DIPTYCH, a double tablet made with a hinge to open and shut. Diptychs were used in the time of the Roman empire for sending letters—“mainly love letters,” says Facciolati, quoting the scholiast to Juvenal ix. 36, whose note does not, however, seem to imply as much. The consuls and quaestors used, on assuming office, to send diptychs containing their names and portraits to their friends. The exterior of the leaves was often ornamented with other paintings. The tablets were made, the more ordinary kind of boxwood or maple, the richer sort of cedar, of ivory, of silver, and sometimes even of gold. They were very frequently sent by friends to each other as presents at the beginning of a new year. The early Christians used tablets thus made in the celebration of divine worship. And Cardinal Noris (Dissertai, de Hist. Synod.) expends much learning in showing, what is very evident, that the Christians adopted the use of them from that of the consular diptychs. They were placed on the “ambones,”—the pulpits, or reading desks, which may still be seen in ancient basilicas at the west end of the choir or presbytery; and from them were read to the congregation of the faithful the names of the celebrating priests, of those who occupied the superior positions in the Christian hierarchy, of the saints, martyrs, and confessors, and, in process of time, also of those who had died in the faith. It is the diptychs that are referred to by the early Christian writers under the names of “mystic tablets,” “anniversary books,” “matriculation registers” of the church, and sometimes “books of the living,” or “books of life.” The word is also occasionally found used in other senses, e.g. for the priest’s vestment, which was usually folded in two (see Ducange, ad ...