Imagine you need to tell your spouse you’ve run out of milk, or you want to jot down a quick tally of the inventory in your shop. Today, you might grab a yellow Post-It note or tap a quick message into your smartphone. But what if you lived in Thebes in 1200 BCE? You wouldn’t waste a pristine sheet of papyrus on a grocery list—that would be like printing a tweet on high-quality vellum. instead, you would look down at the ground, pick up a piece of a broken vase, and start scribbling.

These fragments are called ostraca (singular: ostracon), and they are the unsung heroes of historical linguistics. While the monumental inscriptions of temples and tombs give us the polished, official propaganda of kings, ostraca give us the messy, misspelled, and incredibly human reality of daily life. For linguists and language enthusiasts, these ceramic shards are a treasure trove that redefines what we know about ancient literacy and the evolution of language.

The High Cost of Writing Materials

To understand why ostraca were so ubiquitous, we first have to understand the economics of ancient writing. In antiquity, papyrus (in Egypt) and parchment (in later periods) were expensive, labor-intensive commodities. They were reserved for religious texts, legal contracts, and official government correspondence.

However, pottery was the ancient equivalent of plastic. It was everywhere, and it broke constantly. Once a clay vessel cracked, it was useless for holding water or grain, but the smooth, curved surface of a shard was perfect for holding ink. It was free, abundant, and durable.

For the linguist, the medium dictates the message. Because papyrus was expensive, texts written on it were carefully composed, edited, and distinctively formal. Because pottery shards were free, the texts written on them were spontaneous, informal, and filled with the vernacular—the street language of the ancient world.

Deir el-Medina: The Village of Scribes

Perhaps the most famous collection of ostraca comes from Deir el-Medina, the village of the artisans who built the tombs in the Valley of the Kings during the New Kingdom of Egypt (c. 1550–1070 BCE). Because these workers were highly skilled, the literacy rate in this specific village was astronomically higher than in the rest of the country.

Excavators have found thousands of ostraca here, providing a linguistic snapshot of how Ancient Egyptian was actually spoken, as opposed to how it was written on tomb walls. Here, we see the transition from Middle Egyptian (the classical language) to Late Egyptian (the spoken vernacular).

The “Call-in Sick” Logs

One of the most fascinating linguistic finds is a “register of attendance” from the British Museum. It’s essentially a massive spreadsheet on a rock tracking when workers were absent and why. The reasons listed offer a hilarious and human look at the vocabulary of excuses:

• Brewing beer: A common and valid excuse, as beer was a nutritional staple.
• Embalming a relative: Family duty was paramount.
• Bit by a scorpion: A distinct occupational hazard of the desert.
• Wife bleeding: A frank reference to menstruation, indicating that men stayed home to handle household chores during this time.

From a linguistic perspective, these notes are written in Hieratic, a cursive script that is the handwriting version of hieroglyphs. The strokes are rapid and abbreviated, showing how the script evolved for speed and efficiency—a “shorthand” that stands in stark contrast to the slow, deliberate carving of stone inscriptions.

The Greek Connection: Politics and Pottery

While the Egyptians used ostraca for administration and letters, the Ancient Greeks gave the object its heavy political weight. In fact, our modern English word “ostracize” comes directly from these clay shards.

In 5th-century BCE Athens, citizens could vote to banish a politician who was becoming too powerful or dangerous to the democracy. To cast their vote, citizens would scratch the name of said politician onto a pottery shard. If a person received 6,000 votes, they were exiled for ten years.

A Study in Dialects and Spelling

For the historical linguist, the thousands of surviving voting ostraca are a goldmine. Because every citizen had to cast a vote, these shards reveal the “handwriting of the masses.” They show us:

• Phonetic Spelling: Many Athenians couldn’t spell names according to the standard orthography. Instead, they spelled them exactly how they pronounced them. This allows linguists to reconstruct ancient accents and regional dialects that standard literature hides.
• Handwriting Evolution: We can see the difference between the neat, practiced hand of the educated elite and the shaky, uncertain letters of a farmer participating in his first vote.
• “Ghost Writers”: Interestingly, archaeologists have found heaps of ostraca with different names but identical handwriting. This suggests that illiterate voters would ask a scribe (or a political operative) to write the name for them, hinting at ancient election tampering.

Casual Insults and School Exercises

Beyond politics and business, ostraca held the casual musings of the bored and the young. Just as a modern student might doodle in the margins of a notebook, ancient students used ostraca for school exercises.

We have found shards with the alphabet written out repeatedly, or standard proverbs copied over and over again to practice grammar. These artifacts are vital for understanding the pedagogy of the ancient world—how language was taught, not just how it was used.

Even more entertaining are the insults. On one Greek ostracon, a writer simply sketched a crude face and wrote, “This is rascally Themosticles.” It is a prehistoric meme, a testament to the fact that humans have always used the written word to poke fun at one another.

What Ostraca Teach Us About Literacy

For a long time, historians believed that literacy in the ancient world was the exclusive domain of the 1%—the priests and royal scribes. However, the sheer volume of ostraca found in trash heaps suggests a different story. It points to a concept known as functional literacy.

A trader might not have been able to read The Iliad or the Book of the Dead, but they could almost certainly read a receipt, write a list of goods, or recognize a name on a voting shard. Ostraca prove that reading and writing were not just sacred acts; they were pragmatic tools used by laundrymen, builders, and soldiers.

The language found on these shards is often “ungrammatical” by the standards of the high court, featuring slang, code-switching, and simplified grammar. This provides evidence of diglossia in the ancient world—a situation where a community uses two distinct forms of the same language (one high/formal, one low/informal).

Conclusion: The Digital Ostraca

Today, we generate the equivalent of ostraca every hour. Our text messages, tweets, and sticky notes are the ephemeral, informal writings of our time. Like the ancient shards, our digital scribbles are often filled with abbreviations, slang, and emojis, distinct from the formal English we use in textbooks.

When archaeologists sift through the sands of Egypt and find a receipt for a donkey or a note complaining about a scorpion bite, the distance between the centuries collapses. We realize that while the medium changes—from clay to paper to pixels—the fundamental human need to communicate the mundane details of daily life remains exactly the same.

So, the next time you scribble a grocery list on the back of an envelope, remember: you are participating in a tradition as old as civilization itself.