NEW “DOCUMENTS” FOUND IN ONE OF THE UNDERGROUND RIVERS OF LONDON.

NEW “DOCUMENTS” FOUND IN ONE OF THE UNDERGROUND RIVERS OF LONDON. I posted here in the early days of the blog about the lost rivers of London and, in particular, about the Walbrook, which flowed into the Thames and is thought to have taken its name from the London Wall it flowed beneath. Now it has been announced that over 400 “documents” (wooden tablets) have been discovered from the early days of the conquest of Britain by the Romans. The tablets would have been covered with a layer of beeswax, and messages would have been written on them with a stylus. The tablets were found in the layers of soil used as landfill to manage the Walbrook. The mud of the Walbrook preserved the tablets by keeping mud from them just as volcanic ash preserved Pompeii. The beeswax has disappeared, but messages from 87 of them have been reconstructed from traces on the wood and have been translated.