Tablet

also: board, plate, slab

Giovanni Ciotti

A tablet is a flat and relatively hard and thick piece of material shaped as a rectangular parallelepiped or a short cylinder (e.g. Phaistos Disc) that is larger than tall (vs Folio). It can be made of a moulded lump of clay, a slice of wood, a slab of stone, a plate of metal, a piece of bone, etc., variously worked so as to host writing. Tablets are portable, i.e. sufficiently light to be held in hand, archived or simply moved, in opposition to for instance steles, which can be in fact also moved, but are not meant to.

Tablets can be written upon in different ways, depending on the material they are made of. 

Clay tablets, which have been used in ancient Mesopotamia and Iran from the middle of the fourth millennium BCE onward, were impressed upon while the clay was still fresh (and apparently only very rarely inked, cf. Fales et al. 2005). Similar objects can also have other shapes, such as cylinders and prisms.

Wooden tablets were written upon with liquid black or coloured ink or chalk, either on the raw surface or on a layer of material such as gesso that was first smeared on it (for the Greco-Roman world, see e.g. Sharpe 1996,108–113). A similar practice is rather ubiquitous across many premodern written cultures.

Stone slabs were incised and possibly inked or just written upon with liquid ink. Metal plates and bone tablets were usually incised, the latter being relatively rarer than the rest of the above-mentioned tablets (e.g. Hopkins 1913).

Wooden tablets, stone slabs and metal plates may be used as plaques.

Tablets can also be waxed. Mainly made of wood (rarely of other materials, such as ivory), these were hollowed on one side and scored with criss-cross hatching for the wax to have a better grip. The wax surface was then written upon by incising it with a stylus (rarely, if at all, inked thereafter) and could be easily modified or reused by erasing the writing. Waxed wooden tablets are mentioned in textual sources in Mesopotamia from the twenty second century BCE (Third Dynasty of Ur) and first attested from the fourteenth (Cammarosano et al. 2019, 122, 129–130, 145) and were extensively used in the Greco-Roman world (Sharpe 1996,108–113 and Willi 2021, 49–55).