Winter break is over, have you finished your homework?
Recently, archaeologists in the long-lost ancient city of Athribis in central Egypt have discovered the largest batch of ancient Egyptian "notepads" since the beginning of the 20th century — more than 18,000 pieces of pottery inscribed with inscriptions, with months, numbers, grammar exercises and bird-shaped alphabet lists — which are likely the remains of ancient Egyptian schools.
Interestingly, many of these pottery tablets have a lot of repetitive writing practices on them — it seems that more than 2,000 years ago, strict Egyptian teachers were asking students to "copy 100 times."
Ruins of the ancient city of Arthur Libis
Arthur Libis is located on the west bank of the Nile, about 200 kilometers north of Luxor, the famous ancient capital of Egypt. Excavations of the ancient city have been going on for almost 100 years, but large-scale and formal excavations began in 2003 – jointly carried out by the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Monuments and the University of Tübingen in Germany.
In the latest discovery, archaeologists found more than 18,000 pieces of pottery with writing written in ink. The pieces of pottery came from pottery vessels such as broken clay pots, written by writers dipped in ink with feathers or hollow reeds, and these pieces of pottery with characters written had a special name: collectively known as "Ostraca".
These pottery pieces are much cheaper and more readily available than the famous ancient Egyptian papyrus. So, while papyrus is famous, in fact, in the daily life of ancient Egypt, people mainly used the remnants of these broken jars and other utensils to make detailed shopping lists, record transactions, copy literary works, and teach students how to write and draw.
This batch of 18,000 "Ostraca" is also the largest batch of ink pottery pieces found by archaeologists in Egypt so far. A batch of "Ostraca" slightly smaller than this batch has also been unearthed in the Valley of the Kings in Luxor.
Repeating characters on pottery tablets
In this batch of pottery, a considerable number of them have been deduced by archaeologists to be from an ancient school that was located here. Professor Christian Leitz, an Egyptologist at the University of Tübingen, said: "The words and patterns on this batch of pottery tablets, including months, numbers, arithmetic problems, grammar exercises and a list of 'bird-shaped alphabets' – each letter is assigned a bird whose name begins with that letter. ”
In this batch of "study materials" from ancient Egyptian schools, there are hundreds of pottery pieces that are particularly special — there are plenty of repetitive writing exercises on these pieces — and on the front and back of the pieces, someone has written the same characters over and over again. Archaeologists speculate that this is likely to be the homework left by the teacher more than 2,000 years ago when mischievous or poor students were punished by the teacher for copying.
Graffiti pottery pieces
There is also a childlike pottery piece that is specifically mentioned: it should be a graffiti of a small child, with a pattern that appears to be a human figure (or possibly a god).
Three-quarters of the contents of the pottery tablets are written in the ancient Egyptian script (Demotic), which was commonly used in Egypt during the reign of Ptolemaic XII (Cleopatra's father). In addition, the text on the pottery tablets also includes Greek, Arabic and Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Red Star News reporter Qiao Xueyang
Edited by Li Jie
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