Egypt: 43,000 Ancient Pottery Notes Found at Athribis

Imagine finding 43,000 ancient sticky notes that reveal exactly how regular people lived thousands of years ago.

That's what researchers uncovered at Athribis, an archaeological site 70 miles northwest of Luxor. Over the past two decades, they've excavated pottery fragments called ostraca that ancient Egyptians scrawled on like notepads.

The collection includes tax receipts, delivery records, schoolchildren's homework, religious texts, and even drawings of animals and gods. Some fragments show scorpions and swallows, while others depict a shrew, which was sacred to the Egyptian god Haroeris.

Christian Leitz, director of the Egyptology department at Germany's University of Tübingen, calls the discovery astonishing. "This everyday content gives us a direct insight into the lives of the people of Athribis," he says.

Ancient Egyptians were resourceful recyclers. When papyrus was expensive or scarce, they grabbed broken pottery pieces and limestone chips to jot down quick notes. The oldest ostraca found at Athribis dates to the third century B.C.E., though similar fragments from elsewhere reach back to the 15th century B.C.E.

Most of the Athribis fragments are written in Demotic, an ancient Egyptian cursive script. Others use Greek, Hieratic, hieroglyphic, and Coptic. The newest examples, written in Arabic, date to the ninth through 11th centuries C.E.

The team from the Tübingen Athribis Project started excavating in 2003, focusing on a temple built for Ptolemy XII, Cleopatra's father. In 2018, they expanded to a settlement west of the temple and struck gold. Between 2023 and now, they've been finding 50 to 100 sherds every single day.

Athribis now holds more ostraca than any other site, even surpassing Deir el-Medina, the famous ancient working-class village in the Valley of the Kings. About a third of all discovered ancient Egyptian documents are written on these humble pottery pieces.

Why This Inspires

These fragments prove that the most powerful historical records aren't always carved in monuments or sealed in tombs. Sometimes the deepest truths about humanity come from the everyday scribbles we leave behind: a student practicing their letters, a merchant tallying deliveries, someone doodling their favorite animal.

The team plans to digitize the entire collection so researchers worldwide can study these voices from the past, and they expect to find many more.