A bloody sign

We are now zoomed in to the very last sign on the stone, drawn in black and red ink. This sign depicts a sitting man (in black) with blood streaming from his head (in red). This final sign tells us the text includes the name of a deceased individual.

The Cairo texts have a similar sign, but there, the sitting person is a woman. These and similar signs do not indicate a violent death, but simply express the status of an individual as deceased in Egyptian hieroglyphic and in hieratic writing.

Further pieces of information supplied by the texts are the deceased’s profession, the name of his supervisor, the names of his parents, and the place where he lived or worked.

Together with the fact that these objects were found in graves, we might say they were a form of ancient ID, meant for the dead.