Crossing Invisible Boundaries: An Erased Letter to the Chief of the Storehouse Ḥwy. (original) (raw)
2023, In Ola el-Aguizy & Burt Kasparian (eds.), Proceedings of the Twelfth International Congress of Egyptologists ICE XII, 3rd–8th November 2019, Cairo, Egypt, Bibliothèque générale 71, Cairo (Institut français d’archéologie orientale), pp. 753–760.
This ostracon previously belonged to the collection of the Bodleian library, then all Bodleian ostraca were sent to the Ashmolean Museum, whereas the papyri remained in the Bodleian library (information kindly provided by Dr. Helen Whitehouse, formerly in charge of the Department of Antiquities of the Ashmolean Museum). 2. The paleographical features of the text, the thin pointed script resulted from using the Greek reed pen, suggest decisively the Roman period as a possible date for this ostracon: Depauw 1997, p. 26.
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The Ostraca, in G. Vörös, Machaerus I, History, Archaeology and Architecture of the Fortified Herodian Royal Palace and City Overlooking the Dead Sea in Transjordan, Milano 2013, pp. 259-277
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reason lies in the contents of these texts, their chronology and the culture they belong to. Texts written on ostraca are of the same kind and in the same languages as those written on papyrus, and they were produced in the same period, in the same places and by the same people. As we will see, the use of various writing materials in everyday life was completely normal and each text that we find on an ostracon could equally have been written on papyrus.
Ten Notes on Attic Inscriptions (2001)
rejected by IG i3 (see IG i3 app. crit.); but Raubitschek's n]ex?A,o may not be right either. Despite the kome Petalidai in Aphidna (Rationes, 194) and the occurrence of n?xoc?o? as a personal name elsewhere (see LGPN1, IIIA and B), it is not securely attested in Attica.2 ??xaXo?, on the other hand, is, and in the right period and class, namely for sons of the tyrant Peisistratos and of Kimon.3 Davies has already plausibly inferred from FGH 373 Heliodoros nepi 'Aicporco^eco? F54 that it occurred on an Acropolis dedication. Ours might be the dedication in question; and it is not out of the question that the dedicator was the tyrant's grandson.
Greek Literary Ostraca Revisited
Using Ostraca in the Ancient World. New Discoveries and Methodologies, 2020
In 1976 Paul Mertens produced a survey of previously published Greek literary ostraca, arranging them chronologically and indicating their provenance.1 In his selection Mer-tens followed the catalogue of literary papyri compiled by Roger Pack, who defined literary texts as "most or all of the texts that were intended to reach the eyes of a reading public or at least possessed a more than ephemeral interest or usefulness."2 Although, as Pack noted, in practice this selection meant that only documents and private letters ought to be excluded; however, with some exceptions, he also left out magical as well as "Biblical and other Jewish and Christian" texts, not because they were deemed not literary, but because separate catalogues existed or were being prepared for them.3 Exclusion of these kinds of texts from Mertens' survey in turn had consequences for both his statistical observations on the chronological distribution of literary ostraca (because a lot of specimens from the Byzantine period were left out) and for his discussion of practices associated with them (because the notion of a Christian text does not correspond to any single distinct practice). Yet Mertens' short study has remained the sole attempt at a comprehensive approach to Greek literary ostraca, and many of his observations have been further supported by new findings and publications. Mertens lists 143 ostraca, both pottery sherds and limestone fragments inscribed mostly in ink but also incised. He observes that, of the approximately datable ostraca, Ptolemaic pieces comprise 24 %, while Roman and Byzantine amount to 35 % and 41 %, respectively. Upper Egypt is clearly the source of the majority of extant finds: 84 % of ostraca with attested or determinable provenance come from that part of Egypt. In terms of text types, most could be associated with educational contexts, but Mertens also points out that medical recipes and drafts of inscriptions are also recognizable categories, while a few more literary texts, including five 'lyriques et épigrammatiques', remain outside of these categories. Furthermore, Mertens makes an interesting observation that the share of adespota among literary ostraca is much higher than it is in the overall papyrological evidence.4
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