Roman wax tablet - self assembly kit
Three Roman wax tablets as a craft set 9cm x 14cm
Contents of the craft set:
3 wooden boards made of three-layer glued wood (beech) 14x9cm
12 pcs. beech wood strips for the frames
one wooden glue bottle
real beeswax
3 wooden sticks for the pens
Sandpaper for making the styluses
instructions
Inspire your pupils with this vivid teaching activity.
This craft set is ideal for project lessons in the subjects Roman Empire and Middle Ages. Your schoolchildren can write down their homework on this wax tablet with the stylus they have sharpened themselves. The wax tablets can thus be used as "antique" notepads.
| Aspiration scale: | Easy |
|---|---|
| Time Line: | 1,0 Hour |
Interesting:
In 1875, excavators in Pompeii made a spectacular find: in a house on the Via Stabian, they came across more than 150 small wooden tablets (tabula ceratae), once covered in wax, which belonged to the accounts of the banker L. Caecillius Luncundus. It was not so much the writing material itself, but the abundance of the tablets and their information content regarding the banker's transactions that made the discovery so sensational.
For such statements and receipts, but also for other types of texts in everyday life such as letters, minutes, notes, messages and exercises in school lessons, one usually resorted to wooden tablets in various forms, on whose often whitened surface one initially wrote with ink.
They were quickly replaced by the more "recyclable" wax board. The writing was carved into the red-coloured wax with the help of a pointed metal or bone stylus. If one wanted to erase what had been written, the wax was smoothed out again with the spatula-shaped top of the stylus.