Metropolitan Museum of Art — Egyptian Art (Open Access) · ostracon

Ostracon

Source of record: Metropolitan Museum of Art — Egyptian Art (Open Access) — catalogued by the holding institution. View the original record →

Description

Pottery, ink

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.

Fragment of a terracotta pottery ostracon with faint, worn traces of ink/inscribed markings on the surface.

The image shows a broken, roughly rectangular-to-irregular sherd of reddish-brown pottery against a light background. The surface is uneven and weathered, with small chips and abrasions. Near the center and lower area there appear to be very faint, dark traces consistent with ink writing, but the marks are too fragmentary and low-contrast to reliably read individual hieroglyphs. No clear royal cartouche, deity figure, or legible sign sequence is visible. No Greek, Coptic, or Arabic text is apparent. The overall condition is worn, with inscriptions largely illegible, consistent with an ostracon that has been handled or abraded.

hieroglyphic only Late Period–Ptolemaic Period (as catalogued; exact sign style not legible here) fragmentary
Materials potteryink (faint traces)

Connections

Found at Hibis
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.