Stuff & Nonsense

Somewhere in the 15th-century Brandenburg, a student dropped his homework down the toilet.

You scratched your Latin exercises into the wax with a stylus, smoothed it over, and started again the next day. Cheap, reusable, and easy to lose.

This particular set ended up at the bottom of a latrine shaft in the town of Wittenberg, in a privy attached to a Franciscan monastery.

For six hundred years, they sat there in the muck.

When archaeologists excavated the site, they expected the usual. What they pulled out instead was a stack of wax tablets in remarkable condition. The very thing that should have rotted them away, the wet, oxygen-poor sludge of a medieval toilet, had sealed them off from the air and preserved both the wood and the wax.

The writing was still legible.