Firewood

Further down the line of day ten, we find more evidence that our writer knows hieratic numbers. Here, he has written the hieratic number 600. Perfectly legible, but again, his penmanship is remarkably clumsy. Unlike the writing of most trained scribes, all his signs are made with strokes of the same thickness. He applies the same pressure to every part of the sign, in contrast to hieratic scribes who can manipulate their pen to create elegant signs with narrower parts (Fig. 1).

The sign left of the number 600 looks a little bit like a hieratic sign used to write the Egyptian word for firewood. Great quantities of firewood, used as fuel, were delivered to the settlement of Deir el-Medina on a daily basis. In the days of our writer, these and other daily deliveries were often meticulously recorded in hieratic documents. Such texts indicate that the workmen of Deir el-Medina organized the arrival of these deliveries according to a rotating duty roster. Each day, a different workman was excused from working on the royal tombs and stood guard at the settlement to receive the incoming goods.Egyptologists sometimes refer to this corvée system as a turnus. For more on the Deir el-Medina turnus lists, see this page written by Rob Demarée (Leiden University) at the Deir el-Medina database.

It is precisely these types of events that our writer has recorded on this ostracon. He could not write full hieratic texts, and yet, he found a way to pen down the deliveries. In the next steps, we see how he managed to record different commodities.