The Romans had iPads. This is how they used them
They used abbreviations in their messages, too. LOL!
YES, the Romans really did have their own version of the iPad. Instead of notebooks they jotted things down on wax tablets of various shapes and sizes, from small ones (the size of an iPhone) to big ones (the size of a big iPad, before the iPad Air showed up). The image at the top of this post is a particularly fine example, from the Roman-Germanic Museum in Cologne (to which I am indebted for the picture). It is the size, shape and aspect ratio of a modern iPad. (Note to Google: it’s a 4:3 aspect ratio rather than 16:9, so the Romans are with me when I say that I find 16:9 a bit odd.)
These tablets consisted of a layer of wax inside a wooden frame. You’d use a stylus to scratch things into the wax, and flip the stylus over to use its flat end to smooth the wax and erase things when necessary. That’s why I like to say that the woman in this image (a mural from Pompeii) is using the Roman equivalent of a Samsung Galaxy Note 3. As you can see, several tablets were often bound together, like the pages in a book, to increase storage capacity. You can buy a modern replica, if you’re interested in trying this, or make your own.
If you were a wealthy Roman who wanted to read the news over breakfast, you might send a scribe down to the forum to jot down excerpts from the daily gazette, or acta diurna, onto one of these tablets. (It was arguably the world’s first newspaper, founded by Julius Caesar in 59BC, but only one copy was produced each day, posted on notice boards in the forum.) Having read the news yourself you could then copy selected highlights to your friends: the text would be transcribed onto papyrus rolls and taken to them by messenger. They might then copy those news reports, in turn, to their own friends, adding their own comments or analysis. It was common for wealthy Romans to rely on their friends to filter and distribute the news for them in this way when they were away from the city. This is how the Roman social-media system worked. It’s just one example (and, in fact, the earliest example) of how social-media environments predate the Internet.
Because the amount of space on a wax tablet or single sheet of papyrus was limited, the Romans used abbreviations in their letters. SPD, short for “SALUTEM PLURIMAM DICIT” meant “says many greetings”, for example; if I was writing to someone called Mark I (or my scribe) might write TOM MARCO SPD (Tom, to Mark, says many greetings) at the top. Another abbreviation was used as a sign-off: SVBEEV, short for “SI VALES BENE EST EGO VALEO”, which meant “If you are well, that’s good; I’m well”. It was equivalent to TTFN or GTG today. Alas, there seems not to have been a Roman equivalent of LOL. But the Romans certainly had their own version of the iPad. SVBEEV.
Tom Standage is digital editor of The Economist and author of “Writing on the Wall: Social Media—The First 2,000 Years” (Bloomsbury)
