SOHAG, EGYPT—According to an Ahram Online report, some 13,000 ostraca, or inscribed fragments of pottery, have been recovered at the site of Athribis, an ancient city in Upper Egypt. Christian Leitz of the University of Tübingen said that the texts span a period of more than 1,000 years. The oldest are tax receipts dated to the third century B.C. that are written in Demotic script. Other texts record information about religious life, temple activities, delivery orders, accounts, administrative lists, and student writing exercises. Most of these inscriptions are in Demotic, although some were written in Greek, hieratic script, hieroglyphic script, and Coptic. The most recent texts in the collection are jar labels written in Arabic between the ninth and eleventh centuries A.D. In all, more than 43,000 ostracons have been uncovered in Athribis. To read about ostracons found at the village of Deir el-Medina in southern Egypt, go to "The Cat and the Fat."
