This is a picture of an ostracon. Papyrus was very expensive in Ancient Egypt, and used only for the most important documents. For everything else, shards of stone or pottery were used. This is a piece of limestone, and the unknown artist has used it to practice some hieroglyphic characters.

The ducklings shown here represent the glyph TA. The artist has drawn several, each more frenetic than the last. Note that he has drawn the ducklings facing to the right, which was the preferred direction in normal Egyptian texts. He has also drawn a lion, perhaps part of the glyph HAt. Interestingly, the duckling forms part of the word TAty 'vizier', and the lion, the word HAty-a 'governor'.

His skill with the brush probably indicates that this scribe was one of the fortunate few chosen to study hieroglyphs. In Ancient Egypt, every scribal student learned the hieratic style of writing (a more simplified and abstracted version of the hieroglyphs) as a matter of course. This was the style used in normal day-to-day writing, as well. Hieroglyphs per se were reserved for the most important texts: tomb paintings, sarcophagi, royal edicts, and the like, and only the most talented students went on to study it. Clearly, the artist of this piece of work was either one of those talented student scribes, or a working scribe keeping his hand in. (I've been using the masculine pronoun here because, unfortunately, the job of scribe was an overwhelmingly male occupation. Women were occasionally trained as scribes, but the odds are very high that the artist of this ostracon was male.)

© 1999, Terrence Donnelly