Ptahmose the woodcutter

Here we are at the entry for day ten, which we can read quite well by now: on day ten, workman Mose was on duty, and he received one unit of dates for the ‘left side’ of the crew and 600 units of firewood. What are the two signs at the end of the line, at the far left? The very last sign is effaced but recognizable as 𓄠. Confusingly, this is the same sign that is used as the identity mark of Mose, and at a first glance it is unclear why it is repeated here.

The key to understanding these two signs is found in another document, an ostracon written in the hieratic script (Fig. 1), which records the very same deliveries on the ostracon made by our writer. This hieratic text provides a little bit of additional information and records the names of the woodcutters responsible for delivering the units of firewood on day ten. They were called Ptahmose and Amenhotep. Maybe you can already tell where this is going: the name of woodcutter Ptahmose means ‘The-one-who-is-born-of-the-god-Ptah’ and contains the word mose. To record the name of this man, our writer therefore decided to use the hieroglyph for mose, which happens to be the same sign that the workman Mose used as his identity mark. At the end of the entry for day ten, this hieroglyph is a quick abbreviation that refers to the name of Ptahmose. The sign right of it is another hieroglyph that looks like 𓊵 and is used to write hotep. Here, it refers to the name of the other woodcutter called Amenhotep.

Great, we now know how to read this ostracon.If you want to find out exactly what the rest of the ostracon says, see Ben Haring and Daniel Soliman, 2014, ‘Reading twentieth Dynasty ostraca with workmen’s marks’, p. 86-88. But you may wonder at this point why this ostracon was ever made, especially as we have just seen that this information was duplicated in a hieratic document. Let’s dive a little deeper into the administrative practices of Deir el-Medina at the time of our writer.