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 small, triangular reddish-brown pottery ostracon with faded black-brown ink marks arranged in a few horizontal lines on one face.

The object is a broken pottery sherd shaped roughly like a triangle. One side has several faint ink strokes forming traces of what may be hieroglyphic signs or cursive marks; the writing is heavily abraded and no individual sign can be reliably read. No clear figurative imagery or divine symbols are visible, and there are no legible Greek/Coptic/Arabic characters. The ink appears dark brown/black against the light reddish clay, consistent with an ostracon used for writing.

hieroglyphic only Late Period–Ptolemaic Period (consistent with catalogue; exact dating from image not secure due to faded writing) fragmentary
Materials potteryink
Signs unknown ink sign(s) ×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.