Thousands of stone “ notepads ” leave an unprecedented glimpse at routine living in Egypt 2,000 years ago have been discovered by archaeologists .
The texts come in in the strange material body of inscribed shards of pottery acknowledge as “ ostraca . ” Over the past 19 old age , digging by the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities and the University of Tübingen in Germany at the ancient settlement of Athribis have unearth over 18,000 of these ostraca , documenting many aspects of everyday life , including peoples ' names , receipts for food , mythology , offering to goddess , and school homework .
Much of what we currently know about ancient Egypt comes from the important documents , the grand mummies , and brilliant monuments of all - mighty pharaohs . On the opposite , the texts find at Athribis are particularly interesting as they moult light on the everyday life of the ordinary person , from the amazingly insightful to the beautifully unremarkable .
The text were written in a variety of different languages admit Greek , Hieratic , and hieroglyphic , plus a few rare examples in Coptic and Arabic playscript .
Up to 80 percentage of the texts were written in Demotic , the common administrative book in the Ptolemaic and papistic periods , which acquire out of Hieratic around 600 BCE . On top of Word , there are also figurative illustration of fauna and people , some appearing to have been drawn by children .
found on the nature of some of these text , the team think many of the ostraca were used by kid at an ancient school . In fact , they even discovered some texts are just inscribe with the same one or two theatrical role over and over again as if a school-age child is practice their calligraphy skills – or perhaps writing pedigree as a punishment . Some matter never change .
" There are leaning of months , number , arithmetic problem , grammar exercises and a ‘ bird alphabet ’ - each letter was designate a doll whose name began with that varsity letter , " Christian Leitz , a German Egyptologist who leads the Athribis Project , sound out in astatement .
“ These sherds [ broken pieces of ceramic ] show various figurative representations , let in brute such as scorpions and swallows , homo , God from the nearby temple , even geometrical physical body , " summate Leitz .
The Athribis Project initially set out in the early 2000s to unveil and put out a large temple build by Ptolemy XII , the sire of the famous Cleopatra VII . As the researchers mark , the number of texts detect at Athribis is practically unheard of . Such a large quantity of uncovering has only been made once before in Egypt at the workers ' village of Deir el - Medineh near the Valley of the Kings in Luxor .
Studyingthese schoolbook , written on both ostraca or papyrus , has helped to reveal a Brobdingnagian amount of knowledge about ancient Egyptian spirit . Perhaps with further work , the more late find from ancient Athribis may expose even more .
