The Albertini Tablets (French: Tablettes Albertini) are a set of 33 (or 34) legal documents in Latin cursive written in ink on 45 cedarwood tablets from the years 493–496. They were discovered in 1928 by local miners in a cache on the estate of Jabal Mrata near the Algeria–Tunisia border, just south of ancient Theveste and beyond the southern frontier of the Vandal Kingdom.[1] [2] They are all dated by the regnal years of the Vandal king Gunthamund.[3] [4] [5] They are named for Eugène Albertini, who edited the first transcription.[6] The tablets are presently conserved at the National Museum of Antiquities and Islamic Art in Algiers, Algeria.
The place where the documents were found is Saharan pre-desert at the limit of the cultivable zone and of permanent human settlement.[5] The tablets show that in the Vandal period arboriculture (including of olive) and floodwater irrigation were practised in the area.[4] Besides agriculture, the tablets reveal the legal, social and economic practices in and on the fringes of the Vandal Kingdom.[5] They also provide useful information about Late Latin grammar and phonetics.[4]