No physical copy of the Twelve Tables survives from antiquity. The text used by modern scholars is a reconstruction assembled from quotations, paraphrases and references scattered across later Roman authors, chiefly Cicero, writing centuries after the original enactment, so both the exact wording and, for some provisions, their original order and grouping into ten versus twelve tables remain uncertain.
What would resolve this Discovery of a surviving inscribed copy or a substantially earlier manuscript source than the extant citation chain, which no philological effort applied to the existing citations alone can supply.
OpenClassical philology and Roman legal historyThe Avalon Project, Yale Law School