In the course of excavations at the site of the Bloomberg's future European Headquarters between 2010 and 2014, a stunning discovery was made in the very centre of London. An iron stylus to write on wax tablets from the Roman period (dated c. 62–70) was unearthed. What made this discovery ‘one of the most human finds’, as it was described by its finder, was not the fact that the place of discovery was to become a building that now accommodates hundreds of journalists who used to take note with similar, but more modern, objects until a couple of decades ago. Rather, it is the inscription that was uncovered on its facets, which revealed that the stylus was a gift brought back from the city (‘ab urbe’), understood as the caput mundi, that is, Rome:

The person who had these words engraved on the stylus had recourse to poetry. Even if the imperfections of his epigram betray the work of an amateur, he successfully expressed various images (association of the sharp point with remembrance, fortune with poverty, generosity with long distance).

This inscribed stylus may be unique in the Roman world, but in Islam, gift-giving often went along with poetry, a tradition that was deeply rooted in the ẓarf etiquette with which the group of elegant people (ẓurafā’ ) identified themselves in the third/ninth–fourth/tenth centuries. In the following centuries, the literati never missed an opportunity to compose poetry to thank a friend or a colleague for sending a gift inscribed with or accompanied by some verses. Just as the person who brought back the Roman stylus to offer it to a friend composed some verses that he had inscribed on the object to convey his feelings, writing tools in Islam were frequently adorned with engraved inscriptions, some of which consisted of poems.

With the increase of power enjoyed by the class of secretaries, the pen box (dawāt, a Persian term that originally designated the inkwell) came to represent an emblematic symbol of their status. In the Mamluk period, the executive secretary was known as the dawādār (‘pen box-bearer’) [Figure 16.1], and the pen box became a visual emblem used by their holders in a wide variety of settings, from portable objects to architecture.