Massive ostraca find

Before paper was cheap, and before plastics became a thing, "post-it notes" took the form of broken pottery sherds / shards. Ostraca for past peoples were the most valuable form of lower-middle-class accountancy and, for us, of social studies into the past.

I don't know why the Mycenaeans (for one) didn't think to use ostraca for their accounts; maybe because where we've excavated, the accounts were all run at the palace without thought to the local markets.

Anyway, via Saraceni: Atribis @Sohag. This is a bit upstream of the White Monastery and Akhmim / Panopolis but not as far as Nag Hammadi; I cannot make more sense of the Wiki. Lower Egypt got papyrus by the skiffload but Upper Egypt, it seems, went the ostraca route. Thirteen thousand ostraca are here. In demotic, hieratic, Coptic, Greek and Arabic. They say "also", which I take means a second deposit, more ostraca specifically Roman-to-East-Roman. These will cluster Coptic and Greek.

By Coptic up here... they don't tell us. We can start with "not Bohairic". I expect something like Akhmimic at first, just because that's the conservative dialect (pdf). Moving on to Sahidic as that subAkhmimic "Lycopolitan" variant gained prestige as The Christian Language, and pushed south. You can see that process already up in Nag Hammadi: some texts are pure Lycopolitan, others are Sahidic.

The excavators think there was a school here, and one ostracon reproduced here does look like an exercise in practicing the letter "C", more likely the Coptic / Byzantine "S" tho'. I wonder if we'll be seeing quotes from common prayers.

Although I do wonder if the school ever bothered teaching Latin. (Probably not.) But how about Nubian? ...Meroitic?