Ostracon
Description
Late Period–Ptolemaic Period, 400–30 B.C. Pottery, ink. 9.5 x 8 x 1.1 cm (3 3/4 x 3 1/8 x 7/16 in.). From: Hibis, Western Desert; Kharga Oasis, Egypt. Excavation: MMA excavations, 1908–10. Credit: Rogers Fund, 1925.
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 with faint, reddish-black painted/inked marks forming lines of writing across the surface.
The object is a roughly triangular pottery fragment with irregular broken edges and a slightly rounded surface. The central and upper portions show faint dark red/black traces consistent with ink or painted hieroglyphic-style signs arranged in horizontal lines, though most characters are too worn or low-contrast to read confidently. No clear figurative scene, deities, or royal titulary/carthouches are legible. No Greek, Coptic, or Arabic text is visible. The background is a plain light color, and the artifact appears photographed against it; no mounting hardware is visible. Overall preservation is fragmentary, with the writing heavily abraded.
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.