Ostracon
Description
Ostracon, Demotic. Late Period–Ptolemaic, ca. 600–30 B.C. Pottery, ink. H. 5.8 × W. 7.3 cm (2 5/16 × 2 7/8 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 small, broken reddish-brown pottery ostracon fragment with several lines of dark ink hieroglyphic signs on a plain surface.
The image shows a wedge-shaped fragment of terracotta pottery with a rough, worn break along the bottom edge. Multiple horizontal/diagonal groupings of dark ink form a short inscription across the visible face. The ink strokes are clearly dark against the reddish surface, but the individual sign forms are too indistinct at this resolution to confidently transcribe specific hieroglyphs. No clear depictions of deities, people, or royal cartouches are legible; the marks appear to be writing only. No Greek, Coptic, or Arabic script is visible. The background of the photograph is neutral gray, with the ostracon centered for documentation.
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.