Egyptian Ostraca

Caroline Sauvage 

Andy Hogan

This project aims to catalogue and document the collection of Ostraca housed in the LMU collection. Once the catalogue (around 380 objects) will be completed, it will be available online to scholars and researcher world-wide.

The collection from LMU dates from approximately 450 to 350 BC. It exhibits documents written with black ink on sherds of pottery. The languages included in our collection include Hieratic and Demotic Egyptian, Coptic Egyptian, some Greek, and very few later Arabic documents. These were commonly used in Egypt for all kind of documents, such as tax receipts, tags, labels, lists of names, letters and other temporary documents. They were a medium chosen by local scribes to write, and it is likely that ancient pots or larger sherds were specifically cut by scribes to fit their needs (Caputo 2021). Potsherds would have been readily available everywhere as centuries of broken pots littered ancient cities. The documents constitute an invaluable source of knowledge for scholars of varied disciplines, especially economic history of the Ptolemaic period, yet they are often neglected.

The collection was assembled in Egypt in Aswan, Elephantine and Luxor by Jesuit expeditions in Egypt in the 1930s. These objects constitute a long-term loan to LMU by the PBI in Jerusalem, where the rest of this collection is preserved. Other ostraca from Elephantine excavated by a French team in 1906-1911 are now preserved at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo and at the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres in Paris.