influenced fundamental aspects of the cultures that used them. The investigation will focus especially on three historical-cultural areas: the ancient Near East, the classical world, and medieval and early modern Europe. The ultimate goal is to develop a general theory of the role of erasability in manuscript cultures.

To this end, an interdisciplinary team of researchers in philology, history, palaeography, codicology, archaeometry, chemistry, petrography, and cultural heritage conservation will combine the analysis of original manuscripts and indirect sources with laboratory-based replication and experimentation. The aim is to reconstruct how once-central – but now forgotten – writing technologies functioned, how they related to other media, and how they impacted textual composition practices and palaeographic development. Finally, a travelling and environmentally sustainable exhibition will allow both children and adults to experience these revived techniques firsthand, discovering just how close the connection is between writing practices that seem so distant and the tablets and smartphones that play such a central role in our lives today.

Materials for hands-on experiments used in the Ephemeral Writings workshop

Overview of Scientific Objectives


TabulaRasa aims to understand the role of rewritability as a crucial aspect of manuscript cultures. This overarching goal is essentially historical in nature, and includes three major objectives in the domains of codicology, palaeography, and the study of manuscript cultures:

  • In the domain of codicology, the project will achieve an in-depth understanding of clay manuscripts and wax tablets as material objects. The aim is to sift through the extensive corpora of existing clay manuscripts and approximately 3300 wax tablets (around 2500 from Antiquity and about 625 from the Medieval and Early Modern periods) and identify a purposeful subset of examples for in-depth analysis. Key aspects of these manuscript classes will be systematically investigated, including the composition and mechanical properties of clayey and wax pastes across different periods and cultures; sourcing, manufacturing, aging; processes of knowledge transfer and adaptation.
  • In the domain of palaeography, the project will achieve an in-depth understanding of the relation between the material properties of clay and wax (pastes) and the associated writing techniques. This encompasses a thorough understanding of the biomechanics of writing techniques, including influence of environmental conditions, stylus materiality, shape, and handling, writing speed and processes, wedge/trace depth and shape, script density, layout elements, and legibility. Two exemplary case studies in the relevance of rewritable manuscripts for palaeographical development will be explored: the development of the characteristic traits of cuneiform script and the impact of writing on wax on the development of the Latin script.
  • In the domain of the study of manuscript cultures, the project will provide a history of rewritable manuscripts in the exemplary historical contexts of the Ancient Near East, the Classical world, and Medieval to Early Modern Europe, illuminating their role in material and intellectual culture – why they were invented or introduced, how they were adapted to fulfill specific functions, how they interacted within each other and with other media. Furthermore, building on the results of the codicological and palaeographical studies, the project will develop a general theory of manuscript rewritability as a result of a systematic, cross-cultural, comparative analysis of practices of manuscript reuse.