Les Ostraca hieratiques inedits de la Bibliotheque nationale et universitaire de Strasbourg.

• Author: EYRE, C. J.
• Position: Review

Les Ostraca hieratiques inedits de la Bibliotheque nationale et universitaire de Strasbourg. By YVAN KOENIG. Documents de fouilles de l'IFAO, vol. 33. Cairo: INSTITUT FRANCAIS D'ARCHEOLOGIE ORIENTALE, 1997. Pp. 21, 135 plates.

This volume represents a contribution to the slow, often thankless task of primary publication of the New Kingdom hieratic ostraca from the Theban region, and especially from the workmen's community at Deir el Medina. Such ostraca have often lain in museum collections for decades, typically cherry-picked for publication of the most obviously interesting examples, leaving the less legible, fragmentary, unpromising pieces that have also often slowly further deteriorated in condition. Yet for the historian of the period it is the mass and range of the archives that are important, as well as the individual text, so that publication of the most unpromising of scraps fills out the overall picture.

Working within the context of the Ramesseum project, and with the target of completing Spiegelberg's publication of ostraca from the Quibell excavations of 1895-96, Yvan Koenig has turned his attention to the Strasbourg collection. A coherent group of unpublished Ramesseum dockets is left to a separate publication by Bouvier, and Koenig makes available the rest of the unpublished hieratic corpus of ostraca in Strasbourg. Clearly the majority of these belong to Deir el Medina, although in many cases provenance is neither recorded nor evident from internal evidence: many are simply recorded as "Borchardt 1910" or "Thebes ouest 1911." A significant number of ostraca are simply not now legible, and are omitted. Preliminary (unpublished) transcriptions by Cerny have helped significantly in reading a number of difficult or faded texts, but others remain practically untranscribable, and a few registered examples turned out to be in Demotic.

110 ostraca are presented here, all (except H130 rt) with hand facsimile, and almost all with photographs (except for H36, H90, H116 vs, H130 rt). Transcriptions are provided for all but about twenty of the most illegible, although not for a small group (H10, H11, H13, [?]H193) which contain examples of the local annotation marks or symbols--not proper...