The Romans, when they eventually succeeded the Bronze Age and Hellenic civilisations of the Eastern Mediterranean, adopted small Ulu Burun-style tablets, which they called pugillares or ‘handhelds’. They made them more capacious, either by making the leaves larger (and calling the results tabellae) or adding more leaves: tablets with three (and therefore four, not two, faces to write on) became common, and one survivor from Pompeii has eight. Many paintings on the walls of Pompeii and Herculaneum depict them and – as usual in Rome – their usage seems to have been firmly gendered.
