On the day of his great discovery, Robin Birley was standing in mud at the bottom of a pit. As he leaned wearily against a wall, he toyed with a strange, small object, something like a square of soggy blotting paper, which he had just found.
”They were two tiny sheets pressed together,” he recalls. ”I pried them open and got the shock of my life.”
What Birley saw were lines of spiky writing, a sort of hieroglyphics. But by the time the specimen was rushed to a university in nearby Durham, the writing had vanished and the pages were black.
Infrared beams penetrated the blackness. Experts at the university confirmed that Birley had found the oldest example of Roman writing ever found in Europe and, by six or seven centuries, the oldest example of a letter from one ordinary Roman to another ever found anywhere.
That original find came in 1973. But that discovery, while significant, pales beside the trove Birley has found in the last three months.
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From a swale of mud and rubbish 25 feet below the ancient Roman fort of Vindolanda, Birley so far has found about 1,100 writing tablets. Some are official documents, including a ”supertablet” giving details on troop strength and deployment at the fort.
But about 700 of the documents are personal letters, some written by scribes, many in the handwriting of the authors themselves. In chatty tones, they give news of everyday life among Roman grunts on the far northern fringe of the Roman empire. One series of letters, from the well-born wife of a local commander, may be the earliest known examples of writing by any women.
”This is the oldest written material in Europe by ordinary people and the oldest written material in Britain of any kind,” says Birley, a large and rumpled archeologist. ”For the first time, we are able to read the ideas and hopes and aspirations of ordinary soldiers and their wives.
”It is the largest body of early written Latin anywhere in the world,”
he says. ”Scholars are seeing now how handwriting developed, how spelling and new words came into being.
”In archeological terms, the Vindolanda tablets are to Britain what the Dead Sea Scrolls are to the Middle East.”
But there`s more. With the letters, Birley has found shiny, uncorroded objects of silver and iron, perfectly preserved wooden tools, supple leather tents, textiles, heavy leather shoes and high-fashion meshed-leather slippers, still good enough to wear.
”Pompeii and Herculaneum have the mosaics and sculptures of a wealthy town,” he says. ”We don`t have those. What we have is the ordinary material that ordinary people used.”
The finds at Vindolanda are the result of history, climate and serendipity.
Vindolanda is one of a series of forts that Roman invaders under Agricola built as they moved north in the 1st Century A.D. in the conquest of what is now Britain.
Vindolanda, about 20 miles south of the Scottish border, was first built about 80 A.D. and manned by about 750 soldiers, most from what are now France and the Low Countries, to build roads and guard supply lines.
Shortly after 100 A.D., the Romans abandoned Scotland because they needed troops in Dacia, now Romania. The emperor Hadrian built his wall across England in 128. Vindolanda, one mile south of the wall, became a frontier post.
At that point, the Romans built a proper stone fort at Vindolanda. Previously they had built five forts on the site over 40 or 50 years, each of wood. As each wore out, it was torn down and covered with a layer of turf and clay, to lay the foundation for the next.
These clay and turf layers sealed everything below in a cold and damp
”deep freeze,” as Birley calls it.
”These total seals preserved the sites. There was no oxygen, no moisture. Everything was totally preserved.”
Thus all the organic material-the wood, textiles and leather-that are missing at Pompeii were kept at Vindolanda, waiting to be found.
Birley, now 53, is literally a child of Vindolanda. His father, archeologist Eric Birley, excavated the old stone fort, and his son grew up at Vindolanda, in a house that is now the Vindolanda museum.
Robin Birley began digging 20 feet down in the early 1970s and unearthed the first letters and other relics. A shortage of visitors to the museum during a recession forced him to abandon digging: He gets no government funds and relies on museum income for most of his $250,000 annual budget. In 1985 he resumed digging and found more tablets, leading to the discovery this year of hundreds of letters in a workshop and a commander`s residence.
The letters, Birley says, show that human nature hasn`t changed much in two millenniums.
”Like bureaucrats everywhere, they kept a lot of files, then left them behind,” he says. ”Their servants were too lazy to get rid of them, so they put them beneath carpets of straw and bracken and heather, where we found them. We found a ditch where a shoveler, whom we know was left-handed, tossed rubbish away, instead of taking it to the rubbish tip.”
The letters themselves were written in carbon ink with ”dip-and-scratch pens” on prepared sheets of birch or alder. They were hinged and folded together, then tied through perforations.
Some letters come from a woman named Claudia Severa, the wife of a prefect in an outlying fort, to Sulpicia Lapidina, the wife of a Vindolanda commander. One letter, written by a scribe, asks Sulpicia to come to her birthday party ”on the third day before the Ides of September.”
She sends her greetings to ”your Cerialis” from ”my Aelius and my little son”-the details enabling Birley to build a cast of characters.
Below, in her own rougher script, she adds, ”Farewell, sister, my dear heart.” It is, Birley believes, the earliest example of handwriting by a woman in any culture.
Another letter, from a quartermaster named Octavius to an officer named Candidus, is a straightforward gripe about money and materials:
”I will try to winkle out of Marinus the hundred pounds of string. . . . I have bought some ears of corn-5,000 modii (sacks). Therefore, I need denarii (a denarius was about $15). Unless you send me some denarii, at least 500, the result will be that I shall lose what I have paid out of my own pocket, about 300 denarii, and I shall be in an embarrassing position.”
The letter goes on to complain about bad roads, sloppy bookkeeping by one Fatalis, and a soldier who ordered up hides ”on the Ides of January” but never showed up.
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There are 15 letters asking for leave, which surprised Birley, because until now the Roman army was not known for granting leave.
Another letter from a centurion asks, ”regarding the two men who have been held for committing an offense and have already been lashed with rods until they were covered with blood, can they be spared further punishment?”
The letters, oddly, never refer to the emperor or religion. Birley`s conclusion is that, official attitudes to the contrary, these two totems played a small role in everyday life.
The ”supertablet,” written on oak, reports 750 men assigned to Vindolanda. But no fewer than 474 are absent, away on one assignment or another. Of the 276 left, 38 are sick, many with conjunctivitis, or pink eye, a common disease.
This short-staffing didn`t worry the Romans, according to other letters, which dismiss the hostile natives as ”Brittunculi”-”wretched Britons.”
Other documents attest to hearty stores of meat, nuts, honey, Italian wine and local beer. New commanders signed lists of provisions issued to them, down to bootlaces and towels, a rich source of detail on living standards.
A lesson by a schoolboy, copying a line from Virgil, shows that commanders provided their children with a classical education, even on the frontier. Unfortunately, the lad wasn`t up to it: A teacher has scrawled on it ”segn,” short for ”segnis,” or ”sloppy.”
Much of the writing in the letters is worse: ”camp Latin,” Birley calls it. ”They get their declensions and spelling wrong, which makes life difficult for us today.”
Since his discovery of the first letter, Birley has refined his techniques. Within 20 minutes of a find, a new letter is in the Vindolanda laboratory, run by Birley`s wife, Pat.
She separates the compacted papers and cleans them with tap water and a dentist`s probe, then plunges them into methylated spirits for six weeks and in ether for another two weeks, to remove the moisture. Birley, impatient, tries to read and translate the letters as they float in the lab: After that, they are shipped off to the British Museum in London, where climatic control and security are better.
So far, Birley has excavated only about 1.5 acres of the 14-acre site. Still unprobed are most of the commander`s residence, the hospital, the stores and the headquarters, ”which should be full of documents.”
The digging starts again in March, and he hopes to uncover more treasures.
But at the year`s end, he will take a year off to write up his findings before returning to the pit-”a little hole,” he calls it, ”that is one of the richest archeological finds in Western Europe.”