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The largest and earliest collection of Roman 'notepads' - including an IOU - has been unearthed in London.

The 405 wooden tablets were found near the new headquarters for financial firm Bloomberg in the City of London.


One is the earliest document ever to be found in the capital, dated 8 January, 57 AD.

Another dates to around 43 AD, which was one of the first years the Romans had rule in the UK, while a further contains "the earliest reference to London, 50 years before Tacitus cites the city in his Annals".

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There is also evidence of someone practicing writing the alphabet and numerals.


Others ask for repayments, or act as IOUs to traders in London.

"...I ask you by bread and salt that you send as soon as possible the 26 denarii in victoriati and the 10 denarii of Paterio...", one reads, while another states a "freedman of Venustus owes Gratus, freedman of Spurius, 105 denarii".

The tablets would have been covered with beeswax, with messages then engraved or inscribed upon it with a stylus.

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Some 87 of the 405 tablets have already been deciphered, making it the largest collection of such specimens found in the UK.


The tablets were deciphered by Roger Tomlin, classicist at the University of Oxford, who used photography as well as microscopic analysis to translate them.

"The preservation of the tablets is remarkable," the Museum of London Archaeology (Mola) said. "Wood rarely survives when buried in the ground. The wet mud of the Walbrook, a river that dominated the area in the Roman period but is now buried, stopped oxygen from decaying the wooden tablets, preserving them in excellent condition."

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"The Bloomberg writing tablets are very important for the early history of Roman Britain, and London in particular," added Tomlin. "I am so lucky to be the first to read them again, after more than 19 centuries, and to imagine what these people were like, who founded the new city of London."


"What a privilege to eavesdrop on them: when I decipher their handwriting, I think of my own heroes, the wartime academics who worked at Bletchley Park."

Sophie Jackson, director of Mola, said the findings had exceeded her already "high hopes".

"The writing tablets are truly a gift for archaeologists trying to get closer to the first Roman Britons," she said.