The Wood of the Ulu Burun Diptych

In the fall of 1988, Cemal Pulak, acting field director and assistant director of the Ulu Burun excavations, asked the authors to identify the wood used in the diptych found on the fourteenth- or very early thirteenth-century Ulu Burun shipwreck. Although it has been stated generally that Greco-Roman writing tablets were made of boxwood, other woods were also used for writing tablets in various periods of antiquity. The second oldest known writing-boards, from 8th-century Nimrud, were made of walnut (Juglans nigra), and from Assyrian records we know that writing-boards were constructed of tamarisk, cypress and cedar woods. Geography clearly played a role in the choice of wood. At the port of Roman London, for example, “most of the twenty-two fragments of writing tablets recovered from the recent waterfront excavations were of the wax-impressed type made from larch, cedar or silver fir, suggesting that they … were brought over [from the continent] as finished products”; the only boxwood tablet, perhaps locally made, was not of the type that held wax.