They were used as notepads for private letters, laundry lists, records of purchases, and copies of literary works.An ostracon with child’s drawing. Image credit: Athribis-Project Tübingen.
Fragment of a school text with a bird alphabet in Hieratic. On the right, the name of the bird, and on the left, the numbers from 5 to 8, which reflect the position of the letters in the list. Image credit: Athribis-Project Tübingen.“Around 80% of the potsherds are inscribed in Demotic, the common administrative script in the Ptolemaic and Roman periods, which developed from Hieratic after 600 BCE.
“The contents of the ostraca vary from lists of various names to accounts of different foods and items of daily use,” they said.“There are lists of months, numbers, arithmetic problems, grammar exercises and a ‘bird alphabet’ — each letter was assigned a bird whose name began with that letter.”