I’ve had waxed tablets on my mind for the last few months. In 2025, I had the opportunity to meet up with the ERC TabulaRasa project, which is doing some very interesting cross-cultural work on erasable media from antiquity to the early modern period.

I’ve used models of wax tablets in my teaching in the past. When working with several students writing, erasing, and rewriting in tablets, I’ve found that at the end of the session, I had to clean up a lot of wax shavings. This is because the students used the blunt end of the stylus to erase writing that has been scratched into the wax.

Depending on how thick the wax is and how deeply the writing is incised, this process can involve gouging out quite a bit of wax, which eventually needs to be replaced. A more efficient method involves heating the blunt end of the stylus over a flame to erase the writing by melting the wax and working it into a smoother surface without loss of wax. This is clearly a better method, unless you happen to be using a bone stylus instead of a metal one. And open flames probably run afoul of normal classroom safety rules.

I was discussing these topics with a colleague who said that her grandmother had actually used waxed tablets in school, and it was customary to just leave the tablets in the sun in order to erase them. The warm summer weather encouraged me to give it a try.

I inscribed a couple lines on a the inner side of a waxed diptych (bound together with a link stitch, in deference to Georgios Boudalis), and then left it out in the sun.

According to the weather report, it was about 34° C (about 94° F). After three hours in the sun, the wax was liquified (to the point that it was visibly seeping into the wooden frame).

After a couple hours cooling off in the shade, it solidified into a smooth, clean slate with no wax lost (aside from what was absorbed into the wood.

This seems like a good method for achieving a fresh reset of wax tablets, at least in warm climates. It’s probably a bit impractical if one needs to reuse the tablets quickly (the whole melting-and-hardening process took about five hours).

For more on erasing and reusing wax tablets in antiquity, see Anna Willi, “Refill, Reuse, Recycle Reusing Wax Tablets in the Roman North-western Provinces,” in Erasing and Rewriting in Manuscript Cultures Practices of Text Obliteration and Manuscript Reuse in a Global Perspective, ed. Michele Cammarosano (De Gruyter, 2025).