Wax tablet

Cicero's letters make passing reference to the use of cerae, and some examples of wax-tablets have been preserved in waterlogged deposits in the Roman fort at Vindolanda on Hadrian's Wall.

The earliest surviving exemplar of a boxwood writing tablet with an ivory hinge was among the finds recovered from the 14th-century BC Uluburun Shipwreck near Kaş in modern Turkey in 1986.

An archaeological discovery in 1979 in Durrës, Albania found two wax tablets made of ivory in a grave believed to belong to a money lender from the 2nd century AD.

Liddell & Scott, 1925 edition gives the etymology of the word for the writing-tablet, deltos (δέλτος), from the letter delta (Δ) based on ancient Greek and Roman authors and scripts, due to the shape of tablets to account for it.

A carved stone panel dating to between 640–615 BC that was excavated from the South-West Palace of the Assyrian ruler Sennacherib, at Nineveh in Iraq (British Museum, ME 124955) depicts two figures, one clearly clasping a scroll and the other bearing what is thought to be an open diptych.

[8] Margaret Howard surmised that these tablets might have once been connected together using an ingenious hinging system with cut pieces of leather resembling the letter “H” inserted into slots along the edges to form a concertina structure.