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К вопросу о названии TABULAE VINDOLANDENSES
The article examines the issue of naming the wooden writing tablets from the Roman fort Vindolanda (late 1st - first quarter of the 2nd century AD), which represent a unique corpus of epistolary and documentary sources for the history of Roman Britain. Since their discovery in the 1970s, over a thousand specimens have been found, with approximately nine hundred published. However, scholarly literature lacks consensus on what these artifacts should be called. The author analyzes various terms found in classical literary and epigraphic sources - such as tabula, pugillaria, codicilli - and concludes that in the Roman world there was no standardized name for such objects; their designation depended on context, author, and purpose. Particular attention is paid to the term tilia (‘lime-wood’), which appears three times in the Vindolanda tablets themselves (Tab. Vindol. 643, 589, 893). The author argues that, regardless of the actual wood used, tilia became a conventional, locally understood designation for this type of writing material in Roman Britain. The article emphasizes that, while codicilli may have been dominant in the literary tradition, the epigraphic evidence points to regional specificity. Thus, the term tilia reflects not only the material but also the everyday writing practices of the northern frontier of the Roman Empire. The study contributes to the broader understanding of Roman provincial literacy, terminology, and material culture and highlights the need to avoid unwarranted generalizations when describing ancient writing practices.