New Kingdom Ostraca – Everyday Voices from Deir el-Medina

The New Kingdom ostraca of the Museo Egizio form one of the most important collections of written everyday documents from ancient Egypt. These small flakes of limestone and pottery, used as a cheap writing surface, come above all from Deir el‑Medina, the village of the royal workmen who cut and decorated the tombs in the Valley of the Kings and Queens.

Within ME‑Scripta, a dedicated project will reassess this rich corpus of hieratic and hieroglyphic ostraca dating mainly to the 18th–20th Dynasties. The material is extraordinarily varied and includes:

• notes on deliveries of stone, wood and food rations for the workmen;
• administrative and legal records, such as duty rosters, absences and disputes;
• school exercises, model letters and literary excerpts used in scribal training;
• short religious texts, hymns and personal prayers;
• private letters that reveal friendships, family tensions and daily concerns.

By combining new autoptic readings with digital tools, the project will update the documentation, editions and translations of the ostraca and link them more closely with the papyri and archaeological context of the site. Particular attention will be paid to handwriting and layout, allowing scribal hands to be identified and social networks within the community to be traced.

In this way, the New Kingdom ostraca of Deir el‑Medina become a central pillar of ME‑Scripta: they bring us as close as possible to the spoken voices, routines and anxieties of the people who built the royal tombs, complementing the more formal and monumental sources of the period.