Ostracon
Description
Ostracon, Demotic. Late Period–Ptolemaic, ca. 600–30 B.C. Pottery, ink. H. 7.8 × W. 8.7 cm (3 1/16 × 3 7/16 in.). From: Medinet Habu, Upper Egypt, Thebes, Egypt. Excavation: Davis excavations, 1912–13. Credit: Gift of Theodore M. Davis, 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 pottery sherd (ostracon) with faded brownish/black ink marks forming what appear to be lines of writing on the surface.
The image shows a small, roughly rectangular reddish-orange ceramic fragment with irregular edges, photographed against a light gray background. Dark, faded ink traces are visible across the sherd, arranged in several horizontal groupings/lines; individual signs are too unclear to reliably identify or count. No figurative imagery, cartouches, or clear deity names can be confirmed from the current resolution. There is no clearly visible Greek, Coptic, or Arabic text. The object matches the catalogue description as an ostracon written in ink on pottery, with the stated Late Period–Ptolemaic dating plausible but not confirmable from visual features alone.
Connections
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.