Ancient Egyptians used broken pottery shards called ostraca for their everyday messages, and archaeologists recently struck the mother lode. Excavations at Athribis, a temple complex 300 miles south of Cairo, have yielded an astonishing 42,000 ostraca over eight years, making it Egypt’s most productive such site ever. The shards—spanning scripts from Demotic and Greek to Hieratic, Coptic, and Arabic—cover over 1,000 years of the daily life of ordinary Egyptians, capturing tax receipts, school exercises, animal sacrifice certificates, and horoscopes. As excavations intensify, the site continues to produce dozens of new finds daily, offering fresh insights into evolving cultures and languages.
Artnet
