Ulubrurn Shipwreck Near Kas, Turkey

Recovered the World's Oldest Book

Among the rich corgo of the Late Bronze Age (c. 1350 B.C.) Ulubunun ship, marine orchaeologists found the small boxwood writing tablet. The tablet's two leaves, each 3.5 inches high, were joined by three ivory hinges‹two of which have been recovered‹allowing the "book" to be opened and closed. The book would have been fastened with a loop-and-hook mechanism.

The leaves' interior sides are recessed to hold a layer of wax. The text would have been inscribed on the wax with a stylus made of bronze or, occasionally bone.

The book‹a small, hinged writing board from the late second millennium B.C.‹was reassembled from 25 fragments by Robert Payton at the Museum of Underwater Archaeology at Bodrum, Turkey. It is a diptych, consisting of two rectangular wooden leaves, each 2.5 inches wide and 3.5 inches high, joined by three ivory hinges. Both interior sides are recessed to a depth of about a tenth of an inch to hold wax, leaving a raised outer margin about half an inch wide. To achieve better adhesion of the wax coating, the sunken area is covered with crisscross-hatching scored into the wood. The waxed surfaces would have been inscribed with a stylus and folded closed for protection. In order to keep the board tightly shut, there is evidence of a fastening mechanism consisting of a loop on one side and a hook on the other.

Sadly, none of the wax, and thus none of the text, has survived. We therefore do not know what was written on the diptych.2 The important discovery of the "book" proved not to be an isolated find: In the 1994 season, the excavators recovered a wooden leaf of a second diptych. Found resting against the shoulder of a storage vessel, the leaf measures nearly 3 by 5 inches and has provision for three hinges on one side.3

It is widely known that the traditional writing materials in the ancient Near East were clay tablets and later also scrolls, so it may come as a surprise to some readers to learn that waxed writing boards were also used by the scribes.

From cuneiform sources it had been suspected for some time that writing boards were widely used in temple and palace administration in Mesopotamia in the first millennium B.C. This was indeed confirmed archaeologically in 1953 by the sensational discovery at Nimrud (north Iraq) of a large number of ivory and wooden writing boards recovered from the bottom of a well in the Northwest Palace, dated to the late eighth century B.C.

Equally, the existence of wooden writing material during the Hittite Empire in the second millennium B.C. has long been established from their archives, but no example has ever been found at any of the Hittite sites.

The discovery of the Uluburun diptych, which is contemporary with Hittite activities in the region, was therefore particularly welcome and generated great excitement among scholars. As a result of meticulous excavation methods, we are in possession of the earliest known example of this type of wooden "folding tablet" dated to the late 14th century B.C. The diptych has consequently been referred to as the oldest "book" in the world.

In both cases, at Nimrud as well as Uluburun, we owe the survival to the silt and water-logged conditions in which the writing boards were found. In most other archaeological contexts they are highly unlikely to have survived.

It was George Bass who first made the connection between the Uluburun diptych and the reference to a "folding tablet" made by Homer. In Book VI, line 169 of the Iliad, we learn that Bellerophon carried a "folding tablet" containing "baneful signs" to Lycia. This is the only reference to writing in Homer and, until the Uluburun discovery, scholars regarded this reference to a "folding tablet" as an anachronism, added to the text at a late date.

Where did the Uluburun diptych originate? The cargo on the Uluburun ship came fiom all over the eastern Mediterranean: Canaan, Cyprus, Syria, Mycenaean Greece and Egypt. Although we do not know the nationality of the ship, Bass and Pulak, among others, have suggested that it hailed from a port on the northern Levantine coast, possibly Ugarit (modern Ras Shamra) on the Mediterranean coast of Syria (Syro-Phoenicia).

Apart from Syria, we have no contemporaneous evidence from any of these regions on the subject of writing on waxed wood.* In Mesopotamia, scattered references to writing boards first occur in Ur III texts (2112-2004 B.C.), but most of the evidence belongs to the Neo-Assyrian and Babylonian periods (c. 1000-500 ~B.C.), when waxed boards became increasingly popular. In the mid-second millennium B.C., writing boards are occasionally mentioned in Middle Assyrian and Babylonian texts, but the overwhelming evidence, for the period of the Uluburun wreck, comes from the archives of the Hittite capital Hattusa at Bogazkoy in central Anatolia. From Hittite sources we know, for example, that writing boards were used in Cilicia (southeast Anatolia). The Cilician port city of Ura, east of Uluburun, was an important maritime outlet for the Hittites, and the activities of the merchants of Ura are well documented in the Ugarit and Hattusa records.

*In Late Bronze Age Egypt, writing boards were covered witb stucco and fabric and written on with ink. Only in Greco-Roman times were wax-covered boards introduced into Egypt. The literacy of other regions such as Canaan, the west Beast of Anatolia (Arzawa) and Cyprus (Alashia) is evident from the Amarna Letters, the diplomatic correspondence between Near Eastern rulers and the Egyptian court in the 14th century B.C., but their archives have invariably not been located. As for Mycenaean Greece and Crete, Linear B tablets make no mention of wooden writing material. But a number of clay scalings have been found which may have been used to seal more perishable writing materials.

Long-known Mesopotamian literary references indicated the use of waxed writng tablets in the first millennium B.C.‹a conclusion confimmed in 1953 by the discovery of late-eighth-century B.C. writing boards at Nimrud, in northem Iraq. (The Ulubunun example suggests that such tablets were known in the second millennium, at the time of Hittite activihes in the regian.) Several Assyrian reliefs, such as this seventh-century B.C. show two scribes recording booty – with one scribe writing on a scroll and the other writing on a hinged writing board. For armies an the move, small waxed diiptychs would have been much easier to use than cumbersome clay tablets.