An important source for business in Puteoli and coincidentally for many other aspects of the city is the archive of the Sulpicii. The archive consists of a set of writing tablets discovered in 1959 near Pompeii, but documenting financial transactions that took place in Puteoli. Scholars used to refer to them as the Tabulae Pompeianae di Murecine, after the place of discovery. Today they are called the Tabulae Pompeianae Sulpiciorum, abbreviated TPSulp., with reference to the textual edition by Giuseppe Camodeca, published in 1999. The history of the archive is rather sad. It was summarized in 2011 by Taco Terpstra, and we quote him here.

A model of the building in which the tablets were found (closed to the public).
Photo: ancientrome.ru.

"In 1959 during road construction in the Agro Murecine just outside the walls of Pompeii, workmen discovered the remains of an ancient villa, about 600 meters south of the city. In haste, an excavation was performed, but under pressure from the road contractors the archaeologists could uncover only a small part of the structure. What they found were five elegantly decorated triclinia opening up onto an equally elegant little garden. In one of those triclinia they found a wicker basket containing a large collection of writing tablets. Wood is usually not preserved in Pompeii, and this find was therefore remarkable. What had helped conserve perishable materials in this villa was the relatively wet condition of the soil. Predictably, after almost 1900 years in an anoxic environment, the wooden tablets started to deteriorate quickly once they were exposed to the outside air. The immense importance of the find was obvious to the archaeologists, and they tried to preserve the tablets as best they could. Regrettably, attempts to seal a number of them in a paraffin and paraloid coating turned out to be disastrous; the tablets, still containing some moisture, 'sweated' and their wax covering flaked off, utterly destroying the writing. Unable to stabilize the condition of the tablets, the archaeologists took photographs of them, and this set of (mostly) high-quality pictures now forms the basis for our knowledge of the tablets' content. Unfortunately, some of the tablets were overlooked and not photographed, one of several reasons why early editions were very unsatisfactory. The condition of the documents is now so poor that to the naked eye they are completely illegible. Using infra-red light, Camodeca was nonetheless able to distinguish and decipher parts of writing on the un-photographed surfaces."

"The collection as we now have it consists of 127 documents, although many are incomplete and some show no more than a name or a few words. They record various business transactions, mostly relating to loans. Two tablets, much larger in size than usual, were probably part of a ledger; they contain two entries in chronological order confirming that money had been paid out, possibly as loans, possibly as draw-downs on an account. A number of documents are canceled; they have three big letters 'SOL' (for solutum, 'paid') scratched through the text; others are canceled by long diagonal lines. In both cases these marks are a sure sign that the documents were kept for the duration of the contracts, and then for some time afterward as records of completed transactions. Two tablets show marks ('tab. XIII'; 'tab. XVIII') that should in all likelihood be interpreted as archival markers; other documents are palimpsests showing traces of previous writing."

Photo and drawing of one of the tablets (TPSulp. 54), dated 3 October 45 AD. Images: EDR075793. Over the text SOL(utum), "Paid", was written. The last line is Actum Puteolis, "Transacted at Puteoli".

"The villa in which the basket and its content were found was buried along with the rest of Pompeii during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. However, the documents turned out not to date from the period just prior to that event; they date from decades earlier, so far as we can tell from 26 AD to 61 AD. By the year 79 AD probably all had lost their value as written evidence for concluded transactions, as is suggested not so much by their age as by another characteristic. Some of the tablets, linked together in 'booklets' of diptychs and triptychs, seem to have been disassembled in antiquity. The majority of them are missing one or two tablets so that many documents are without their lists of witnesses, a state at least some were already in at the moment they were stored. This incompleteness would have rendered their value as evidence in a court setting zero, indicating that they were not being kept for business reasons. The room in which they had been placed further strengthens that notion; the triclinia of the Murecine building were being refurbished during the time of the eruption. The one in which the tablets were found was apparently used as a sort of general storage area containing building material and miscellaneous objects such as a part of a ship, oars, and an anchor - hardly a place for a current archive to be kept. A recent interpretation is that the whole complex was a hospitium or deversorium, welcoming travelers coming up the river with bathing and restaurant facilities."

"The main protagonists of the tablets are three bankers: C. Sulpicius Faustus, C. Sulpicius Cinnamus, and C. Sulpicius Onirus. We know from the archive that Cinnamus was the freedman of Faustus, while Faustus himself and Onirus seem to have been the sons of the freedman C. Sulpicius Heraclida. The tablets refer to transactions that took place not in Pompeii but for the most part in Puteoli, on the other side of the bay of Naples. Why the Sulpicii brought them with them to Pompeii and stored them there is a mystery. It is extremely tempting to connect the fact that the archive runs only to 61 AD to the earthquake that hit the bay of Naples in 62 AD. I think it is safer not to make too much of the approximate coincidence of the two dates, and to ascribe it to mere chance. A large number of inscriptions from the villa - about ninety scratched on marble revetments stacked in the kitchen area awaiting construction, and two more scratched on the walls - show the letters 'SVL'. Given also the presence of the archive, we can only conclude that the building belonged to the Puteolan Sulpicii or to their descendants."

Painting of the Muse Calliope, of epic poetry, with stilus and writing tablet.
From the building where the tablets were found. Photo: Wikimedia, Sailko.