![]() I shall expect you sister. Farewell, sister my dearest soul, as I hope to prosper, and hail.” ( Source) Astonishingly, with this tiny scrap of no more than 223 mm wide we have in our hands a two-millennium-old text message sent between two sisters, concerning a matter as trivial as a birthday. My Aelius and my little son send him their greetings. The latter writes: “On 11 September, sister, for the day of the celebration of my birthday, I give you a warm invitation to make sure that you come to us, to make the day more enjoyable for me by your arrival. It invites the commander’s wife, Sulpicia Lepidina, to her sister’s birthday party. Remarkably, the tablets are only 1-3 mm thick, about the size of a modern postcard (more about the fortress here and about the correspondence here). Some 400 wood tablets with correspondence were found in the house of the commander, Flavius Cerealis, prefect of the Ninth Cohort. The tablet was dug up some time ago in a Roman army camp just south of Hadrian’s wall, in the north of England. ![]() ![]() 1: I encountered it in a news letter from calligrapher Patricia Lovett). The idea for this post was sparked by an image of a wooden writing tablet that was written almost two thousand years ago (Fig. “My soldiers have run out of beer, please send some!”Īntiquity Fig. Interestingly, this hurried and cursory manner of communicating was quite common in medieval times, while its roots can be traced back to Antiquity. This post shows how people sent each other short messages before the invention of electricity and the phone: hastily, cheaply and with a modest amount of attention. Both the speed and short lifespan of text messages are responsible for its most peculiar features: they are written in a special language of short words and a high volume of abbreviations, and they come with the built-in understanding that there will likely be typos included. We all do it a few times per day: shooting a friend a text message with our phones. Doing so has become routine and we don’t really think about it: just grab your device, hold it up, and type a few words quickly and on the fly.
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