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 reddish pottery sherd (ostracon) with faint red-brown ink marks on its surface.

The image shows a flat, irregular fragment of terracotta-colored pottery with weathering and chips along the edges. On the upper-left/central area there are faint ink strokes in a reddish-brown tone, but the characters are too fragmentary and low-contrast to read reliably. No cartouche borders, royal titles, or clearly identifiable divine iconography are visible. No Greek/Coptic/Arabic text is apparent. The ink appears to be written directly on the pottery, consistent with an ostracon inscription, though individual signs cannot be confidently counted or identified.

hieroglyphic only Late Period–Ptolemaic (per catalogue; signs not legible enough to refine) fragmentary
Materials potteryink
Signs unidentified linear ink sign(s) (too faint/fragmentary) ×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.