The Vindolanda Writing Tablets: (Tabulae Vindolandenses) Volume III

by Alan K. Bowman, J. David Thomas

This is the third volume in a series presenting the first editions of the important Latin writing-tablets from the Roman fort of Vindolanda, located to the south of Hadrian's Wall. The tablets now form part of the British Museum collections. This volume covers the ink tablets discovered in the excavations of 1991-4, and contains transcriptions, translations and detailed commentaries on about 150 texts and brief descriptions of a further 100 fragments. As in earlier volumes, the texts are mainly either accounts or letters. The accounts include a long record of the supply and consumption of chickens and geese in the commanding officer's residence over a period of more than two years in the first decade of the second century AD. The correspondence includes letters from the archive of Cerialis, the prefect of the Ninth Cohort of Batavians, stationed at Vindolanda in the period AD 97-104. A notable novelty is a unique letter dating from a later period, c. AD 180-200. Fifty of the tablets are reproduced.

208 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 2003

About the author

Alan Bowman is Principal of Brasenose College and Emeritus Camden Professor of Ancient History at Oxford University. His research interests focus on papyrology, the Vindolanda Writing-Tablets, and the social and economic history of Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt and the Roman Empire.