Have you ever dropped your smartphone in the toilet? Don’t worry, this already happened to your ancestors. About 700 years ago, a wealthy resident of the town of Paderborn, Germany, experienced exactly the same mishap with the technological equivalent of his time: his personal notebook. This vestige of the Middle Ages has just been removed from the mud by archaeologists, during excavations carried out before the construction of an administrative building.
The object was discovered in an old latrine, an environment which, against all expectations, proved to be a wonderful conservation setting protected from air and decomposition. The icing on the cake of this unusual excavation: the notebook lay next to pieces of fine silk, which researchers suspect of having served as luxury toilet paper.
Measuring just 10 by 7 centimeters, this mini notebook is a little masterpiece of ingenuity. Featuring an elegant leather binding and wooden plates as pages, it worked using a layer of wax on which text was engraved using a pointed metal or bone stylus.
The big advantage? The other end of the stylus, flat, was used to smooth the wax to erase notes and rewrite over them. A sort of erasable tablet, reusable endlessly to note down appointments or accounts.
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According to an article in the American media Gizmodo, the notebook has survived the centuries in an almost suspicious state of freshness. “I only had to clean the outside of the book, because the inside pages were so tightly bound that there was no dirt on them”explains restaurateur Susanne Bretzel, from the Westphalia-Lippe Regional Association (LWL). The wood had not warped and the wax remained intact. The only downside: after seven centuries at the bottom of the hole, the object still gave off a particularly tenacious and unpleasant odor when it was cleaned.
Examination of the pages revealed that all the notes were written by the same person, in cursive script and Latin. For archaeologist Sveva Gai, there is no doubt that the owner belonged to the local elite. “The surface of the leather binding is decorated with a relief pattern: small regular rows of lilies”she explains, knowing that this symbol of purity and power was very prestigious at the time. Researchers believe that the owner of the object was probably a wealthy merchant from Paderborn, who used it to make notes about his business.
For the moment, the texts overlap and form a happy scribble difficult to decipher with the naked eye. The scientific team therefore plans to use high-tech X-ray scanners to read through the different layers of wax without damaging the object. We will then perhaps know what this trader wrote just before the big plunge. History does not say whether our man tried to fish out his precious notebook or whether he preferred to abandon it to its sad fate out of disgust.
