Archaeologists have uncovered a huge trove of notes written on the Ancient Egyptian equivalent of scrap paper. A German-Egyptian team says it has uncovered more than 43,000 inscribed pottery and limestone fragments—essentially 2,000-year-old receipts, memos, and homework—from an archaeological site west of the Nile, Gizmodo reports. The pieces, called ostraca, were excavated between 2005 and 2026 at Athribis, a temple complex dedicated to the lion goddess Ta-Repit, according to the University of Tübingen. Most of the finds were made in the last eight years.
"The ostraca show us an astonishing variety of everyday situations," excavation director Christian Leitz said in a news release. "We find tax lists and deliveries, along with short notes about everyday activities, exercises by schoolchildren, religious texts, and priestly certificates attesting the quality of sacrificial animals. This mixture is what makes the find so valuable." Most texts are in Demotic, the administrative script of the Ptolemaic and Roman eras; others appear in Greek, hieroglyphs, and later Arabic, stretching the record from around 300BC into the 9th–11th centuries AD.
"This everyday content gives us a direct insight into the lives of the people of Athribis and makes the ostraca an important source for a comprehensive social history of the region," Letiz said. The shards are so numerous that some days bring 50 to 100 new finds, and each must be scanned in 3D, cataloged, and translated. The site has now produced more ostraca than any other, surpassing a huge trove found in an ancient workmen's village in the Valley of Kings, and the team expects more ostraca to surface as excavations continue.
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