Ramesside Ostraca

This new volume repairs a significant gap in the British Museum's Egyptian catalogue series. The first to be devoted to ostraca, as opposed to other inscribed media, it publishes in full the British Museum's collection of hieratic, hieroglyphic and figured ostraca of the Ramesside Period. This is a large, rich and varied collection covering the entire range of known text-types, documentary, literary and religious. The texts include duplicates of well-known literary works, hymns to Amun and other gods and goddesses, a considerable variety of administrative documents, and a whole series of previously unknown texts. The wide spectrum of subjects treated in the administrative texts demonstrates the vital importance of the information furnished by the written documents from the necropolis workers' community of Deir el-Medina, from which most of the ostraca originate. Each ostracon is presented with a photograph and where the text is in hieratic, transcriptions are provided. The catalogue is organised according to British Museum inventory number for ease of reference, but a separate list of the ostraca according to subject provides a guide to the reader interested in a particular group of texts.