Archaeologists Uncover 18,000 Ancient Egyptian 'Notepads'

Researchers excavating the ancient Egyptian city of Athribis have discovered more than 18,000 ostraca—inscribed pottery shards that essentially served as “notepads,” writes Carly Cassella for Science Alert. Ranging from shopping lists to trade records to schoolwork, the fragments offer a sense of daily life in the city some 2,000 years ago. Per Newsweek’s Robert Lea, the trove is the second-largest collection of ostraca ever found in Egypt.

Ancient Egyptians viewed ostraca as a cheaper alternative to papyrus. To inscribe the shards, users dipped a reed or hollow stick in ink. Though most of the ostraca unearthed in Athribis contain writing, the team also found pictorial ostraca depicting animals like scorpions and swallows, humans, geometric figures, and deities, according to a statement from the University of Tübingen, which conducted the excavation in partnership with the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.

A large number of the fragments appear to be linked to an ancient school. Over a hundred feature repetitive inscriptions on both the front and back, leading the team to speculate that students who misbehaved were forced to write out lines—a schoolroom punishment still used (and satirized in popular culture) today.

Around 80 percent of the ostraca are written in demotic, an administrative script used during the reign of Cleopatra’s father, Ptolemy XII (81 to 59 B.C.E. and 55 to 51 B.C.E.). Greek is the second-most represented script; hieratic, hieroglyphics, Greek, Arabic, and Coptic (an Egyptian dialect written in the Greek alphabet) also appear, testifying to Athribis’ multicultural history, per Science Alert.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/archaeologists-uncover-18000-ancient-egyptian-ostraca-180979543/

A purchase receipt for bread written in Demotic script University of Tübingen