A workmen’s community

This object is a fragment of a larger limestone flake, inscribed in black ink with a reed pen. In ancient Egypt, it was common practice for scribes – professional writers – to use such limestone pieces as a writing surface. Egyptologists call them ostraca in the plural, and ostracon in the singular. When Egyptian scribes did not use papyrus to write on, they often made ostraca, particularly for administrative documents.

Ostraca were written in the thousands at Deir el-Medina, the modern name of the settlement in which the writer of this ostracon lived (Fig. 1). Between ca. 1506 and 1100 BC, it housed the workmen who constructed and decorated the royal tombs in the nearby hills of ancient Thebes. These elite tomb builders were paid by the Egyptian state in rations that were delivered to the settlement. We know this thanks to the many administrative documents written by various scribes who lived in the village (Fig. 2). Explore Deir el-Medina and its community further at this website. A database of documentary texts from Deir el-Medina and a comprehensive bibliography related to its community is compiled at Leiden University.

These scribes wrote in hieratic, a cursive form of writing that is closely related to hieroglyphic script. Hieratic is a complex script that takes considerable training to master. Or so we can tell from the many writing exercises found at Deir el-Medina, made by students training to become professional scribes (Fig. 3). For more information about students in ancient Egypt, see Nikolaos Lazaridis, 2010, ‘Education and apprenticeship’ in: UEE. For more on student exercises, see Judith Jurjens, 2019, ‘The Teaching of Khety Twice – A New Reading of oBM EA 65597 as a School Exercise’ in: JEA. Indeed, literacy was exceptionally high in the elite workers community of which our writer was a member. Interestingly, he himself probably was not a trained scribe. This did not stop him from creating administrative documents. How did he manage to do so?