When and where?

The text is not dated, but the style of writing indicates that it may have been written in the ninth or tenth century. The bone was acquired commercially in the 1960s, with an unknown provenance.

Yet, by the greatest coincidence, we know exactly from where it came. In the winter of 2004-05, a team of Egyptian and German archaeologists was excavating an ancient tomb near the city of Asyut in Upper Egypt. The tomb belonged to a local potentate who lived around the year 2000 BC. Deep in a shaft of the tomb, amidst rubbish that had gathered there over the centuries, the archaeologists found a bone that was similar to the Leiden one, inscribed by the same hand with the same text.

There can be no doubt that the two bones, as well as a similar third one now in an Italian collection, are a set and that all three originally came from the same ancient tomb near Asyut.