Archaeologists have uncovered tens of thousands of stone “notepads” that provide an unprecedented peek into daily life in Egypt 2,000 years ago. The inscriptions are engraved on shards of earthenware known as “ostraca,” which are rare. Over 18,000 of these ostraca have been discovered at the ancient settlement of Athribis by the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities and the University of Tübingen in Germany over the past 19 years, documenting many aspects of daily life, including people’s names, receipts for food, mythology, offerings to goddesses, and school homework.
Much of what we know about ancient Egypt now comes from important records, majestic mummies, and magnificent monuments built by all-powerful pharaohs. The texts unearthed at Athribis, on the other hand, are particularly noteworthy since they offer light on average people’s daily lives, ranging from the startlingly astute to the charmingly prosaic.
The manuscripts were written in a range of languages, including Greek, Hieratic, and Hieroglyphic, as well as a few rare Coptic and Arabic script instances. During the Ptolemaic and Roman periods, up to 80% of the documents were written in Demotic, a popular administrative script that emerged from Hieratic circa 600 BCE.
There are also figurative images of animals and humans, some of which appear to have been made by children, in addition to the words. The team believes that many of the ostraca were used by students at an ancient school, based on the nature of some of the inscriptions. In reality, they noticed that certain writings are just engraved with the same one or two characters again and over, as if a student were practicing calligraphy or penning lines as a punishment. Some things remain constant.
In a statement, Christian Leitz, a German Egyptologist who directs the Athribis Project, said, “There are lists of months, numbers, arithmetic problems, grammatical exercises, and a ‘bird alphabet’ – each letter was allocated a bird whose name began with that letter.” “These sherds [broken pieces of porcelain] depict a wide range of figurative images, including scorpions and swallows, humans, gods from the neighboring temple, and even geometric shapes,” Leitz continued.
The Athribis Project began in the early 2000s with the goal of uncovering and publishing a massive temple erected by Ptolemy XII, the famed Cleopatra VII’s father. The experts point out that the number of manuscripts discovered at Athribis is practically unprecedented. Only once previously has such a massive number of findings been made in Egypt, at the workers’ town of Deir el-Medineh near Luxor’s Valley of the Kings. The study of these texts, which were written on ostraca or papyrus, has revealed a wealth of information about ancient Egyptian life. The more recent finds from ancient Athribis may reveal considerably more with additional investigation.
