This also happens in the desert: you spend hours turning shards over, you blow the dust away, and from a rough surface a receipt, a school assignment, a horoscope, a delivery of wine emerge. To Athribis, in Upper Egyptthat gesture repeated for years has given archaeologists further 43 thousand ostracarecovered between 2005 and 2026 by the joint mission of the University of Tübingen and the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities. For those looking from afar they seem like ordinary fragments. For those who read them, they become voices.
Ostraca were ceramic fragments, sometimes stone chips, used as a support for short texts: accounts, receipts, lists, reminders, exercises, work records. A kind of very hard-to-die post-it, created from cheap materials and always at hand. The studies also recall a fact that immediately puts the proportions back in their place: about a third of the Egyptian documents that have come down to us pass through these supports, and in several cases the fragments were prepared specifically to write on. Writing, in Egypt, was also part of the minute management of the day.
Among shards, receipts, school assignments, wine deliveries and horoscopes
Athribis, founded in the 4th century BC and located opposite the ancient Akhmim, was an important religious center, linked to the leonine goddess Repit. The site dominates the temple of Ptolemy XII, the sovereign who for many remains immediately linked to Cleopatra, because he was her father. Excavations had been working on this complex and its inhabited layers for years; from that soil emerged the largest collection of Egyptian ostraca documented so far, rich enough to surpass Deir el-Medina, the famous workers’ village in the Valley of the Kings.
The strength of this archive lies in its variety. The oldest fragments are tax receipts from the 3rd century BC written in Demotic, the cursive script used for administration in the Ptolemaic and Roman periods. The later ones bear Arabic inscriptions dating back to between the 9th and 11th centuries AD. In between are Greek, hieratic, hieroglyphic, Coptic, priestly certifications on the quality of the animals intended for sacrifice, delivery notes and small school exercises. Reading them in a row, Egypt changes its language, power and habits, leaving everything on the same terracotta skin.
Then there are the drawings, and there the material takes on an even more human temperature. In Athribis appear people, geometric figures, local deities, animals such as scorpions, swallows and shrews, the sacred animal of the god Haroeris. An amphora even contains an inscription recording the “first delivery from the southern vineyard”. Among the pieces that emerged there are also hieratic school texts, including a version of the so-called bird alphabet. And then over 130 demotic-hieratic horoscopes appear, enough to make Athribis the most important site in the world also for this type of documents.
Writing, at that point, stops seeming like a palace or temple affair alone. Here it takes the form of a life administered, taught, counted, corrected, offered to the gods, entrusted to a surface of fortune and yet extremely resistant. Inside him Athribis ostraca enter taxation, school, work, religion, astrology, even that very concrete way of marking off a wine delivery and moving on with the day. The social history of a place often passes through objects like this, small and stubborn.
The true size of the deposit has been understood since 2018, when an excavation area of 20 by 40 meters was opened to the west of the temple of Ptolemy XII, which was then expanded. Three years ago the extension towards the west brought the surface to 40 by 40 meters and around 40 thousand ostraca emerged there, with a daily rate of 50 to 100 registered pieces. To get to each one, workers had to turn and check hundreds of fragments. Together with the shards, mud brick buildings, living spaces and warehouse structures appeared: very concrete traces of a city that is showing its fabric again, room after room.
Here another work begins, much less spectacular and much longer. Each fragment must be photographed, studied, catalogued, and the entire corpus requires complete three-dimensional digitization. Specialized tools, computing power and trained personnel are needed. The idea of also relying on artificial intelligence systems exists and remains fascinating, because it could accelerate cataloging and digitization; the technical weight of training and maintenance, however, remains high. So the research continues above all with hands, eyes and patience. The same things that allowed the writings to get here.
The value of this discovery easily exceeds the numerical record. The Athribis ostraca they bring inside the daily life of a place for over a millennium and restore it without the ceremonial filter of monumental inscriptions. What remains are the accounts, the lessons, the wine, the names, the sacrifices, the predictions from the sky. On a shard, history lowers its voice. And it feels great.
