Ostracon
Description
Ostracon, Demotic. Ptolemaic–Early Roman Period, 664 B.C.–A.D. 1st century. Pottery, ink. 13.5 × 9.5 cm (5 5/16 × 3 3/4 in.). From: Medinet Habu, Upper Egypt, Thebes, Egypt. Credit: Rogers Fund, 1914.
AI image analysis GPT-5.4-nano
Machine-generated from the object's image on Jul 2026. Not curatorial; treat deities, names, and signs below as the model's best reading, not authority.
A reddish-brown pottery ostracon fragment covered with dense ink handwriting in dark lines and clustered marks across most of its surface.
The object is a single, irregular ostracon fragment with uneven break edges. The surface is mostly covered by multiple horizontal and vertical ink strokes forming lines of cursive/handwritten text rather than carved monumental inscriptions. The ink appears dark (black/brown) and sits on the fired clay surface; the text is distributed throughout the visible face, with no clearly delineated cartouches, royal titulary boxes, or iconographic figures. No legible Greek, Coptic, or Arabic script is immediately identifiable from the image resolution; the signs resemble Egyptian cursive/miscellaneous documentary writing. No deities or human figures are shown.
Inscriptions (1)
Visible text (machine reading)
About this record's data
- From the source institution — accession, description, dimensions, and dating are as catalogued by Metropolitan Museum of Art — Egyptian Art (Open Access).
- AI-inferred — the image-analysis panel (deities, names, signs) is machine-generated and may be wrong.
- Approximate location — most map points are plotted at the site centroid, not the exact findspot.
- Inferred links — cross-references marked with a match method other than explicit-source-field were matched by us, not stated by the source.