Archaeologists Unearth More Than 40,000 Pieces of Pottery That Ancient Egyptians Used Like Scrap Paper

The ostraca, some dating back to the time just before Cleopatra, were discovered within the ancient ruins of Athribis

Sonja Anderson | Daily Correspondent

March 24, 2026

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Researchers in Egypt have discovered a massive trove of what amount to ancient notepads. The 43,000 ostraca—sherds of broken pottery onto which Egyptians scrawled short messages—were excavated from the archaeological site of Athribis over the past two decades.

“The ostraca show us an astonishing variety of everyday situations,” says archaeologist Christian Leitz, director of the Egyptology department of the University of Tübingen in Germany, in a statement from the school. “We find tax lists and deliveries, along with short notes about everyday activities, exercises by schoolchildren, religious texts and priestly certificates attesting the quality of sacrificial animals.”

Athribis was built in the fourth century B.C.E., about 70 miles northwest of Luxor; researchers from the Tübingen Athribis Project, a collaboration between the university and Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, have been studying its ruins since 2003. They began with the aim of excavating the buried rooms of the city’s main temple, erected for Ptolemy XII, father to Cleopatra, in the first century B.C.E.

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In 2018, while excavating a settlement west of the temple, the team found mud-brick buildings, living quarters, storage structures and a large deposit of ceramics, including ostraca. Then, in 2023, researchers expanded their excavation area further west, where they unearthed between 50 and 100 sherds each day.

This haul, taken with ostraca found elsewhere in Athribis, makes for a total of 43,000 inscribed fragments excavated on the site. According to the statement, Athribis is now the “most productive site for ostraca to date,” surpassing the famously ostraca-rich Deir el-Medina, an ancient working-class village in the Valley of the Kings.

Ancient Egyptians would often recycle cheap, accessible materials as scrap paper. Older examples of these ostraca are fragments of limestone, like a 280-day record of employees attendance that dates to around 1250 B.C.E. The oldest ostraca found at Athribis dates back to the third century B.C.E. They’re tax receipts written in Demotic script (ancient Egyptian cursive), which administrators used during Egypt’s Ptolemaic and Roman eras.

Most of the examples found at Athribis are inscribed in Demotic, but a significant portion were written in Greek. Others are inscribed with figurative and geometric designs. The researchers also found some ostraca written in hieratic, hieroglyphic and Coptic. The newest examples found onsite are inscribed in Arabic and date to the vessels ninth to 11th centuries C.E.

Per the statement, many of the ostraca contain personal notes and lists, recorded accounts and copied texts. But others are pictorial ostraca, depicting people, geometric figures, gods, and animals like scorpions and swallows.

“This mixture is what makes the find so valuable,” Leitz says in the statement. “This everyday content gives us a direct insight into the lives of the people of Athribis and makes the ostraca an important source for a comprehensive social history of the region.”

Indeed, ostraca have proven extremely useful to historians studying ancient Egypt. About a third of all discovered ancient Egyptian documents are written on pottery or stone ostraca. Traditionally, experts assumed that people resorted to ostraca only when faced with a lack of papyrus, but some believe select scribes intentionally cut and wrote on pieces of pottery.

“We expect to find many more ostraca,” Leitz says. “The high and ever-growing number of objects is encouraging, but it also presents us with challenges.”

Leitz says in the statement that he wishes to digitize the growing collection of Athribis ostraca.

Sonja Anderson | Read More

Sonja Anderson is a writer and reporter based in Chicago.