Counting the days

The writer of this ostracon may not have been a trained scribe, but he was certainly familiar with hieratic script. Let’s take a look at what the signs on this ostracon mean. Like scribes writing in hieratic, this document consists of lines written from right to left. Three lines are quite well preserved and they all start with a mirrored form of the sign 𓋴. In hieratic, it stands for the sound s. Next, there is a hieratic number. One line has 𓎆, the number ten; the line below has 𓏺𓎆, eleven; and the line below that reads 𓏺𓏺𓎆 for twelve. They are hieratic signs, yes, but a fully trained hieratic scribe would frown upon them because they have been so poorly executed. The handwriting is unsteady, and the signs look clumsy and ill-proportioned. Moreover, these signs do not form words. Instead, as we now know, our writer used simple signs as abbreviations for words. Take for example his s-sign, which stands for the ancient Egyptian word su, meaning ‘day’. In hieratic, the word for ‘day’ is written in a completely different way, without the sign 𓋴. But it is clear what our writer is doing. Line by line, he is listing the days of the month according to the Egyptian calendar. And he has more tricks up his sleeve, as we discover in the next step.