CNN —
Party invitations. Broken flip flops. Wigs. Complaints about road conditions and a heartfelt request for more beer.
While it sounds like the afterglow of a well-earned spring break, these items are nearly 2,000 years old.
These are just some of the relics found at Hadrian’s Wall, a 73-mile-long stone wall built as the northwestern border of the Roman Empire, separating Britannia (present-day England and Wales) from Caledonia (basically what is now Scotland).
When it comes to everyday objects preserved from Ancient Rome, most people think of Pompeii or Herculaneum, but this outpost in the northern wilderness of the empire is home to some of the most astonishing discoveries.
“It leaves a very dramatic mark on the countryside, and nothing makes you feel like you’ve stepped into the Roman Empire more than seeing this structure,” says Richard Abdi, head curator of the British Museum’s current special exhibition, Legion, which focuses on the daily life of a Roman soldier and displays many artefacts from Hadrian’s Wall. With a tenth of the Roman army based in Britain, Abdi says the wall was a treasure trove of military supplies.
But as the excavations have revealed, it’s not just about soldiers.
Darren Edon/English Heritage
Houstees resembled a modern garrison town, with a local community as well as soldiers.
Hadrian, who ordered the wall’s construction after a visit to Britain in A.D. 122, had a different vision for the empire than his predecessors, said Frances McIntosh, curator of 34 sites along Hadrian’s Wall for English Heritage.
“All the emperors before Hadrian tried to expand the empire, but Hadrian is known as the unifier,” she says. He gave up some of the territory his predecessor, Trajan, had gained, and “set out borders” — in some cases literally, with wooden posts in Germany and stones in Britannia. Where those posts decayed thousands of years ago, the walls still stand. “It’s a fantastic visual vestige of the Roman Empire,” McIntosh says.
It’s not just a wall: there are castles every mile, turrets every third of a mile, ditches and banks to the north and south. “It’s not hard to imagine what an impact that would have had not just on the landscape, but on the people living in that area,” says McIntosh.
And thanks to finds from the walls, we’ve learned a surprising amount about those people.
Historians have long thought of military outposts as remote, male-dominated places, but excavations along the walls show that this is not the case. Not only did soldiers bring their families with them, but civilians also settled on the outskirts of the settlement to conduct business. “Housesteads was almost like a garrison town,” says McIntosh. “There were places where you could have a drink.”
A Roman principle was not to station soldiers in their hometowns due to the risk of rebellion, which meant Hadrian’s Wall was a cultural melting pot, with soldiers from what is now the Netherlands, Spain, Romania, Algeria, Iraq and Syria. “It may have been more multicultural because it was a central point,” McIntosh said, adding that surrounding communities may have included merchants from across the empire.
Peter Nichols/Getty Images
The British Museum’s current Legion exhibition looks at military life across the empire, including the lives of women in far-flung garrisons.
The soldiers were divided into two groups: the legionnaires, Roman citizens from Italy, who had more rights than the other soldiers and could import olive oil, wine, and garum (a sauce made from rotten fish).
They served alongside the auxiliaries (soldiers from conquered states) and had fewer rights, but could usually obtain citizenship after 25 years of service.
Soldiers carved their names and regiments into stones to indicate which section of the wall they built, and about 50 of these are on display at Fort Chester’s.
However, the walls show that women and children were equally present.
Pottery brought to the camp from the Low Countries and North Africa shows that soldiers “brought their families along who cooked in traditional styles,” McIntosh said, and archaeologists have found ancient tajine pots that may have been used for North African-style cooking.
The gravestone of a woman named Regina, found at Fort Arbeia, indicates that she was a freed slave from southern England who was bought and married by a Syrian soldier.
Another woman buried at Fort Birdswald was buried wearing chain mail that likely came from modern-day Poland. “She probably married a military man,” said McIntosh, who called the wall “a melting pot of people from all over the world who came together under the military flag.”
“They worshipped the Roman gods and adopted local deities, but also brought their own religion,” she adds. At Karavala, a temple to Mithras, a Persian god, was originally located near a spring with a shrine to a local water spirit.
Adam Stanford/Vindolanda Trust
Vindolanda’s collection of 5,000 pairs of shoes is the largest ever found at a single Roman site, and women’s and children’s footwear, such as these baby boots, reveals a true military community.
Some of the Roman Empire’s most astonishing discoveries have come from Vindolanda, a site on one of Hadrian’s Walls, where archaeologists have uncovered a wealth of organic remains thanks to what curator Barbara Burley calls “the extraordinary circumstances of the site.”
Vindolanda has the remains of at least nine forts spread over 14 levels. “When the Romans left, they demolished the wooden fort and covered the area with turf and clay, sealing off the levels below,” she says.
“Because it’s been done so many times, the bottom five or six layers are sealed in anaerobic conditions and don’t decay. When we go down there, we get wood products, textiles, organic matter, you name it.”
Vindolanda is home to the largest collection of Roman textiles from a single site in Western Europe and the largest collection of leather from the Roman Empire, including 5,000 pairs of shoes and even broken leather flip-flops. “I think the population was between 3,000 and 6,000 people, depending on the time period, so 5,000 pairs is a lot,” says Bahley. For Abdi, the shoes evoke conditions in the wet borderlands. “The women’s and children’s shoes are fastened with studs, which was necessary on the muddy, remote, unpaved roads. It brings back so many memories.”
There are wigs made from hair moss, a local plant that is said to repel Scotland’s summertime enemy, the midges. Even centurions’ helmets are adorned with hair moss – the ancient equivalent of spraying yourself with bug repellent.
CM Dixon/Print Collector/Getty Images
This party invitation from one woman to another on Hadrian’s Wall is thought to be the world’s first example of a woman writing in Latin.
One of the most famous discoveries is the largest hoard of wooden writing tablets in the world.
“They are snapshots of what life was actually like at the time,” says Burley. “We understand more from the letters than from the ‘objects’ – archaeologically speaking, objects like metals and pottery are what usually survive.”
“These were written in ink, not a wax stylus, and we believe they were used as email content: ‘The roads are awful’, ‘The soldiers need more beer’, etc. Routine business.”
The tablet, a “personal letter” in Burley’s words, was discovered at the site of a bonfire lit when the Batavian IX Corps (in what is now the Netherlands) was ordered to move.
“They built a big bonfire and threw a lot of letters into the fire. Some were charred. I think it might have rained,” she says. One of the letters calls the locals “britunguri,” or “miserable little Englishmen.” Another talks about an outbreak of conjunctivitis. One claims the roads are too bad to send wagons through, and another laments that the soldiers have run out of beer.
Among the 1,700 letters, 20 mention a woman named Sulpicia Lepidina. She was the wife of a garrison commander and appears to have played an important role. In a letter to her from another woman named Paterna, she agrees to send two types of medicine, one of which is an antipyretic.
Burley says it’s similar to today: “If you’re in a mom group, you’ll still be like, ‘Do you have Calpol?’ It’s a very human thing.” To Abdi, it’s proof that these women were businessmen. “She’s clearly peddling drugs,” he says. “It’s really amazing stuff.”
The other tablet is an invitation to a birthday party from Claudia Severa, wife of another commander in a nearby camp. Beneath the formal invitation, presumably written by a scribe, is the following scrawled handwriting: “I’m waiting for you, sister. Farewell, sister, my dearest soul.”
Courtesy of Vindolanda Trust
Vindolanda’s unusual environment has allowed organic materials such as leather, textiles and wood to be preserved.
It was probably written by Claudia herself and is thought to be the oldest known example of a woman’s handwriting in Latin.
Unlike jewelry and weaving tools, it’s hard to conclusively prove that women lived in significant numbers without organic remains like shoes or letters that clearly belonged to women. The Vindolanda site “speaks to a missing void,” Abdi says.
For Burley, the tablets prove that women were just as important a part of the military community as men. “Until the Lepidina tablets we didn’t know much about the interactions between soldiers and their wives,” she says. Another tablet shows what appears to be the common-law wife of a Spanish standard-bearer ordering military equipment for her partner.
“The Vindolanda collection shows that it wasn’t just military servants and prostitutes, but that women were part of everyday life and contributed to military society in many different ways,” Burley says.
Abdi says Hadrian’s Wall is interesting because the women who lived there span “all strata of society,” from Regina, a deceased freed slave who would have been “at the very bottom,” to Paterna, a merchant, and Lepidina, an aristocrat.
And then, of course, there’s the wall itself.
“In Holland and Germany, many of the finds are so amazing and well preserved that you go to museums and are amazed, but in terms of structural remains, Hadrian’s Wall has to be one of the best,” McIntosh says humbly about his site.
Abdi agrees: “I can think of few other symbols that are as evocative of imperial intent as that wall.”
