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.

A broken, flat terracotta pottery fragment (ostracon) with faint black ink marks forming a few linear signs on one face.

The image shows a reddish-brown, porous pottery fragment shaped like a small sheet with irregular edges and a rough break on the right side. On the principal face there are faint, dark ink traces: mostly thin, linear strokes with at least one vertical line and several short horizontal/diagonal marks, suggestive of partial hieroglyphic cursive or abbreviated signs, but the characters are not clear enough to identify confidently. No cartouches or royal names are legible. No figural imagery or deity iconography is visible. The back side is not shown clearly; the marks appear to be on one face. There is no visible Greek, Coptic, or Arabic text in the provided image.

unclear Late Period–Ptolemaic Period (catalogue ground truth; specific dating not determinable from the image alone) fragmentary
Materials potteryink
Signs unidentified linear ink signs ×5

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.