Being able to write was a valuable skill in Roman antiquity, but it is usually estimated that only 15% or so of the population of the entire Empire was literate, with most of those individuals living in towns or serving in the army. Literacy is also thought to have been more common among men than women, and most widespread among urban elites at the heart of the Empire, rather than in Rome’s northern provinces.
Much previous research on the subject has, naturally enough, focused on written sources, be they papyri from the Egyptian desert, wax tablets like those discovered at the London Bloomberg site (CA 317), or the renowned ink-written wooden tablets from Vindolanda. One problem with this approach is that these exceptional finds owe their preservation to conditions that are equally exceptional, in either very dry or very wet deposits. Elsewhere, ancient writing materials rarely survive in the archaeological record, making it difficult to understand how and where literacy took root.
One comparatively unsung type of artefact can be used to redress the balance: the humble inkwell. Although these are unlikely to be the first objects that spring to mind when you think about the rich corpus of Roman artefacts, they do survive in considerable numbers. Roman inkwells were usually made from copper-alloy or clay (inkwells displaying the fashionable red hues of Samian ware are especially common), but glass, lead, and silver versions were also available for those with a generous stationery budget. Despite the potential for inkwells to fill in some of the gaps in our knowledge about where people were writing, they were not studied as a group until a recent project hosted by the University of Reading and funded by the British Academy produced the first comprehensive catalogue of metal inkwells. This involved gathering well over 400 examples from across the Empire.
