The photo shows final work being carried out on the Temple of Mithras. (Photo courtesy of the Museum of London Archaeology)

by Peter Barker

LONDON, Nov. 25 (Xinhua) -- London is one of just a few global financial hubs, with trillions of dollars of business passing through its books each day. A new archaeological discovery pushes back the history of the city as a financial center to Roman times.

Archaeologists working on the site of a temple in what was the Roman city of London close to the banks of the river Thames have come across an exceedingly rare hoard of wax tablet documents. One of these is the oldest financial document the City ever produced that has so far been found.

"This is an IOU (I owe you) between two ex-slaves, and it is the first financial document for the City of London," archaeologist Louise Fowler told Xinhua on Friday.

"And we can date this back precisely to January 8, AD 57. It is the first hand-written document from Britain," said Fowler, a project manager with Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA).

The temple, dedicated to the mysterious Roman god Mithras, stood on the banks of the Walbrook, one of the now lost streams that once crossed the city of London site.

The archaeology dig which uncovered the remains of the temple is over, and the excavation is now on show to the public.

The Romans invaded Britain in AD 43, and by AD 50 they had acquired a firm grip on the south of the island of Britain.

It was at this time that they founded London, at the point where the Thames estuary narrowed enough to allow it to be bridged.

The city was from the start a port and a trading hub, which grew rapidly in stature as the Romans developed the parts of the British isles they had conquered and as trade flourished with continental Europe and the Mediterranean, which was why the two ex-slaves were in London and why they were doing business together.

The IOU had been written into a flat cake of wax contained inside a wooden frame, called a tablet, by one of the ex-slaves involved in the transaction using a metal pen, known as a stylus.

The wax had dissolved away in London's soil many hundreds of years ago, but the friction of the stylus in the wax surface had grazed the wooden backing of the tablet, meaning that the Latin words can now be read.

PRESERVED IN ANCIENT STREAM BED

"We had a collection of over 405 wax writing tablets dating from the first years of the city. They contain names, they contain addresses and the very first written references to London," said Fowler.

Such a find is highly unusual, not just for its size but because hardly any wooden tablets ever survive.

"A stream (the Walbrook) occupied the site and led to a build-up of deposits in the valley," Fowler said.

"There are several meters of archaeology in the area and conditions from the stream have preserved the remains really well. So we have lots of stuff we would not normally have on an excavation in Britain, things like leather and wood have survived really well in those conditions," she explained.

So the tablet takes back the history of trade and financing in what is known as the City of London, the historic core of the metropolis and the heart of the financial sector, to the very early days of the Roman occupation of Britain.

And one of the imports that the Romans brought to Britain was their variety of gods and religions, including the god Mithras.

WINSTON CHURCHILL SAVES THE TEMPLE

The remains of the ancient temple to this god was the main target for the archaeologists from MOLA during their excavations in 2012-2015 on what has now become the site for Bloomberg's new London headquarters.

In 1954 when the temple was first identified among the rubble of a building destroyed in bombing during the Second World War.

The plan was for the temple to be recorded and then destroyed during development work.

But it became hugely famous and popular with 30,000 people a day visiting the site to view the remains.

There was a huge public outcry against the demolition Fowler said, and Winston Churchill, the then prime minister, intervened.

The owners of the site dismantled the temple remains and rebuilt it 100 meters away from where it was discovered and at street level, significantly higher than its original position.

"They did not involve the archaeologists involved in the dig in the reconstruction of the temple," said Fowler.

The latest Bloomberg redevelopment was a great opportunity to correct the mistakes of the past, and return the temple to its original site, or at least close to it as the original site was found to still contain two portions of the temple which had not been uncovered in the 1954 dig.

"It's not precisely where it was discovered, it is about 14 meters further to the west because we found that parts of the original temple on the site had survived, and we needed to preserve them in situ," Fowler explained.

The MOLA excavation was "one of the largest excavations we have had in the City", said Fowler, and it produced a "huge assemblage of finds, 14,000 artifacts, 65,000 shards of pottery."

MYSTERIOUS GOD

Mithras was a Roman god with links to Persia and his followers would have met at temples. There were thousands scattered across the Roman Empire, with Rome alone having several hundred temples dedicated to the god.

"We don't know much of what the Mithras followers did or what they believed because it was a mystery cult," said Fowler.

"It was for men only and there were seven grades of initiation into the cult, and it was mainly made up of soldiers and traders -- people who would have moved around."

Not only was the cult a shared belief, it was also a good way for businessmen to carry out what is now known as "networking".

The iconography of the religion was "complex" said Fowler, with a central focus on a Tauroctony, the scene of Mithras slaying a bull which appeared in all his temples across the empire.

A statue found at the site also indicates the religion's connections to the worship of the sun and the moon.

The temple thrived in London from 240 AD for about 100 years, but interest in the god Mithras waned, and the temple was rededicated to the god Bacchus, and the Mithras statues were buried under the floor to be forgotten for centuries.

But from this week the temple is on view free for the first time to the public during working hours at the site in Walbrook, central London.